Must Read
- Ben Ehrenreich, How Do You Know When Society Is About to Fall Apart?
Barring a cataclysmic event, societal collapse isn’t sudden. It happens over generations if not hundreds of years. Joseph Tainter has an interesting hypothesis re the root cause of societal collapse. It feels relevant to our time. That stated, there are counterarguments that what might feel like collapse – of democratic institutions, of post-WWII America – is just people adapting to the world changing around them as they always have. To wit, “The end of the world as we know it isn’t the end of the world full stop.” Ehrenreich presents Tainter’s ideas and some counterarguments:
Only complexity, [Joseph] Tainter argues, provides an explanation that applies in every instance of [societal] collapse. We go about our lives, addressing problems as they arise. Complexity builds and builds, usually incrementally, without anyone noticing how brittle it has all become. Then some little push arrives, and the society begins to fracture. The result is a “rapid, significant loss of an established level of sociopolitical complexity.” In human terms, that means central governments disintegrating and empires fracturing into “small, petty states,” often in conflict with one another. Trade routes seize up, and cities are abandoned. Literacy falls off, technological knowledge is lost and populations decline sharply. “The world,” Tainter writes, “perceptibly shrinks, and over the horizon lies the unknown.”
- E. J. Dionne, Jr., Radical, Moderate, and Necessary
I’m a UU and a Jesuit sympathizer. Dionne captures what draws me to both. The values he speaks to are indeed radical, moderate and necessary:
Those inspired by Catholic thinking have always been alive to the importance of balance—between personal responsibility and a concern for community, between individual rights and the common good. This sense of equilibrium could be an antidote to much that is wrong in our public life….
The Church’s teachings about politics represent a radical brand of moderation that is missing in our discourse—radical, because they offer a sharp critique of the status quo and its assumptions; moderate, because they understand the imperative of weighing competing goods and seeing human beings as fallen but also capable of transcendence and redemption.
- Environmental League of Massachusetts, Green Budget
The Baker administration continues to passive-aggressively inhibit and undermine progress on environmental issues in MA:
Severe cuts to environmental agency budgets and staff reductions are preventing Massachusetts from living up to its potential. Currently, only 0.6% of the state operating budget supports environmental agencies. In our annual Green Budget report we set forth funding recommendations that put us on the right track toward achieving the Governor’s commitment of 1% for the environment. The last time Massachusetts allocated 1% of its budget to environmental programs was in the early 2000’s.
Examples of Need and Impact [for FY2021]
- More than 100 MassDEP employees took advantage of the Early Retirement Incentive Program in 2015 but the agency faces additional responsibilities to comply with Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decisions (like the 2018 decision to uphold the state’s ability to cut emissions from power plants,) and to implement new laws and regulations.
- $1.1M of H2’s $1.5M increase is already specified for PFAS efforts
- Deep budget cuts have jeopardized the ability of MassDEP to do its work. The agency is extremely limited in its ability to issue permits in a timely fashion, provide technical assistance, and enforce state law.
- An addition of $1 million for the MassDEP Administration line-item would enable the agency to hire back approximately 10-12 staff.
- With an additional $2.17 million in funding, MassDEP could hire back more than 10 enforcement and compliance officers, five permit officers, and five monitoring and assessment staff.
- DEP will be expanding the waste ban program, yet 40% of loads at the current waste levels contain banned materials.
Worth Reading
- Jennifer Finney Boylan, The Long Shadow of the Reagan Years
The upheavals of our current era did not begin with Donald Trump, nor will they end now that he has been defeated. Nov. 4, 1980, was 40 years ago, a long time ago now. But in so many ways the cataclysms of 1980 created the world we live in today….
Sure, blame Donald Trump for his inept pandemic response. But blame Ronald Reagan for encouraging people to hate their own government, or to view an individual sacrifice for the common good as some kind of tyranny.
The Republican Party is increasingly a minority party, or counter-majoritarian, as some political scientists put it. The beliefs and priorities that hold it together are opposed by most Americans, who on a deeper level do not want to be what the GOP increasingly stands for. A counter-majoritarian party cannot present itself as such and win elections outside its dwindling strongholds. So it has to be counterfactual, too. It has to fight with fictions. Making it harder to vote, and harder to understand what the party is really about—these are two parts of the same project. The conflict with honest journalism is structural. To be its dwindling self, the GOP has to also be at war with the press, unless of course the press folds under pressure.
I’ve always had reservations about a politics oriented around opposing cruelty. Political theorists will recognize the provenance of that argument, and I think that it basically never moves beyond a politics that is concerned, above all, about victims, and protecting victims, while remaining wary of people gaining power. We saw a version of that kind of politics during the move toward humanitarian warfare, and I’ve been wary of it ever since.
The politics I care about most is about people gaining power, and exercising the latent powers that they already have but don’t realize they have yet. It’s not about protecting victims from harm; it’s about recognizing that putatively powerless people have a tremendous amount of power if they exercise it.
Chris Dillow, Our Priorities
Connecting with grassroots is not an alternative to technocracy. The two are complements because good policy requires a detailed knowledge of ground truth. I stress here that these are not focus groups: the party must ask not “what do you think?” but “what do you know?” And the results of this research must form policy, and not be over-ridden by the instincts of party leadership or by the search for quick headlines….
Politics isn’t only about ideas. It’s about what ideas get mobilized and which side-lined. The point of such an exercise is to increase the salience of these policy areas… Abstract centralized knowledge of principles is not enough. We need detail and ground truth. And this comes from mobilizing not just academic experts, but local experts…
This might seem technocratic stuff. And God knows we need that. But it’s a different sort of technocracy. It’s not the bullshit managerialism of New Labour [Ed.: Or, in the US, the neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party], but a genuine drive to harness local expertise. Ground truth is everything.
But it’s more than that. What all this amounts to is a different way of doing politics. It sets the agenda. It says: our focus is upon real, material living standards, and we must resist distractions from this. It also says that policy is to be developed not with regard to fleeting newspaper headlines but to hard empirical evidence. Policy is not something to be pulled out of your arse or a newspaper column.
Ending on a Positive Note
- Yuval Noah Harari, Review of ‘Kindred’ by Rebecca Wragg Sykes
Ever since we discovered their existence in 1856, Neanderthals have captured our imagination. While we find it easy to accept that the world is home to different kinds of bears, foxes and dolphins, we are startled by the idea of other species of humans. Just by being, Neanderthals challenge some of our most cherished ideals and delusions. Neanderthals force us to question the belief that Homo sapiens is the apex of creation and, more generally, what it means to be human.