INTELLECTUAL HONESTY AND THE ABSENCE OF THE
SACRED
Once again
humanity faces a threat to its continued existence. The first, the atomic bomb,
remains in the jug but may escape at any time. Unfortunately, global warming
has no jug to contain it. Under present practices, global warming will occur
sooner than anyone predicts. Once the critical temperature arises, humanity
will no longer find it possible to adapt to the resulting environment. Millions
of years of experience in adaptation will no longer apply. We will become
refugees in our own land—our genome alienated from the new environment.
There is no
credible controversy in the scientific community about the consequences.
Unfortunately, instead of the facts we get a media game that obfuscates any
conclusions. Everything is in dispute. Intellectual honesty remains impossible
when determining what the facts mean remains out of reach. Agendas rule
instead. The agenda for those who wish to continue burning fuel that
contaminates everything, and makes them rich, includes any means of denying
global warming.
Without intellectual
honesty, we cannot resolve conflicting agendas and opinions. Means of
validating constructs [like E= MC2] that
describe reality where it cannot otherwise be seen lie at the center of the science now under
attack by agendas that cannot survive intellectual honesty. The billion dollar
campaign to discredit global warming attacks the means of vetting discoveries
that will help us adapt to a sustainable environment. Ignoring earth science is
the most dangerous game anyone can play.
Intellectual
honesty requires an agenda so inclusive that only the sanctity of life can
serve as its guiding light. The global-warming debate shows no signs of
applying that bottom line. Mostly, the arguments rely on magic thinking like
the coming of new technologies that will do huge amounts of work with little
side-effects in spite of the laws of physics and chemistry that govern the
production of energy.
We have been
using up the earth and ignoring the bill. Nature does not hand out free
lunches; governments provide subsidies that hide the fact. New technologies
praised as solutions are more likely to make the problem worse. That hypocrisy,
ignoring nature‘s rules when it supports an argument, is one failure of
intellectual honesty. These failures appear in all walks of life. During the
life of my law practice of over 30 years I witnessed an increasing tendency for
the trier of fact to rely on something other than intellectual honesty. Opinions
get the facts right or the law right or both but come up with a wrong result,
which does not follow from the facts or the law. Some agenda pre-empted the way
conclusions were once drawn. All the math and experimentation science relies
upon is worth nothing if the conclusions do not match the findings or the
findings do not match the facts.
The
unfortunate consequence of that discourse makes it easy to deny what someone does
not want to hear. I have some difficulty with the denial of global warming on
the most basic level. The ability of carbon deposits to generate heat is not in
question, nor is the fact that we are dumping millions of tons of it in the
air. One and one makes two.
People have
tried many means of overcoming bias. The scientific method has contributed much
to that effort. Some see pragmatism as an answer. The President sees himself as
a pragmatist, not an idealist or a man of faith. Pragmatism has its uses but in
the absence of the sacred it can abandon the all important sense of proportion
and adopt agendas that serve the status quo. Compromises that sacrifice one life
support for another (like clean air at the expense of clean water) will not
save the planet any more than bombing accused terrorists will end terrorism. Terrorists
may be hard to track down but bombing their friends and families to get them makes
no friends and puts the whole operation in a morally reprehensible light—safety
at the expense of justice.
For a lot of
people, the fact of terrorism justifies any response. The same pragmatism
supports global-warming fixes that will do great damage to some for the benefit
of others. If we do not view the earth and its treasures as anything other than
a means of making paper wealth, nature will have the last word. Science, all
too often, quite innocently, plays God because it assumes that we control
nature when the reverse is true.
I define God
as that which we believe we must obey to survive—be it priests or natural
selection. In capitalist cultures, we must adapt to making money. We are what
we adapt to. When people grew their own food, all manner of things were central
to existence. One could not buy eggs in a grocery store. The value of seeds was
a matter of life and death. Water did not come out of a pipe that seemed to
have no end. People experienced the results of poison first hand.
Technology
cannot change nature’s rules. When the parameters of those rules have been exceeded,
time will have come to pay the bill for ignoring the sacred. All those things
which support life are sacred and require protection from the things that diminish
life. Oil and water do not mix. The oil must be kept away from the water. In
many cases technology has not managed to do that. Reliance on oil and coal must
end for the sake of global warming and its impact on weather and water
supplies. We can develop non-polluting means of producing the energy needed.
What is holding that advancement down?
We are at
war; a war more dangerous than anything history offers. The outlaw gene (a
metaphor) defines the basis of the conflict. Darwin did not anticipate the two
most important side-effects of natural selection that create evil. First, if
short-term adaptations use up the resources needed for the long term, the
species will become extinct. It may take a long time. A million years counts
but a moment in geological time. Capitalism has been around for a few seconds.
In that time it has done incalculable damage to our chance of surviving the
next hundred years. Turning real wealth into paper wealth exhausts real wealth.
The money, otherwise worthless, controls which adaptations we use—most of them
short term.
Second, the
evil men do evolved with the choice natural selection leaves to each
generation: Will we accomplish the production and distribution of wealth by
divisions of labor based on merit where all share in the production and
distribution, or will people take the short-term strategy of steeling other people’s
labor by force, fraud, or class. Will society support democracy, freedom, and equality
or white supremacy (a metaphor). Lincoln did not fight the Civil War to free
the slaves. He fought it to free all humanity. Color is only one convenient way
to stigmatize a class of people.
White
supremacy has become more subtle. Slaves and masters have been replaced by underpaid,
uneducated, poverty-stricken people with no insurance or life support who have
no bargaining power and who do the dirty work for overcompensated elite. The
battle remains: Who will prosper and who will pay the price for other people’s
success? Poverty endangers civil rights as well as the biosphere. Poverty
destroys democracy by eliminating choices. Starving people take what the elite
grant them and that is not very much.
The increasing
distance between the rich and the rest of us today leaves us fewer and fewer
choices. At the center, oil and coal and gas produce so much money that the
corporations that control them can buy almost anything, including good
government. The scale of money invested in elections alone has reached a level best
characterized as evil for it supports white-supremacy and outrageous favoritism.
The struggle
to enjoy elite status centers on energy. Those resisting the destruction of the
real wealth that supports their lives are being jailed, murdered, and otherwise
marginalized by the evil of corrupt government and ruthless corporate culture.
For years people tried to work with the “system” to address the danger of new
means of extracting energy, without sufficient success. Corporations refuse to
recognize the evil they do. They lie.
Wars are
fought on the ground. Only a mass-supported revolution in production and distribution
can change our direction from dangerous energy to safe energy. Those profiting
from and protecting the old market will not give up without a merciless fight. We
need to create an environmentally friendly energy market. That would reduce the
old market’s ability to hold the new market down and thereby reduce the casualties
that inevitably follow the inequities that huge discrepancies in wealth, along
with environmental degradation, create.
Markets
create nothing. People create markets. The fallacy that they function like a
law of gravity independent of human intervention allows the exploiters of other
people’s labor to plead no contest. We can do nothing about the course of
markets. We must obey them. We do so at great risk.
The
ignorance of the elite and super rich defy reason. How can they advocate
life-threatening extractions of energy that threaten their own lives and
property? No amount of money can save us from global warming and poisoned
water. At best, money can only decide who dies last. What supports such a level
of denial? Even intellectual dishonesty seems hardly up to the task.
I believe
that evils of capitalism have reached a point where profit is more important
than life itself. In the absence of intellectual honesty and the sacred, money
will defeat all challenges. God will save the righteous; just as white
supremacy will reward them—the people who obey money, their God. The on-the-ground
problems of energy conservation are not nearly as difficult as the ethical
revolution required to achieve consensus in time to halt global warming.
Recognizing
the sacred requires the guidance of intellectual honesty. Life is sacred, not
theology. Clean water, not words, supports life. Words as markers, identifiers,
do not function without a consistent logic supporting their relationships.
Logic evolves from experiences that disclose what makes the world work. Justice
starts out with lessons in fairness, something we feel in our gut. Huge discrepancies
in wealth do not seem fair. It takes a good deal of propaganda to make people
ignore their understanding of the basic tenants of life.
Water is
sacred. Trees are sacred. The temperature of the oceans is sacred to the life
it supports. Small changes can destroy breading grounds and cycles. We have to
rely on science to understand what is obvious only to the trained eye.
Oil is not
sacred. It feeds machines, not living creatures. Therein lies the problem. We
adapt to our machines instead of nature’s rules—we defy our genome. The machines
rain destruction on the life givers on a scale the earth can no longer process.
Poisons remain poison after their release. Our way of adapting to machines
kills the biosphere, as well as a good deal of labor.
Take water.
Once we could only use what annual rainfall lakes and rivers stored. Now we
pump water miles under the ground from centuries of storage. When it is gone,
all is gone. The earth is also sinking because of it. Instead to adapting to
the requirements of our genome that millions of years designed—like adopting to
annual rainfall—we adapt to the pump.
By Carter
Stroud, author of Natural Selection’s Paradox: The Outlaw Gene, the Religion of Money,
and the Origin of Evil.
carter.stroud@gmail.com
