A long time ago I was at a family gathering. One of the young boys came running through the kitchen and out the back door—except he didn’t. The screen door was closed. Running hell bent for leather, looking into the bright back yard at the other kids playing, he didn’t see the screen. Splat! A reality moment. Oblivious to us grown-ups sitting around the kitchen table watching, he bounced off, shook his head, came to himself and figured out what had happened.  Without a word he opened the door and ran out.

I call such an event a reality moment. We as a nation, and a lot of us as individuals, have just had one. The reality we’re facing isn’t what we thought it was. Splat! We have to get real. I recount one of my own everyday reality moments in an earlier post.  Such events help keep us grounded, conscious, keep us real, remind us that we can error—if they aren’t fatal or irretrievably damaging. (In the present case I make no claims or predictions in that regard.)

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Five days ago Donald Trump became President of the United States. It’s taken me this long to even begin to wrap my head around that event as a brute fact. A lot of pundits and professors, quicker on their feet than I am, already have written a great deal about Trump’s electoral victory from their various points of view. I guess I was too surprised, stunned, dismayed, to have many coherent thoughts of my own, so I’ve been reading what others have been saying. Here’s a few things that stand out so far.

Trump did not win the popular vote. That must be said. More people voted for Clinton—though obviously by only a thin margin. But it also has to be said, as one observer precisely noted, some “sixty million two hundred and sixty-five thousand eight hundred and fifty-eight people” did vote for Trump. That’s a lot of people. It was enough to give him the electoral college margin he needed to win under our current system. Why?

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Eight years ago Obama won the Presidency. People thronged the streets in celebration. Close-ups broadcast on our TVs showed people crying tears of joy and relief, not just in the U.S., but around the world. This year we’ve seen, and perhaps ourselves cried, tears of grief, of stunned apprehension, of pain at contemplating the damage that Trump will do in four years. A far-right Supreme Court for decades to come is just one tip of the iceberg. In one of the most comprehensively grim accounts of what a Trump presidency will mean, Andrew Sullivan, writing in the New York Magazine titles his piece “The Republic Repeals Itself.”  Read it.  Worst case scenario? Maybe.

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A few themes keep coming up in what I’ve read so far. First, most fundamentally, like Brexit, Trump’s win reflects a huge reaction against “business as usual.” What does that mean? Here’s where things get weird.

Today’s business as usual for the U.S. began when the Reagan-Thatcher axis set the world on its present course of neoliberal economic policies. Reagan and Thatcher, and the interests they fronted for, made cabinet and judicial appointments, implemented policies, and just generally governed in ways that reflected their peculiar far-right-wing ideology. Those policies had predictable real-world effects: They concentrated wealth, hollowed out the middle class, economically squeezed working Americans at almost all levels, and heightened widespread fear and insecurity. No wonder people finally are pissed.

That’s what the Republicans do. As Jonathan Chait writes:

“The Republican Party in Washington has been organized over the last three decades as a machine to redistribute resources upward. It has no other ideas and automatically rejects any proposals with any other effect. The political cost of waging class war for the rich will not deter them because it is their reason for existing.”

So what do the very people most damaged by these policies do? They vote the Republicans into both houses of Congress and the Presidency. It’s weird, and it’s also deeply disturbing and scary.

You know the term, “post-reality politics”?  That’s what we’ve just seen actually work in the real world.  We can’t afford that now. There is a real world out there, with screen doors and hot burners, with climate change and looming economic crises. We have to pick ourselves up, shake our heads, and get real.

Food is fun. We all think about food a lot. After all, where would we be without it?  But beyond that, cuisine is fun, flavourful, a universal field for human creativity and artistry. In many cultures, prominently including our own, food brings family and friends together to prepare it, and to enjoy it together around the table.  In other societies, the hunting or gathering party itself is an important social event.  While modern Western culture puts less emphasis on the social aspects of going after food, many of us still relish hunting, fishing, gardening, even for some shopping.

On The Dark Side.  But food also has its darker sides in our culture, embodied in factory farms and feedlots; in profligate use of fossil fuels to produce it; in processing that removes natural nutrients and in many ways turns the raw food product into materials that are cheap, tasty, unhealthy and even addictive; in the heedless brutality of much of our meat production; in careless use of pesticides, hormones, and fertilizers; in salmon farms that pollute and deplete wild salmon populations; in GMOs that do God knows what to us and our environment; in extravagance and waste and ignorance about where our food comes from and what its real costs are.

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Food and Our Culture.  All that means that we have a cultural problem, in the deepest sense of the word, about food.  It’s right in front of our eyes every time we drive to the supermarket and buy a shrink-wrapped steak, a GMO soybean product, or a clump of bananas from Ecuador; yet it remains (and indeed is kept) hidden.  I’ll offer it in a nutshell. (Of course, it won’t really fit in a nutshell; it’s a big, complicated problem). But here’s the nutshell version anyway: Our modern food system, how we sustain our biological being, the way we eat, is inequitable and unsustainable. Food is one of the great necessities of life, and one of its great enjoyments. Let’s get it right.

Like most cultural problems, but more clearly than many others, this one is rooted in biology.  Food connects us to the physical and ecological grounds of our being even more directly than many other things do.  When you think about food the mind can run off into many different directions, but one of them leads to soil and water, to weather and seasons, to honey bees that fertilize flowers and soil bacteria that feed plant roots. And pretty soon you realize that unless science-fiction dreams of colonizing outer space become real, we have to get real here on Earth.

Getting Real. We have to get along with everything else as one strand of the intricate web of life on this Earth.  Earthly life would continue just fine without us; but we can only exist within it.  So it only makes sense that we need to sustain that which sustains us; but we aren’t doing that—not well enough, anyway, to keep out of trouble.

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Food and the Tap-Root of Civilization.  As usual, it’s really interesting and informative to dig down into the roots of our current problems.  Again as usual, many of those roots—indeed a major tap-root—goes right down to the agricultural revolution roughly ten thousand years ago. Agriculture made possible the growth of cities and civilization beginning about five thousand years ago.  Those two events, the invention of agriculture and the birth of civilization, together were a major turning point in human evolution the fallout from which we’re still trying to understand, grapple with, and control today.  Five to ten thousand years ago, though! That seem like an awfully long time to think about. But let’s put it in perspective.

Through the long expanse of human evolutionary history (fifty thousand years at the barest minimum, or two hundred thousand, or six hundred thousand, depending on what criteria you use to define “human), hunting-gathering societies lived as directly, locally, part of the webs of life in which they evolved.  That was our beginning, and it went on that way for a very, very long time—all but the latest small fraction of the time we’ve been on the Earth, in fact.  It was the way of life in which and for which we evolved as highly social, highly communicative, and eventually cultural beings.

It’s important to remember that—to be aware of our beginnings as we try to understand ourselves and our current challenges.  The time we’re most concerned with here—since the invention of agriculture and the rise of cities and states—represents only a tiny fraction of our species’ time on Earth.  Indeed, much of the world still subsisted by hunting and gathering well into modern times, and a few tribes in the remote areas of the globe still largely do so.

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The Mother of All Unintended Consequences.  The inventions (it happened independently in different places) of agriculture must have seemed like the merest common sense to people who simply, here and there, began to care for and purposefully propagate the seed grasses and other species that they gathered.  It thus began simply enough.

In the course of daily living, some foraging groups began to manage favoured wild species more intensively.  After a long time, some of these species gradually became cultivated crops and domesticated animals that human communities had modified from their wild ancestors by selection, and on which they now primarily depended.  That transition from hunting and gathering to sedentary agriculturally-based subsistence didn’t happen all at once; and each incremental step along the way must have seemed like minor additions to their ongoing ways of securing food for their family and tribe.

That shift from simple foraging to full-blown agriculture took a long time measured by the span of a human life, but it happened in the blink of an eye in evolutionary perspective.  Similarly, the implications of that fateful transition took a long time to play out on the time-scale of human experience, but represent only the last few moments of our cultural history.

After hundreds of thousands of years, suddenly, everything speeds up. And now we have New York City and Hong Kong, cars, jets, nuclear bombs, epidemics, and over-population.  Talk about unintended consequences!

Why was agriculture such a fateful turning point?  When humans began cultivating and breeding crops, and domesticating animals, we stopped living as part of the natural world and instead began controlling nature, putting ourselves above the webs of life in and from which we emerged.

Of course, that can only ever be relatively so, however much increasingly sophisticated technologies tempt us to feel that we’ve truly “conquered nature” or some such nonsense.  But the invention of agriculture and the subsequent growth of cities was, nevertheless, a momentous turning point.  I think of it as the fulcrum of human history.

(But then, the scientific revolution only about five hundred years ago also was a major fulcrum of history as well—more on that later.  Don’t want to bite off more than we can chew.  It’s enough here to register that both of these events powerfully changed how we relate to nature, and our experience and understanding of being human.)

A Question.  For now, let’s just keep in mind how the seemingly simple, everyday, immediately practical choices of our ancestors had truly momentous repercussions.  That began after tens or even hundreds of thousands of years when humans, quite late, finally began to seriously intervene in the natural systems and cycles that supported them.  When they did that, they set up new relationships, new interactive feedback dynamics, in their interactions with the natural world.  As far as they were concerned, in the moment, on the surface, they just used their natural powers of observation and foresight to ensure incrementally more reliable and abundant supplies.  Why not, if you can?  It only makes sense.

But from our standpoint in the present, with hindsight, we see that with the advent of agriculture our ancestors took the fateful step of intervening in systems of great complexity, of which they themselves were part.  They assumed control of certain ecological dynamics without understanding their effects on the whole system.  They didn’t really know or understand what they were doing, nor what the consequences would be.  Are we continuing to do the same thing today, equally blindly, on ever larger and more consequential scales?

Maybe not quite.  We’re beginning to understand what we’re doing, what we make ourselves responsible for, when we try to seize control of ecological systems of which we’re one part.

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But Don’t Worry. … ?  Agricultural societies get along with nature in different ways.  Some traditional societies learned over the centuries to live within their ecological means.  Others didn’t learn, and collapsed.  Yet others, of which we are the latest manifestation, also didn’t learn to live within their means but survived—even thrived—by growing and expanding into new territories and raking in new resources.  The latter option seems great for a while; but the problem is that it can only go on for so long.  It’s not sustainable in the long run.  Throughout the history of civilization we see empires rise and fall.  We in the modern West are the (so far) globally dominant end-product of five thousand years of expansionary civilization—a realization that gives food for thought—a lot of thought.

But, darn it, don’t worry!  We’re different from all the others: smarter, more advanced, far more technologically sophisticated, able to fix any problem we put our minds to.  Aren’t we?  Surely, of all the others, We have achieved the end of history.  Haven’t We alone finally risen above the nasty undertows of human history that drag other civilizations down and bury them under the treacherous waters and shifting sands of time?

Maybe not.  A closer look at the dynamics behind those nasty undertows of history is not so reassuring.

The Technology-Ecology Spiral.   A particular, out-of-balance, positive feedback dynamic that operates between its technology and its ecology drives expansionary civilization.  Technological advances (agriculture, for instance) make it possible for a society to exploit its local environment more effectively.  That inevitably causes problems, one answer to which is the search for further technological fixes.  As newsman Eric Sevaried tersely put it, “the cause of problems is solutions.”  In his book wonderfully titled The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006, p.148), Michael Pollan offers a familiar example. “When we mistake what we can know for all there is to know,” he writes,

“a healthy appreciation of one’s ignorance in the face of a mystery like soil fertility gives way to the hubris that we can treat nature as a machine.  Once that leap has been made, one input follows another, so that when the synthetic nitrogen fed to plants makes them more attractive to insects and vulnerable to disease, as we have discovered, the farmer turns to chemical pesticides to fix his broken machine.”

Then, the problems caused by pesticides lead to even more technological fixes, such as genetic engineering for pesticide resistance, or regulatory controls which require more bureaucracy and breed social conflict and resentment against government.  The technological fixes require ever more complex machinery and organizations. And so it goes:  The technology-ecology spiral in action as a primary engine of social/cultural evolution.

Along with its creation of solutions that cause problems, the technology-ecology spiral, archeologists have found, also tends toward more hierarchical, centralized, and militaristic societies.  Technological interventions in natural systems that evolved over many millions of years cause ecological problems.  One tempting “fix” for these problems is more technology; the other is expansion, growth.  “We’ll just grow beyond the problem, get our neighbor’s resources, or move somewhere else.”  The more effective expansionary civilizations (Europe and European North America, for example, from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to now) conquer and absorb the others.   That expansionary process generates—both makes possible and requires—ever more effective means to discipline and control people as the state gets ever larger and more diverse.  So, the technology-ecology spiral becomes a (I think probably the) major engine of cultural evolution.

In later times the expansionary states’ economic control of resources and populations reaches beyond—far beyond—its own political boundaries. That requires a strong military.  Then, once the economic system is forcefully put in place it becomes a powerfully coercive and disciplining force in its own right—as economic historians and anthropologists have noted for decades, and Naomi Klein’s book, The Shock Doctrine (2008) recently exhaustively documents for current issues and broader audiences).

The positive feedback dynamics of the technology-ecology spiral work well for the expansionary society—so long, at least, as it can find new territories or markets to expand into, it has the power to quell resistance by the natives, and the problems caused by new technological fixes remain themselves fixable by further technology.  We may have reached a tipping point, however, where these conditions don’t hold any longer.  Increasing numbers of leading scientists fear that this is so.  The ecological and social problems we’re causing affect the globe and get ever more tightly coupled.  Mere technological fixes won’t solve complex systemic problems like climate change, species extinction, and growing inequality.  Brute expansion is largely off the books now too.  New geographical frontiers are closed or closing—that’s one thing that globalization means.  Unlike Columbus’s day, the global community now frowns on genocide and occupation.

It seems that, maybe, finally, we must come to grips with the underlying dynamics of the relationships between human culture and its environment that give rise to the “growth imperative.”

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Thinking About Food.  Well, let’s leave it there for now.  In summary, there is a lot to think about food.  Thinking about food opens a doorway directly to a fundamental social/ecological dynamic that is at the root of our current crisis.  It’s a dynamic not just of capitalism, nor communism, nor any other current “ism.”  It’s a dynamic of civilization; and the crisis we are in is truly a crisis of civilization itself.  Along with their physical and social pleasures, the simple acts of buying food, fixing it, and eating it, can open our hearts to thinking more deeply about our complicated relationships with the living Earth that we are in and of.

As ye sow, so shall ye reap.

We’re walking a section of deeply shaded trail, our little group dwarfed by the huge Douglas firs and cedars that hold us, on a sunny day, in a kind of perpetual green twilight.  One of my hiking companions slows her pace and gets my attention.  “As an American,” she asks intently, and I feel a little apprehensively, “what do you think about Trump?”  I imagine the great trees, some of which have lived through the entire period of Euroamerican conquest and settlement of the continent, looking down at our little group from their great heights and pondering the question in the slow movement of the centuries.  We had hardly spoken before, but I know that she and her husband immigrated to Canada from Great Britain some years ago, and think that her interest in the U.S. presidential race reflect both European and Canadian perspectives.

I joined this hiking group last year to learn more about the local area and its trails; but unexpectedly find it almost as enjoyable for its companionship and conversations as for its walks in the forests and along the coasts of this beautiful area.  I hardly have time to roll my eyes and mutter something about Trump being an embarrassment when, seeing that I’m not a mad flag-waving supporter, she exclaims, “Isn’t he simply awful?  He’s an awful man!  Awful!”  I still hear echoes of her British accent and see her concerned expression as I write this.

It was not a one-off or unusual conversation. In get-togethers here in Canada, friends or acquaintances who know that I am American regularly wonder what I think about Trump and the American election.  Much the same split that runs through U.S. politics also divides Canadians, and a few that I meet think Trump would make a great president.  They usually refer to his success in business.  The man and his candidacy appalls most of those I have talked with, however.  They are concerned.  What happens in the U.S. matters, and many Canadians worry about what a Trump presidency would mean for Canada and the world.

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At this point, late August, some time after the Republican and Democratic conventions, Trump’s campaign seems to be tanking.  I’m personally not so much worried about Trump becoming president—never was, really.  Well, maybe a little.  But I always thought it highly unlikely.  What does worry me are the waves of anger, fear, hatred, racism and xenophobia that his campaign stirs up, that washed him irresistibly to the front of the pack of Republican hopefuls.  Where does that come from?  What does that say about American life?  Especially, what does it mean for the public sphere?  Here I am, talking like a political scientist.  What does it mean—”the public sphere”?

As citizens of Western democracies, we have our private lives, but also  public lives.  Generally, the private sphere refers to home and family, maybe job, hobbies, and other recreational activities, and also private business—although the actions and policies of very large business clearly shade over into the public life of the nation.  Many of our laws and constitutional guarantees establish and protect our private spaces of life from intrusion by others, and especially government.  The public sphere, by contrast, refers to the nation’s public life: politics, the economy, government at large, public policy, and so on.

The two, our public and private lives, are interrelated, of course.  The interface between public and private breeds some of our most difficult and contentious issues.  For instance, government controversially regulates corporations operating in the private sphere to protect the public interest; while corporations pour money into lobbyists’ pockets and campaign coffers to protect private profits from regulatory constraints.

A healthy democracy maintains a difficult balance between private and governmental power.  Like trying to rest a pencil on its point, the equilibrium is never perfect and requires constant attention and conscious adjustment.  If the tilt one way or another gets out of control, we’re in trouble.  That’s what I fear—that Trump’s successful run for the Republican nomination is a symptom of dangerous imbalance in U.S. political life.

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Especially after the tumultuous ’60s—the Civil Rights Act, protest against the Vietnam war on college campuses and in the streets, and a brief era of stronger environmental regulation—the far-Right in American politics launched a relentless drive to gain ascendance.  Historians and political analysts are still putting the different pieces of this campaign together, but here’s a brief overview of some highlights that I lived through and know of.

Playing on their lingering resentments and outright racism, Goldwater’s and Nixon’s notorious “southern strategy”  drew southern Whites into the Republican fold.  At the same time, in a bid to wrest the intellectual initiative from the Left, wealthy corporations and individuals, and their charitable foundations, funnelled large sums of money into right-wing think tanks and toward right-leaning university teachers and departments.  The disastrous “war on drugs,” began by Nixon and expanded under Reagan, became part of the picture as a means of disrupting and criminalizing anti-Vietnam war and civil rights (hippies and Blacks) communities.  Anti-government, anti-tax, and anti-regulatory sentiments were fanned and implemented.  Grover Norquist, “Bush’s field marshal,”  for instance, famously wanted to “reduce government to the size where I can take it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”

Science itself was attacked and politicized.  Independent science, raising concerns about a range of issues from the health-impacts of smoking to environmental problems, became a particular target.  Universities were both attacked (public support withdrawn, tuitions raised); and, in various ways and to varying degrees, academic personnel and work were privatized and coopted.  Corporate interests, and anti-government activists in government, fomented campaigns to control science; and where they couldn’t control science they aimed to discredit it and cast doubt on its findings.  Among other things, conservative donors set up or funded “think tanks” to challenge and politicize scientific work that seemed to run against their interests or agendas.  Not surprisingly, one review concludes, “There are twice as many conservative think tanks as liberal ones, and the conservative ones generally have more money.”

A heightened climate of fear, insecurity, and competition seized the academic world.  I both saw this happening and experienced it first-hand.

All this was not some grand conspiracy (although actual conspiracies, such as Watergate and the criminal activities of tobacco companies were sometimes involved).  But altogether, it speaks to a concerted and conscious, if disparate and uncoordinated, effort to shift American politics sharply to the right.  And it was successful. It substantially worked.

Many of the policies and legal decisions of this era—roughly, since the Reagan era in the 1980s to the present—have worked to concentrate ever more wealth in the hands of large corporations and wealthy people. The divide between rich and poor grew as the middle-class was squeezed.  Wealthy individuals and corporations used their expanding wealth to hire lobbyists and influence politicians dependent on their contributions.  They aim to turn law and government ever more to their liking.  All this diminishes and degrades the public sphere in the United States.  This is the frightening imbalance, of which Trump is a symptom.

The U.S. Republican Party used race and fear of differences to align the interests of disaffected poor Southerners and struggling rural poor and economically-stressed middle classes, with the interests of immensely wealthy pro-corporate business leaders and their foundations.  By taking this tack, the Republican party remade itself into the political home for the racist and radical right interests it had been cultivating. Trump’s campaign, ironically, exposes some of the divides between these diverse and even conflicting interests that have taken shelter under the Republican party’s roof.

Middle- and working-class economic insecurities fuel much of the anger and fear that Trump stirs up. Ironically, Republican party neoconservative pro-corporate policies worsen those insecurities. They drain resources out of middle- and working-class wallets and public “safety-net” programs, and into the bank accounts of the largest corporations and their wealthy owners, (see the “Why Trump” post from May 18, 2016).  It’s a double whammy. The Southern Strategy roped conservative southern Whites into the Republican party, while Republican economic policies favouring corporations and the rich heighten the very real insecurities that help drive their angry xenophobia and racism.

But Trump’s bigotry and xenophobia aren’t subtle enough or sufficiently disguised for some in the Republican establishment.  Some Republicans reject him and his unsubtle appeals to bigotry, anger, and fear among conservative working class White voters. An article in New Republic Magazine sums up their quandary: “The [Republican party’s own] Southern Strategy was the original sin that made Donald Trump possible.”

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So, what do I think about Trump.  I too think that he is an awful man. Awful! Is it really possible that this person we see strutting and posturing, blatantly publicly lying, sputtering out negative and hateful utterances, is a serious candidate for President of the United States?  Argh!

But more than that, Donald also signals and embodies of a failure of our democracy.  The U.S. political/economic system has achieved much.  I think it was Churchill who famously said that “democracy is the worst system—except for all the others.”  But as our version of it struggled and evolved over the centuries it brought forward some serious flaws and failings, and developed others along the way, of which Trump now is one highly-visible piece of tangible evidence.  We need to look at our problems with clear eyes.  What Trump tells me is that we’re close to or at a tipping point.  We must go to the next level of self-awareness and consciousness at both the individual and the collective levels, or risk sliding backwards into the vision of America that Trump, in his person and in his words, holds up to us.

Creating Reality?

People’s fear that their bank is insolvent causes a “run on the bank,” which makes it insolvent.  A teacher’s expectation of a child’s character and abilities affects how he or she treats the child, thereby eliciting behavior that fulfills the expectation.  Racist beliefs that Black’s are less intelligent lead to policies that inhibit opportunities and access to resources, so Blacks score lower on achievement tests.  Sociologist Robert Merton coined the apt term “self-fulfilling prophecy” in 1948 to refer to such processes, but the basic idea has been around for much longer. Here’s a concise definition from Wikipedia:

“A self–fulfilling prophecy is a prediction that directly or indirectly causes itself to become true…due to positive feedback between belief and behavior.”

This is one of the ways that we humans, through the power of ideas based in language and other symbolic abilities that uniquely define human culture, do create our own realities. It’s related to the old idea of “the power of suggestion.” But there are limits to our abilities to “create [our] reality”; and sometimes people—especially, it seems, people in power—seem to forget that, or get confused about where the limits lie.

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It must be tempting sometimes, especially for persons of power and influence, to try to turn the power of self-fulfilling beliefs to their own advantage.  Is the self-fulfilling belief, then, simply a lie that makes itself true?  No, not exactly.  It seems that to be effective the self-fulfilling belief must be genuine.  It might initially be wrong, but not a conscious deceit.  I suppose it’s possible, but in fact I can’t think of a single case of outright lies turning into truths—into self-fulfilling beliefs.  Outright lies may have real-world effects, but they rarely if ever make themselves true.

Consider these examples. In 1994 tobacco company executives lied to a congressional committee about the addictive and harmful effects of cigarette smoking.  Company executives well knew, and had known for some time, that cigarettes are addictive and dangerous.  They conducted a decades-long campaign to confuse the issue and sow doubt.  Those lies may have resulted in more cigarette sales, but they did not make cigarettes safe.

We can turn to the political arena for other examples of public lying to influence policy.  George W. Bush notoriously lied, among other things, about Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction” leading up to the Iraq war. The lies helped justify the war, but they didn’t bring the claimed weapons into existence.  Nor did they bring about the peaceful Middle-East Bush promised.  Currently, in his bid for the White House, Trump issues more lies (or are they innocently erroneous claims[?]) than truths, according to his Politifact Scorecard.  Either way, the most enthusiastic blind acceptance by Trump supporters won’t make his misstatements true.

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Similarly, expectations are not necessarily self-fulfilling.  It is possible to make mistakes.  Some mistakes have real consequences, as any child who has touched a hot burner knows.  I remember one morning I stumbled out to the kitchen to make coffee, and hit the switch on the coffee grinder. Nothing happened.  What! I  totally expected it to work, so it should work. In my sleep-blurred state, I was shocked, actually offended, above all surprised.  It woke me up.  It was a reality moment.  I had to think.  And look.  After I plugged the machine into the outlet, it worked.  That simple experience somehow made me realize how important our confrontations with reality are.  Our mistakes, if they don’t kill us, wake us up, teach us, make and keep us real.

It’s true that in many ways the stories we tell ourselves become the lives we live.  But there are limits.  As our technological powers grow, it becomes harder to know or foresee where these limits are.  Simple errors as everyday experience can help remind us that we’re integrally part of larger realities; and that in these larger realities, these living systems in which we evolved and still subsist, we’re susceptible to error in really big and complicated ways as well.  Stubbing a toe, plugging in a coffee grinder, even being more conscious as we breathe, eat, eliminate, can help keep us humble.

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If beliefs can, within limits, “create reality,” how much more true is that of actions. We humans have the ability to bypass simple physical cause-and-effect.  We can act on the basis of ideas we have that are formulated and expressed through language, and make things happen in the real world that otherwise would not happen.  Sound waves from my voice won’t cause the salt-shaker to move toward me; but if I ask you nicely, “pass the salt, please,” chances are that it will happen.  This kind of thing on the larger scale of culture can be tremendously powerful; but, again, there are limits.

In 2004, Ronald Suskind of the New York Times reported a conversation he had with a top aid to George W. Bush that he (Suskind) said “gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.” It’s been quoted and cited many times, but is worth looking at again in this context.  I quote:

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do." (Emphasis added).

That is frightening, chilling, just because it is partly true but shows no consciousness of real-world limits.  It’s where a certain kind of throw-your-weight-around politics and New-Age rhetoric overlap.  Everything is relative.  There is no such thing as truth—it all depends on your point of view.  We can do anything.  There’s a technical fix for any problem.  And so on.  Real life is much more complicated than that.

There are truths that are independent of what we humans think or say or want or believe.  There are limits to what we can do.  We can create problems with our technical prowess that no technical prowess can fix.  We can damage the social fabric of our increasingly unified world through careless wars and brutal economic relations that take generations, even centuries, to heal, if ever.  Such actions tangibly reduce the quality of life, ultimately, for everyone.

Native American people I worked with sometimes spoke of “respect.” It gradually dawned on me that they meant something deeper and broader than the usual meaning the word had for me or has for most people.  It expresses something more like an ethic, an attitude toward one’s place in the cosmos, a grounded humility.  We need more of this kind of respect in our politics, our technology, our economy.  In our time, it might be expressed as respect for the complexity, interrelatedness, and above all for the reality of the world we live in.

On Being Bored

My children sometimes used to complain, “Daddy, I’m bored.”  It drove me nuts.  I always have more to do than I can do—important grown-up work, work that has to get done—and here I’m supposed to stop and entertain a bored child?  I wasn’t always good about it.

Now, in the absence of an attentive, patient, playful parent, there’s the cell phone.  It’s always there, and with even the slightest possibility of impending boredom out it comes.  It seems painful somehow to see a young teen hunched over the cell in something like a self-constructed womb of oblivion to everything around her.  With this technology we’re all more interconnected in wider networks of instantaneous communication, true; but at the same time we’re less connected to ourselves and to each other in our immediate time and place.  It’s a diversion.  Seeking diversion from impending boredom is quite different from actively finding something to do.

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I think about my own childhood.  Laugh if you will about the “Senior Citizen” reminiscing about “The Good Old Days,” but I really can’t remember ever being bored as a child.

I was born in Denver, Colorado, November 11, 1939, and lived there until I was 11 years old when we moved to Gainesville, Florida for a year, and then to Norman, Oklahoma where I spent my teenage and early college years.  I have two sisters, one a year and a half younger, the other four and a half years younger.  Our father was an architect, our mother a housewife—both what you’d have to call intellectual.  They valued reading, writing, conversation.

In Denver, when I was old enough I went to school.  I did not like it.  No one drove us.  We walked, which provided opportunities for lingering, loitering, and even playing hooky.  We also were allowed to roam freely throughout the neighborhood in our free time, playing in the vacant lots with other children or by ourselves.  We lived not far from the Denver City Park, which held a premier museum of natural history.  Entrance was free. I loved to roam by myself or with my sisters through the adjacent golf course and park, and then wander through the museum gazing for hours at the exhibits of everything from insects to dinosaurs from around the world.  Looking back, I’m not quite sure how I got away with it, but I often “played hooky” to do that.  (I wasn’t good in school; maybe the teachers didn’t miss me much.)

We spent a month or more each summer “up in the mountains,” on property outside of Denver that our family owned—basically, a log house on twenty mountainous forested acres.  Our grandmother and great aunt lived there year ’round, for as long as they could.  We loved spending time with them.  Our parents pretty much left us on our own except at meal-times and bed-time, but Grandma Nana especially gave us special kinds of adult attention.  The unpaved road fronting the property had scattered houses every quarter-mile or so, some with children about our age, so when we were there in the summer we had other kids to play with during the days and evenings.  We played the usual games: “kick-the-can,” “red-rover, red-rover,” “hide-and-seek.”  On rainy days we played card games, pick-up-sticks, or just read.

As in Denver, maybe more so, I was often happy to be alone.  I remember especially how I used to get up before anyone else and go out on the small flagstone area by the back door of the house.  It was sheltered by a lean-to structure, but faced east so the rising sun shown directly in.  I watched the wasps and other insects beginning to stir, listened to the birds and the wind in the pines, and just sensed the living mountains around me while the early sun cut through the chilly early morning air and warmed my skin.

Dinners were times for the family to gather together every day.  They had a definite beginning and ending, and were times for conversation—often debate and argument, which we learned early-on not to take personally. At bedtime, we gathered around and our father read to us from King Arthur, The Secret Garden, Tarzan, Heidi, books and stories by Kipling, and so on.  But otherwise all day we were largely on our own.  I didn’t expect our parents to amuse me or drive me places—they had their world and work, and I had mine.  There were no cell phones or computers.  We didn’t have TV until I was well into my teens, and the notion of watching TV while we ate never even came up.  Movies were a special treat.  I had feet, and quite early a bicycle, to get me around.

It all sounds ideal, but of course it wasn’t in many respects.  I could paint you a whole other picture.  Especially, I didn’t adapt well to school, which was a trial for me, my parents (especially my mother), and the teachers.  We experienced family quarrels.  Our parents loved us, but weren’t good at showing it directly.  There was more, but it’s not relevant here.

The point is that, looking back, these aspects I’m relating were good.  With no points of comparison, we just took them for granted at the time. Compared to today’s world we had an astonishing amount of freedom and “alone-time.”  We used it to play—to engage with our immediate environment and each other in real time—and we weren’t bored, ever.

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What has changed?  You can’t just blame cell phones and the internet, because already my own children experienced boredom in the 1970s and ’80s.  Boredom is the effect of a kind of disconnection and paralysis. Someone (whatever their age) who is present in their moment, who experiences autonomy and some degree of freedom, who can act, who has friends to play with will not be bored.  No one should suffer boredom, and I feel badly that could not have given my children the resources they needed not to be bored.  It’s a waste of time, of life—unless it becomes the ground for discovering what you really want to do and acting on that discovery.  Maybe my own feeling of helplessness in the face of others’ boredom is what really irritated me about it.

But while I might have done better, boredom in North American life points to bigger problems than just my own failings.  Is the alleged break-down of civic life in North America that Putnam wrote about in Bowling Alone partly to blame?   Maybe the way that digital media cuts into face-to-face communication is part of it too?

Perhaps the squeezing of the middle-class requiring both parents to work, and all that that means for quality “family time,” plays a role?  We live in a world that seems both much more constrained, and more out of control, than when I was young.  In that sense, could boredom among young people be paradoxically related to the spectre of growing violence and mass shooting in America?  Is it all of the above?

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Today there’s a whole other world of expectations and possibilities (or their lack).  Maybe a lot of it comes down to fear.  Parents have less trust in their children and the world they are in.  Is it really a more dangerous world, or is it just that TV collects and projects the dangers daily into our living rooms?  Today parents constrain their children, shepherd them here and there, drive them to school and to organized activities.  I’ve seen it.  No wonder they’re bored.  Then to stave off the boredom we give them expensive gadgets: the TV and X-Box, cell phone and tablet—and they’re still bored.  I’m sure that’s not the whole story, but it also is part of it.

Like so many things in today’s world, it’s all good for the GNP but not for our human selves, nor for the environment.  It’s complicated, and it would be good to understand it better.

On Reading and Writing—Some First Thoughts

I’ve just recently come across a series of blogs and posts on the internet that report studies on the value of solitude; of “deep reading” and reflection in contrast to skimming or reading sound-bites and tweets; of writing as real work that is not just an activity of a solitary individual, but rather is a “highly social process” involving creativity, reflection, and discussion; and of setting aside uninterrupted time without trying to multitask while managing the distractions of cell phones or web-page surfing.

It all makes me think about my own work, and about writing this blog. Many well-wishers have told me not to make my posts too long—that people these days read everything on their cell phones or tablets, and “on the fly.”  When they see a long column of text, they’ll just flit onto the next tweet or news item that they can assimilate in-between texting with their friends without running into the next telephone pole while walking down the sidewalk.

Good advice, perhaps.  But something in me rebels.  I can’t possibly squeeze what I want to write about into tweets, headlines, and sound-bites.  The ideas that make it up are interconnected, and come together into a whole that is more than the sum of its parts.  My readers will need some relatively uninterrupted “quality time” to take it in, just as I do to write it.

But maybe all is not lost.  The above posts that I linked to illustrate how some writers and thinkers use the very media that are blamed for our distracting, distractible lives to comment on and critique that very problem.  There seems to be a widespread feeling abroad that we’re doomed to be victims of our own technologies; but these critics say that we don’t have to be.  That’s one of the central tenets of this blog too.  We can choose when and how to use the machines we make.  Computers, cell phones, robotics, are powerful tools.  But they are tools, and as such they can augment rather than fragment or displace our lives.  It’s our call—just like it’s always our call to choose what kind of economy we’ll live and work within.

Oops! This post is getting too long.  Better quit for now.

The Rise (And Fall) of Civilization

It’s a truism that no civilization or social system lasts forever (see the previous blog, Growing Things).  History bears that out.  Over the last five millennia of “civilized life,” individual civilizations, and whole networks of civilizations (so-called “world systems), have come and gone.  Why? Many people will shrug and answer, “it’s just the way it is,” or “it’s human nature”—which really are no answers.

But archeologists and historians have accumulated much information about the last five millennia of human history (and earlier, for comparison) that shows repeating patterns. 1   If you take the question seriously, and really bore down into the causes of the rise and fall of civilizations, there are answers, and pretty straight-forward ones at that.  Here’s a very condensed summary (see also the short reading list below).

1) First, as a civilization grows and its population increases, it  maxes-out the environment that supports it.  What to do?  The obvious solution is to grow more.  The young civilization begins expanding into new territories, raking in new resources by conquest or trade or both.  It builds an empire.  It also grows by developing new technologies of social control, and technologies to more efficiently exploit the environments it already occupies.

2) Second, that expansion, in whatever dimension and by whatever means, drives the growth both of military and bureaucratic organization.  Expansionary society becomes ever more hierarchical, more stratified.  Wealth and power concentrate in ever fewer hands.  But again the growing empire runs into resource and environmental limits.  With its advancing technologies and greater concentrations of power and resources, it responds by expanding yet further.

All this repeats itself over and over in human history.  We’re living that cycle right now (see Why Trump?).  It’s a positive feedback system, or in more technical terms a vicious circle.

3) Eventually, communication and logistical technologies inevitably reach their limits.  Top-heavy bureaucracies become impossibly inefficient.  “Barbarians” on the peripheries of the colonial empire become more threatening.  All this begins to limit further expansion.  Access to resources shrinks, just as the divides between obscenely rich and abjectly poor widen.  Democracy (if there ever was any) devolves into oligarchy.  Elites get ever more disconnected from the social realities and human costs of ever more concentrated wealth and power.  Discontent grows internally.  Politics becomes vulnerable to demagogues who feed on and fan public anger. (Sound familiar?)

At the world-system level, the locus of economic and military power might shift from one region or nation to others.  The whole system becomes more vulnerable to both economic, and eventually military, incursions from outside, and growing internal disarray.  Eventually….

4) Collapse.

Where is our own civilization in terms of this cycle?  What is our civilization?  In this era of of globalized capitalist economy and planet-wide communication networks is the whole world becoming subsumed by one overarching civilization—the civilization of modernity?  Such questions, for all their importance, prompt different answers.  I’ll continue developing the approach introduced here in later posts.

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A Few Good Readings

As you can imagine, there is a lot there is a lot to read on these topics—though perhaps not as much as one would expect given their current relevance.  Here’s a few resources that helped shape my own thinking.

1 Adams, Robert McC. 1966 The Evolution of Urban Society: Early Mesopotamia and Prehispanic Mexico. Chicago: Aldine.

Diamond, Jared 2005. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York: Penguin.

Hornborg, Alf 2001 The Power of the Machine: Global, Inequalities of Economy, Technology, and Environment.  Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield.

Mumford, Lewis 1970 (1964) The Myth of the Machine. The Pentagon of Power.  New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Polanyi, Karl 1944  The Great Transformation.  New York: Rinehart & Co.

Manzanilla, Linda (ed.) 1987 Studies in the Neolithic and Urban Revolutions. The V. Gordon Childe Colloquium Mexico, 1986.  Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, International Series, No. 349.

Wallerstein, Immanuel 1974, 1980 (two vols.)  The Modern World System. New York: Academic Press.

Wood, Ellen Meiksins 2002.  The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View. London and New York: Verso.

Adams and Manzanilla’s collection of articles show how similar expansionary cycles arose independently in the rise of civilization in the Middle East and Mesoamerica.  Jared Diamond’s Collapse explores the role of environmental depletion in societal collapse.  Hornborg and Mumford focus on cultural meanings of technology in its broad sense, in the modern world system.  World systems theorists, beginning with Immanuel Wallerstein’s two-volume set, The Modern World System, study how individual states or societies become integrated into larger networks of trade and warfare that are themselves expansionistic.  Karl Polanyi and Ellen Meiksins Wood define capitalism and how it differs from earlier forms of social/political/economic systems.