Who will pay? Guess...

One of my recurring nightmares for the coming decades of environmental crisis and economic problems is that the essential solution will be what it has always been. We will make the poor pay. Of course we will – we always do, and it is built into the way we do things. It will be necessary to dress them up as villains or undeserving or perhaps just render them invisible by hiding them behind 'processes' and 'systems', or perhaps by the simple expedient of not looking that way. But in a world in which rich countries routinely promise a fraction of 1% of GNP to foreign aid and yet feel no shame when they cannot even manage that, how will that be a problem?

On the other hand, to the extent that we continue to pay them any attention, it will be largely in order to exploit their suffering. To take one of the ugliest examples of shameless exploitation, here is a summary of what is really happening in the world food system, and in particular the world of genetic modification, which has spent so man marketing dollars on trying to persuade us that GM is the great hope for the Third World in the face of coming age of droughts, plagues of insects and hunger:

This is the main reason nearly all transgenic crops are now planted in just six countries – the United States, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, China and South Africa – and almost none in the least developed countries, who cannot afford such inputs. It is also why, according to the FAO, just four crops (corn, canola, cotton and soybeans) and just two traits (herbicide tolerance and pest resistance) now account for 99% of transgenic crops planted worldwide. By contrast, the FAO says, because most transgenic research and development is being carried out by private companies there have been ‘no serious investments’ in creating transgenic varieties of crops such as sorghum, millet, pigeon pea, chickpea and groundnut, which are far less commercially viable than soybeans or corn but are the five most important crops for poor farmers in semi-arid tropical regions like sub-Saharan Africa and India… While many anti-transgenic activists continue to get worked up over patent production as the main threat to poor farmers, the larger risk is that the transgenic industry will simply bypass the developing world altogether. Genetically modified cops, complained Louise Fresco, the former head of FAO’s agricultural division, were created ‘to reduce inputs and labour costs in large-scale production systems, not to feed the developing world or increase food quality.’ Not only is transgenic research missing poor countries’ crops, Fresco continued, but it is largely avoiding the traits needed by the developing world, especially drought and salt tolerance and resistance to tropical diseases… This reality runs counter to the oft-stated forecasts that a gene revolution will restore food security in places like
Africa and southern Asia and has fostered the view among critics that the industry is simply using problems like hunger to gain political support for transgenic technologies it can’t afford to offer to the hungry.

(From pp. 262-263 of Paul Roberts’ excellent The End of Food. Read this book.)

But this in turn only reflects the category error (as those of who once shared a flat with an undergraduate philosophy student like to put it) of most debate about whether or how the problems of peak oil, declining soil quality, climate chaos, water shortages and all the rest can be solved by business. Business simply is not in the business of solving such problems. Business is in only one business and it only makes one product. Business is solely and exclusively in the business of making money, and its sole product is profit. Insofar as it can be forced through tax, regulation and the marketing constraint of its customers occasionally refusing to deal with vicious, evil corporations, business can make a useful contribution to society. All its other contributions are either negative or unintentional.

So if the above quote expresses how agribusiness operates, it is not because these businesses are run by bad or foolish people; it is because that that is the only way a capitalist enterprise can operate. Although a great deal of ‘corporate social responsibility’ is little more than PR, and a lot more simply what they are obliged to do by law - in good times there is a degree of Good Works. But even the corporate good guys cannot resist the demands of shareholders, especially when the going gets tough.

So we should never trust businesses to do anything but pursue their own interests. Never never never. Unless, that is, someone can show me a single case of a large business doing something completely altruistic that cost it real money (of its own terms) without them making anything out of it – no indirect or indirect benefit, in fact not even any public claim for recognition that they were responsible. Just the ordinary, decent sort of thing you might expect any morally responsible individual to do. Only with billions of dollars.

Does it work?

Energy prices are soaring everywhere – except in our house. Just the other day our supplier changed our standard bill – downwards. While energy prices as a whole are leaping up almost by the day, ours are falling. We have made no significant physical change to the house yet – not even upgraded the loft insulation. We haven’t even finished replacing the light bulbs, which is as easy as it gets. What we have done is changed our behaviour in all those small ways that look so unlikely to make a difference, but they seem to have done the trick.

Things we have been doing since February include:

1. We turned the heating (space and water) down a couple of degrees – which is to say, down to the temperature all homes were heated to a couple of decades back – not exactly a major sacrifice! After a week I started to find anything higher quite oppressive.
2. We also slightly trimmed the times the room and water heating were on, especially in the morning. It made no difference to our comfort at all.
3. When we got cold, we put on a woolly jumper. Or two, if necessary. I actually find an extra layer of clothes rather comforting, just so long as it doesn’t make me sweaty. When sitting down for long periods, I use a rug – it’s very nice.
4. Lights off as we leave the room. Don’t worry about that hoary old myth that fluorescent lamps are better left on – according to the US Department of Energy, that is only true if you plan to turn them back on again within between 3 and 11 seconds, depending on the light. Incandescent bulbs are always worth turning off.
5. The only lights we put on in the first place are those we are actually using. Which turns out to be surprisingly few.
6. All standbys off. Obviously. What could be more useless than a piece of technology that saves you literally a moment’s effort for such a high price.
7. We closed doors as we went through. This meant that the heat we were paying for was kept in the rooms where we wanted it.
8. We turned of the heating in rooms we seldom use.
9. We stopped filling kettles any fuller than necessary. Given that the average kettle is twice as full as it needs to be, this is a ludicrous waste – it slows you up, adds to your electricity bill and wastes energy. I also stopped waiting for the kettle to turn itself off. The internal detector keeps the kettle boiling going for quite a while after the water is obviously bubbling.

The curious thing is that after a week or two of all this, I can’t remember why I ever behaved otherwise.

The Tragedy of the Commons, Part 2

Every now and again while reading books and papers on the environment, I read about ‘the tragedy of the commons’. This is an idea introduced by Garrett Hardin in a 1968 essay by that name in Science.

The original essay was concerned with the population explosion, which, along with pollution, was the major, if indirect, environmental problem of the day. The general dilemma Hardin proposes is usually expressed by a simple historical analogy. When sheep and cattle grazed on common land, it was always in an individual’s interest to add one more animal to exploit this free resource until eventually the common land collapses from over-grazing and everyone is impoverished.

From an environmental point of view, the idea is used to justify parcelling the whole word out in to units of private property, on the grounds that then someone will have a clear interest in maintaining its value. It is part of the intellectual bedrock of capitalism and it is being used now to anoint private property as the saviour of environment rather than its worst nightmare.

What’s wrong with this idea? It’s hard to know where to start.

Firstly, it assumes that the original observation was completely general – that there are no conditions under which a collective agreement to operate in a particular way that is in everyone’s interests can be reached and sustained. Like many apologists for market economics, Hardin assumes either that everyone is out for themselves or that those who are not will be overwhelmed by those who are. He offers many useful insights into this situation, including some basic criticisms of market thinking, but basically assumes as a universal truth the egoism that is in fact produced only by social systems that isolate their members from one another. Though by no means unique in this regard, capitalism is exceptionally good at isolating the individual.

Conversely, many societies have managed their commons perfectly well. I suspect it was only with the rise of capitalism, when the right to buy and sell property in land became widespread, that anyone that turning the land into private property became desirable or even thinkable. Before that, access to the land was controlled socially, by common agreement. After that, the commons ceased to be genuinely common, and became merely public. Are we incapable of simply agreeing to manage the environment more intelligently?

Nor should anyone forget the brutality with which the common land was enclosed by its owners and the people impoverished and turned off. In other words, the possibility of despoliation was followed by the cast-iron certainty of eviction. We are seeing a re-run of this process in the Third World right now, and the efficiencies this is supposedly introducing into the economies of, for example, rural India, are pricing the food the land now creates out of the reach of the very people who grow it and forcing millions more into the slums – where the next turn of the environmental screw will find millions more victims.

Secondly, it assumes that an owner maintaining the value of their property means defending its environmental integrity. That doesn’t make much sense either. What is in the owner’s interests will depend on the nature of the wider economic system, which in any contemporary case means exploiting it to maximise profit. Generally speaking, contemporary property owners are under pressure to maximise the return on their capital quickly. In other words, their stewardship is likely to focus less on the environment and more on their shareholders and their bank accounts. Why this should benefit the environment is not obvious to anyone who has ever observed the behaviour of businesses in the oil, gas, timber, mining, fishing and other areas of primary production.

Thirdly, businesses have no way of evaluating environmental impacts. Or rather, they can detect them, but only when they have a price tag on them. This in turn will only occur when those impacts have a demonstrable effect on the bottom line. But as we have already seen with, for example, the devastation of our fisheries, this may have no connection with an objective environmental disaster. We’ve known about the damage we are causing to the natural environment and its consequences for decades, and still neither business nor the market have done anything about it. We may decide to let the accountants decide in their own good time whether it’s worth having an entry in the books marked ‘collapse of civilisation’, but on the whole I’d rather not wait.

Of course, the enthusiasts for private property reply that the problem is that the fish aren’t owned by anyone, so no one has an interest in preserving fish stocks. This argument has the merit of being consistent, but unfortunately has corollaries that are too scary for words. Water is being polluted; should someone own the water? Should my access to clean water be by payment only? If I don’t have any money, should I be allowed to die of thirst? What if the owner will make more out of selling it to a rich person who just wants another bath or thinks they need a nice green lawn? We do this with food all the time - there has never been a time when there was not enough food in the world, only times when many people were deprived of it because they had no money. And what about the air that we breathe?

Of course, there are other alternatives that are compatible with retaining capitalist businesses as part of our economic system, such as taxation and regulation. It’s not an efficient solution, but regulation is like representative democracy – as Winston Churchill said, it is the worst of all possible systems, apart from all the other ones we’ve already tried. If, in the few years we have to turn the ship around, someone can identify a better mechanism for reducing the world’s collective carbon footprint to zero, then fine. And in the meantime, relying on business or the market to do it is like asking a blind idiot to drive you home. On the other hand, if business doesn’t like political direction or regulation, I’m sure we unrepentant lefties can think of alternatives, though they might be a little radical for business’s tastes.

Finally, private property only inverts the tragedy of the commons. Instead of bringing forth the hero who will defend the land against the ravages of self-interest, it creates a mass of corporate ‘individuals’ – the businesses themselves – for whom it is always in their interests to make someone else pay for their problems. Insofar as property owners compete with one another, they will always want to make one of their competitors pay first. And insofar as property owners share a collective interest to make the rest of us pay, then that is what they will want to do. How does this differ from the tragedy of the commons, except in that we already know that this is going to happen?

What worries my son

Today I asked my son whether he was worried about the environment. Yes, he said. But what scares me most, he went on, is the fact that people talk about what they are going to do and then they don’t do anything. Is that the worst stupidity of the current Age of Stupid – the self-deception?

The Great Global Warming Swindle swindle

You might have heard of a Channel 4 programme, The Great Global Warming Swindle, which caused a lot of damage to the environmental cause. The Guardian G2 recently published a good article from George Monbiot rebutting the absurd legal judgment that the programme had not misled the public. You can find it here.

Kicking and screaming, the C of E bursts into the seventeenth century

The Church of England and Episcopalians everywhere are currently lurching through the latest round of deciding whether or gay priests are an abomination. Given that their major discussion point is the Old Testament, which makes it perfectly clear what the right answer is, why is there any dispute?

Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination. [Leviticus 18:22]

I look forward to the conservatives winning their point and the evil perverts being thrown (sorry, cast) out. Then we move on to the still more fertile territory of restoring all the other fine beliefs that held by the OT - that the sun goes around the earth, that witches are real, that slavery and wars of extermination are OK, and I am entitled to kill my son if he persists in disobeying me. He has been warned.

As for Dr Laura, she is a credit to radio comedy and I think she should have a regular slot on Radio 4.

Making sense of human nature

I have spent a great deal of my life studying psychology in various ways. Most of the time I have been looking for clues as to what it is that differentiates intelligent life from its non-intelligent cousins and precursors. I have written quite a lot about this (e.g., my History of Human Reason and yet-to-be-published Birth of Reason), but I often feel that I have missed the point.

Quite a lot of human existence is readily captured by the conventional notion of intelligence. We are almost uniquely conscious and historical beings. The only other species that exhibit consciousness are our primate cousins and a few very smart birds and dolphins, and none at all has a history. So far as we tell at the moment (animals are difficult to study in direct proportion to their evolutionary distance from Homo sapiens), these species are all characterised by essentially the same kinds of intelligence as ourselves. Or at least, they can be tested for the same aptitudes and abilities.

Yet I don’t spend my personal life dwelling on the sorts of things that are normally associated with testing intelligence. I don’t sit about doing mathematical puzzles or organising objects into classes and sequences. Right now, I am writing this blog, listening to Muddy Waters and feeling pretty pleased that I have finally coaxed my cat to want to sit on my lap after literally years of trying. Last night I watched Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona and thought about my life. What all that has to do with intelligence as conceived of by science I have no idea. Nor, I think, has science.

Yet I am quite sure that that is where the explanation lies. The problem is that, like everything else about the science of human nature, the study of intelligence seems to take in everything about human beings apart from what makes them so peculiarly human. As so often, science studies what it can readily comprehend and already knows how to research, and everything that does not fit that model is left by the wayside. Later, once it has established a massive body of empirical findings, it announces that this is what humanity is, and all the rest is illusion, epiphenomenal, trivia.

But then, isn’t that where we are now? With all those modules and genes-for and all that – where is anyone asking, ‘So what has all this got to do with human beings?’ The truth is, you can’t get there from here.

So let me suggest a list of things any would-be science of human nature should take as its central problems:

• Love
• Music
• Laughter
• Beauty

I know that there are some studies of some of these things, but precious little. Even when they are studied, there is something strangely mechanical about the way we go about it. How can a checklist or an ECG reading capture anything of significance? No, they aren’t a ‘starting point’ or ‘building blocks’ for a full theory, or anything else of any value, any more than a scientific study of the properties of bricks tells us anything about Westminster Cathedral – or, indeed, a multi-storey car park.

Does intelligence evolve?

Human beings and human intelligence are indisputably the products of evolution. But that does not mean that human intelligence will itself evolve further. In fact it won’t.

Well, if that doesn’t sound like special pleading, I don’t know what does. But then human intelligence is special. Or rather natural intelligence as a whole is special. Not magical or blessed or the product of a special creation, but rather so placed by evolution itself that it can undo the knots and straighten out the hidden connections that driven evolution itself, and so take charge of the process.

Yet if natural intelligence is special on every level, it is only in the same sense that organic structures and processes are ‘special’ from the point of view of physical of chemical systems. Just as life introduces a whole raft of new structures such as ecosystems, reproduction and natural selection, and yet is the product of prior physical, chemical and generally material process, so natural intelligence introduces a whole new range of elements – not least history, consciousness and individuality – that have analogues, but not equals, among organisms.

The consequence of all this is that although intelligence assumes a biological substrate and platform and could neither have evolved nor developed without the pre-existence of life, once it exists it does so on terms that are very different from those of evolution. So if evolution continues to be a factor intelligence must continue to deal with – which it certainly does – that does not mean that it is determined by evolution. After all, a cat has to deal with gravity, but you would be hard pressed to explain a cat’s startling acrobatics through the equations of physics.

So in what sense is intelligence immune to evolution? As I have argued elsewhere, it is a long story, perhaps stretching back to eh origins of life, but the basic case is quite easily explained. It is a story in three chapters, to be told in no particular order, about the most basic structures of human existence: objects, subjects and the world.

What are you doing?

Let me start with a very abstract claim (don’t worry, it only lasts a paragraph). Everything human beings do consists of constructing objects. You know something when you can grasp it on its own terms – which is to say, objectively. You know you have succeeded in doing something when the reality you were trying to achieve endures without you continually having to shore it up - which is to say, as an object in its own right. You know you are acting rationally when you can say what goal you are trying to achieve or what value you are trying to realise, plus explain how you are going to get there without introducing prejudices and assumptions you cannot defend – which is to say, as objects on their own terms. And so on.

Leaving out the philosophical problem of whether objectivity can ever be complete – personally I have no doubt that it can, but the present argument doesn’t rely on this fact – how does this make intelligence any different from any other kind of organic structure, and what difference does it make to evolution?

In short, one of the most striking yet unregarded facts about human beings is that we know what we are doing. There is, unless we deliberately adopt the method of trial and error, no place for random variation or natural selection in intelligent activity. But neither are we limited to executing pre-programmed instructions, even if we allow for the qualifications of learning, memory, facultative adaptations, and so on. Unlike any non-intelligent organism, human beings are capable of saying and justifying in advance what they are trying to do, devising and justifying a plan for doing it, executing and justifying that plan in an orderly manner, and continually monitoring and justifying whether we are fulfilling our purpose.

Piaget had a useful term for this ability – he called it 'object permanence'. By this he meant that our intelligence lets us recognise that things exist independently of our consciousness of them. Even from consciousness’s own point of view, object permanence means that we can look at things in a detached manner, and see not only objects themselves but also the relationships between them, the relationships between these relationships, and so on. As a result, the simple ability to recognise that things exist in themselves soon allows us also to recognise the rules, systems and laws that determine how they exist and the kinds of things our objects can, must and will – or will not - do.

Nor is this talent limited to consciousness as such. Because of our insight into what makes our objects what they are, we not only know that a house we build still exists when we are not aware of it (which is radical enough) but we made it that way precisely so that it would exist – and act - as it does, independently of our own actions. We made it with walls and roof and doors and windows and rooms and systems and furniture and all the rest so that these things would do things for us without us continually having to do them for ourselves.

In short, the object permanence that intelligence gives us also gives us technology. Of course, many organisms use small parts of their environment in an analogous manner, especially (for example) nesting creatures. But nest-building does not seem to be based on any genuine insight into the nature of the situation its maker is in, the nature of the materials they are using or the purpose for which they are used. In human beings not only is this insight there but this talent seems to be generalisable to absolutely any situation, from architecture to global communications systems to evolutionary theory.

So what difference does all this make to evolution? In a nutshell, if we can grasp that things exist independently of our consciousness of them, this is as true of the biological forces by which we are surrounded as of anything else. In other words, we can recognise evolution itself, how it works and what it is doing – and might do – to us. We can recognise, anticipate and deal with sources of variation and selection and decide for ourselves whether we want to allow, evade, forestall or reverse them. Unlike any non-intelligent organism, we can understand what is happening to us and take action if it is not what we want. Of course, we don’t always succeed, but that is a different matter. Meanwhile, through our objective grasp of the structures whereby life operates, we can invent our own selective forces, or intervene still more directly. At the moment we are just beginning to discover genetic engineering; who knows what we will know a century from now.

Who are you?

One of the most basic rules of evolution is that organisms in different lineages never throw up quite the same structure. The bodies of shark, ichthyosaur and dolphin may be streamlined in broadly similar ways, and the eye may have evolved over and over again, but never did this process result in the same structure showing up in more than one place. The possible ways of solving the same functional problem are so many and starting points and conditions so varied that the odds are simply too long.

Except, it turns out, in the case of intelligence. The evidence is thin on the ground, but at present it looks like, when organisms as diverse as human beings, chimpanzees, birds and dolphins start to develop intelligence, what they produce is not just a set of functionally equivalent structures – the equivalent of the fish and whale body-shapes – but exactly the same intelligence, over and over again.

It’s very hard to prove, especially as non-human intelligence is generally so limited and so hard to interpret, but there are at least two features of all natural forms of intelligence that strongly suggest that the same structure has popped up repeatedly. Firstly, the developmental process seems to be the same for all forms of natural intelligence. Intelligence develops through the same sequence of stages no matter what the starting point. If human and bird intelligence were not structurally the same, this would be quite absurd. Secondly, when human beings and dolphins of equivalent levels of intelligence make mistakes because of their lack of maturity, the mistakes they make are of the same kind. Again, if the underlying structure were not the same this would be impossible to explain.

From an evolutionary point of view, this is just about as odd as can be. Just consider the evolutionary distance and biological differences between human beings, birds and dolphins. It is more than two hundred million years since we last shared a common ancestor with African grey parrots. None of our brains are very similar either, especially not in the areas human intelligence relies on.

Why does all this matter to evolution? Because the internal structure of natural intelligence – which is what the above was all about – is what is also known as the subject. As an intelligent being, it is the framework that defines your every experience, shapes your every desire, allows you to make sense of the world and organises how you act. It is, at the most abstract level, who you are.

It’s also another thing that takes you out of evolution. Because if all intelligence shares the same structure internally, then the evolution of intelligence can only conclude in one result. There is no variation around it, and no possibility of selection between variants, because there aren’t any. The structure of intelligence seems to be completely invariable. So unless evolution is able to take intelligence away as well as give it – and I think that the other sections of this essay make it clear that that is not likely – once you have intelligence, evolution has lost its power. Once you are a subject, you have escaped from evolution.

Where are you?

You live in the world. Which is odd, because no non-intelligent creature does. It may – must – inhabit a niche, to which it responds and which it may even change in various ways. But in the absence of a stable subjectivity and a capacity for grasp things objectively, a niche is a pretty unstable, fragmented place. After all, if the organism has no idea that things exist objectively then it can have no sense of the niche itself – which is to say, of whole within which it lives. Still less can it have any idea how it works. On the other hand, if the organism itself has no consistent or stable internal structure then there is no one there for whom the niche could exist.

Hence the oddity of living in a world. It is a single whole, which no niche is. But that is only the first oddity about the world. For a world can’t even be properly compared with an entire environment. Hence its second oddity. For while the organism’s niche includes (one might say) only that subset of its environment that directly affects or supports its activity, even its environment includes only that subset of the universe that might impinge on its niche.

For example, the tulips in my back garden already inhabit quite a large niche, given that they are directly affected not only by the soil they grow in, the garden fences that protect them from the wind and the occasional watering they get from us but also the entire UK weather system. As for its environment, current global warming means that their effective environment also includes Chinese factories, the machinations of New York stock market investors and the land management policies of the Brazilian government. But leaving aside the possibility of a rematch with the meteorite that put paid to the dinosaurs, I think it’s safe to say that their environment does not include much outside the Earth and nothing at all from outside the solar system.

Which cannot be said of the world of intelligent beings. That doesn’t seem to have any limitations at all - its ultimate universe is the universe. Quanta, quasars – they’re all there. How is that possible? Back to objects. For if we recognise objects exist independently of our consciousness of them, then we can’t help also recognising that they themselves exist in relationships with one another (and quite possibly with things we are not even aware of), whose existence is immediately implied by our recognising that the objects we are directly interested in exist. But if that is the case, then our limits in things is not limited to the parts and aspects of the universe that might us in more practical (e.g., adaptive) reasons. In fact we have a name for the study of things, regardless of whether we have any practical interest in them. It is called science.

Hence our ability – again - to transcend evolution. We inhabit a world that itself transcends any adaptive interest. Object permanence also gives us a practical grasp of that world that allows us to change it – make it more in our own image, perhaps. As a result, from generation to generation we have created a world that is increasingly defined by human concerns, human purposes, human desires, and human systems. This has now reached the point where, for better or (as now seems likely) for worse, human beings are now the biggest factor in the lives of many of the world’s species. It is likely that we will have killed off a third of the world’s species some time soon, and if the research Mark Lynas cites in his terrifying Six Degrees is anything like correct, we will soon have wrought so much damage that no species – and certainly no ecosystem – can be considered safe. But from a purely evolutionary point of view, this complete reversal of the relationship between organism and evolution means that the essential question is now whether evolution is controlled by intelligence rather than the reverse. Plainly, I would say, the answer is Yes.

How is this possible?

Finally, how is all this possible from an evolutionary point of view? How can evolution throw up a structure that breaks all the rules of evolution? It has nothing to do with the usual villains, such as ‘Intelligent Design’ (was any theory ever more absurdly named?), some of whose more blatant absurdities are catalogued here. The truth is a long but really quite simple story, which I have tried to piece together in my Birth of Reason, of which you can download a free copy here. And if you would like to read a more detailed version of the present argument, try here.