Rachel’s Musings

This must be the year of change… The US President rode into office on a platform promising change (although he seems to be forgetting that). So, in keeping with this change theme, I’ve decided to change my life, or at least my career. To that end, I am going back to school – a rather scary thing to do amongst the California budget crisis since the class schedule, for example, is being revised. Hopefully, the classes I want to take are still being offered when they’re done slashing…

What am I going to study, you ask? I have been accepted into the master’s program of the philosophy department at SF State. The areas of philosophy that I am particularly interested in are feminist and moral philosophy, especially applied ethics. I would like to center my investigation of these areas around the development of an ethical framework that helps us humans create life-affirming and sustainable societies that are just to all individuals no matter what our relationship status.

Musings over our current economic and environmental situation have deepened my interest in addressing these problems more rigorously by switching careers. As the financial crisis deepens, most economists and policy makers suggest that the way out of the crisis is to spend. They call on the government and individuals to increase our spending, ignoring that one of the root causes of the crisis is a mountain of debt. This debt was largely created by a desire for growth – economic growth as well as the idea of “more” on the individual level. We were accumulating stuff in an attempt to attain happiness in life. If only we could get this one more thing, we’d be happy and our life would have meaning. Overconsumption – and the associated debt – is a symptom of an ethical crisis that might lead to the destruction of our life support system. Back in the 1950s, Victor Frankl talked about an existential vacuum. The existential vacuum emerged from a meaning crisis in most of the Western world: As religions were replaced by humanist ideas, no ready-made life meaning was available and humans no longer felt connected to something larger.

Additionally, our connections to other human beings have narrowed with the increasing emphasis on the nuclear family. The community of friends and acquaintances merged into the idea of “The One” – one person who can meet all of our needs. Underneath the façade, though, the needs for connection and meaning remain unfulfilled. Combine this need deficit with an economic system that pushes growth as the only factor that matters and the consumption and debt patterns we are witnessing now result.

In order to create a life-affirming and sustainable society, we need to find an ethical framework that reconnects us with genuine sources of meaning. My task as philosopher is to help develop this kind of framework that provides potential answers – or guidelines on how to find them – to the quest for meaning in life and the desire to be part of something larger. I suggest that there are better ways to fill the existential vacuum: By strengthening our connections to ourselves and to other people, as well as nature. These connections have to be founded on a profound understanding of justice – an affirmation of the individual as connected to a larger world, no matter who that individual is or how these connections are established (i.e., through marriage or friendship or anything in between). In order for us to increase our chances of survival as a species we need to change our priorities. This redefinition, though, requires a vision of a new way that is grounded in a deep understanding of our interconnections but does not need religious concepts.

Watching “Enron: The Smartest Guy in The Room” now – in the midst of the financial crisis – is eerie. The Too Big To Fail banks are all over that one as well. Citibank, JP Morgan, Chase, Credit Swisse, the who’s who of banking loaned money to Enron without questioning, gleefully swallowing the crap they were told as long as they were making money themselves. It almost looks like Enron was just practice. The bigger house of cards was still to be built; only this time it brought down the world economy when the house of cards collapsed. But why are we allowing this to happen? Sure, Ken Lay’s and Jeff Skilling’s names are tainted but that tarnish seems to come with a bit of admiration. They made themselves. They rose to the top on their own power. And they made loads of money.

Alex Gibney, the filmmaker summarizes the underlying lesson well in his commentary in the extras of the DVD: “I think the story of Enron exposes the major flaw in capitalism, which is the crude belief that raw self-interest left untethered will always result in the best possible social good. It’s not so.” Instead it results in the enrichment of the few and the raping of the rest of us. Why are we letting this happen? Are we so determined to become the few that we overlook reality? Are we so blinded by the money we’ll never make but think we could that we can’t see that there has to be a better way? A way that allows everybody a decent way of living rather than the obscene splendor of the few? The documentary contains a clip of Ken Lay talking to reporters bemoaning the fact that his net worth shrank from $100 million to a mere $20 million after the Enron collapse (this is at least in the bonus material of the DVD). And that’s after setting aside funds for anticipated legal defense cost and settlement. $20 million is far more than most people make in a lifetime. Nobody called Lay on that. How can he get away with feeling sorry for himself?

Somehow this all reminds me of a Yiddish joke that I listened to often as a teenager. A man comes to a rabbi complaining that his friend doesn’t talk to him anymore ever since he’s made a bit more money. The rabbi asks the man to look out the window. “What do you see?” he inquires. The man describes the scene he sees: People hurrying along on their business; kids playing; a couple of friends playing cards; an old woman watching over a baby. The rabbi asks the man to turn to look into the mirror. “What do you see?” he asks. The man laughs and says “I see myself.” “You see,” explains the rabbi, “when you put a little bit of silver underneath, all you can see is yourself.”

Have we gotten so caught up in the earn-and-spend cycle that we don’t see the masses of homeless? Or feel the moral outrage of even having homeless people in a country as rich as the US? Then there are the people – including children – without health insurance and on and on. And yet, the top keeps on enriching themselves and we, the masses, wonder when the next sale is. How have we become so numb to moral dilemmas? How did we become too complacent to be outraged long enough to actually change something?

The Pew Forum presents an interesting chart showing what people think about global warming: If it occurs and if so, what causes it. All this is broken out by religious affiliation. Overall, 71% of the US population agree that the average temperatures are rising but only 47% of the population (or two-thirds of people who agree with a warming trend) think that this is mostly due to human activity. So, one-third of those observing the warming trend think it’s caused by natural patterns. Apparently, they know better what’s going on than the experts… But fully 21% don’t even notice that there is warming going on – I guess it’s cooler when your head is firmly in the sand.

If you look only at the religiously unaffiliated, the percentage of warming by human activity folks increase to 58%, or 77% of those who think there’s global warming. Looking at the chart, clearly religion has an influence on temperature perception and attributed cause. The more religiously conservative, the less likely a person is to notice the warming and attribute it to human activity. Religious influence is endangering our life support system in (at least) two ways: Ignoring the problem of climate disruption (if you think that it’s either not happening or we’re not the biggest contributor, you’re not going to do anything about it) and multiplying fruitfully without regard to overpopulation (the more people there are on the planet, the more consumption happens, contributing more CO2 to the atmosphere).

Last week, an ice bridge broke off in Antarctica. And at work, we started a new recycling program. Each day, I notice the recycables in the trash and the trash in the recycling bin. How hard can it possibly be to get this right? Sure, some things are confusing but what is more obviously recycable than newspaper?!? It is frustrating! The Antarctic is falling apart but people are too lazy to recycle.

Our current capitalist system, especially the unregulated variety in the US, is built around ideas that are fundamentally not life affirming. The system is built on the idea of growth, which ultimately is unsustainable. The idea of growth drives critical aspects of the system: Growing companies, growing profits, growing monetary wealth, growing markets (including by increasing the population), growing consumption, growing GDP. Without growth, capitalism would collapse. The current financial crisis has made a farce out of growing monetary wealth. The recent stock market increases – possibly most of the growth since the 1980s – has been driven by bubbles, inflated by Credit Default Swaps and other financial inventions that brought the whole world’s economies to their knees. To get out of this crisis, we are told, we just have to grow the economy again. Let’s inflate the next bubble! That’ll fix everything. Millions of people got hurt – not to mention the billions that didn’t benefit from the system to begin with: The world’s poor.

We need a new system. A system that is life-affirming and sustainable. Sustainable means that we’re not creating an environmental disaster, especially when expanding the system to everyone on Earth (as would be the case, for example, if everybody in the world would live at the living standard in the U.S.). Life-affirming means that we’d improve all creatures’ lives as much as we can. I am not quite sure how this system would look like but it certainly would have to do away with our (Western) addiction to growth. There’s just nowhere to grow to anymore! Another essential part of this system (or worldview or way of living) would be a limit to world population. The world population has increased dramatically in the last century and a half. This is a reflection of increased standards of living – less children die and people live longer – and withholding of birth control. There are already guidelines on how to control world population, though they’d probably need updating since we probably need to reduce the population to a sustainable level.

If we don’t shift gears, I am not too optimistic about our future (others are also sounding the alarm). I sense that we’re on a train racing ahead under the banner of growth pretending that the canyon up ahead is not there. Business as usual. Heads firmly in the sand.

Obama’s campaign was all about change. Presumably his presidency will be about this as well, if his first few days in office are an indication, there certainly will be quite a few things changing, for the better. But is this change fundamental enough? I suspect not. The financial crisis and the specter of climate change are clear reminders that our way of life is not sustainable. There is a limit to growth no matter what economists are trying to make us believe. We need to rethink our fundamental assumptions instead of calling on each other to defend our way of life. We cannot defend our way of life – against what would we defend it anyway? Reality?

Here are some changes we need to reverse our march toward doomsday:

• Build an economy on the notion of enough, rather than more: We need to abandon the idea that more is better because we’re suffocating in the trash.
• Replace the focus on coupling with rebuilding community ties: The nuclear family has choked out other ties that are important for a fulfilling and meaningful life. Instead of putting all of our eggs into the basket of one other person, we need to (re)learn to connect deeply and intimately with many people.
• Create jobs that are life-affirming rather than mind-numbing: Most jobs address small, often rather irrelevant, parts of the big corporate machine. We could harness the intelligence wasted on these jobs to address the problems we need to confront.
• Face the reality that capitalism is undermining democracy: If the most powerful institutions in our society are run as kingdoms, we cannot expect democracy to flourish.
• Stop ignoring the problem of overpopulation: There are too many people on this planet to live comfortably. The current population size is not sustainable – another example where more is not better. Addressing this issue will be painful and extremely difficult ethically. The longer we wait, though, the worse it is going to get.

I am sure there’s much, much more that needs fundamental change. Obama will not bring this about. He can’t really. He is a politician after all. But we can. All of us can start looking – really looking – at our lives and decide what works and what doesn’t, what is sustainable and what isn’t. And then we can start to make changes, slowly but surely. Will it matter? Maybe. However, rather than pondering our impact (or lack thereof), we could simply decide to act as if our actions matter. If enough of us make that decision, things will change.

Obama and his administration can make these changes easier by enacting things like universal health care, mandatory sick leave, and even by targeting the economic stimulus toward project that build sustainability. These are important foundational blocks onto which we can build real change.

Sustainability must be in the air. Here’s a great post from the Regressive Antidote that touches on similar themes that I covered here.