A Bitter Pill to Swallow

In his column a couple of days ago, Nicholas Kristof prescribed "A 12-Step Program for Responding to President-Elect Trump."  Overlooking for the moment the liberties he takes with the original 12-step program, I am grateful to Mr. Kristof for calling us to action and warning us against curling up in our "echo chambers," licking our wounds, and nursing our grievances.  

I am particularly struck by his Step #8, here in its entirety:

8. I WILL resist dwelling in an echo chamber. I will follow smart people on Twitter or Facebook with whom I disagree. I will also try to enlarge my social circle to include people with different views, recognizing that diversity is a wonderful thing — and that if I know only Clinton supporters, then I don’t have a clue about America.

Guilty, as charged: I fear I don’t have a clue about America.  Possibly, I could identify family, friends, and acquaintances who did not support Hillary Clinton, but I can’t be sure as to their beliefs, their reactions to the election, their dreams about the future, and I am at fault for not knowing.  In fact, if ever I suspected someone of holding political beliefs contradictory or hostile to my own, I worked hard to avoid engaging them on controversial topics. 

My neighbor, for example, almost certainly didn’t vote for Hillary, and suggested, to my hearing, as she puttered about her flower beds, that she has hope for the coming administration, with a smattering of relief at the expiration of the current one.  I can’t say for certain, however, because I didn’t probe any further than my tender nerves would tolerate.  I mumbled and grumbled something depressive, and shambled off behind my dogs to whom politics have little relevance.  No wonder we envy the dog’s life. 

I don’t trust myself, frankly, to interact cordially, should the conversation turn to politics and the current condition of our society and our world.  I am too quick to judge, too quick to repudiate and ridicule.  I don’t trust myself to maintain calm in the face of what seems to me so obvious, and, what’s more, supported by empirical data (sometimes known as “facts”).  I so admire media personalities such as Ira Glass of This American Life: in an episode entitled “Seriously?” he interviews his uncle Lenny, who believes wholeheartedly in a variety of conspiracy myths that have been repeatedly debunked (“fact-checked,” a process that Rush Limbaugh says is “designed … to fool you.”).  In the course of his conversation with Uncle Lenny, Ira manages to stay cordial, to offer alternative viewpoints supported by documentation and evidence, all summarily dismissed.  Honestly, I wouldn’t know how to proceed if faced with that kind of entrenched myopia. 

I admit to my own myopia.  I trust in the facts that support my beliefs, and I’m reluctant and even resistant when confronted by contradictory evidence.  I need to get over that, to learn to listen to the other side, but even more, to learn how to respond constructively to arguments that seem misinformed, misguided, or even dangerous.

Kristof advises that I “follow smart people … with whom I disagree.”  That’s a start, I guess.  But it doesn’t help, really, with the engagement required.  “Follow”: social media has changed the word itself.   To follow someone once meant to swear fealty to, to be guided by; now, it implies a kind of electronic voyeurism.  Sure, social media, in most cases, allow for “comments,” but do posted comments amount to conversation?   Even eavesdropping, Kristof suggests, may be a good place to start, since “[d]iversity is a wonderful thing.”  But if we all just stay firm on our diverse positions, how is diversity wonderful?  Can we grow, can we alter our views, can we become more understanding, more tolerant, more cooperative, and more constructive just by listening?  I’m not sure.

But I accept Kristof’s challenge, and I believe I may have found someone to help me start my own transformative process.  Both The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine recently ran pieces that might make it possible for me to learn more about Glenn Beck. 

Previously, I have only known Beck from the reports of the “liberal media,” my own echo chambers, that have portrayed him for years as a frothing madman spouting accusations about any number of hideous conspiracies, including several derived from Barack Obama’s “deep-seated hatred for white people.” 

That was the old Beck, he insists: “I did a lot of freaking out about Barack Obama.”  But he claims to have recently undergone a transformation, effected primarily by Michele Obama’s New Hampshire speech: “Obama made me a better man.”

He regrets calling the President a racist and counts himself a Black Lives Matter supporter. “There are things unique to the African-American experience that I cannot relate to,” he said. “I had to listen to them.”

“Please be better than I was,” Beck says to the liberal audience of the Times.  “What we need now is for reasonable people to sit down with each other and say: O.K., your guy wasn’t the end of the world. My guy wasn’t the end of the world. How can we talk to each other?”

I no longer have the luxury of being able to dismiss the gesture.  It is no longer an option to refuse Beck’s offer to talk.  I will subscribe to his email newsletter, I may even listen to his radio show, and I will try to keep an open mind.  I only hope that I am a good enough person to follow through.

“Clean Coal,” Mitigation, and the Fate of the Earth

      Some disclaimers: I am not a scientist, but I have devoted many of my personal resources and much of my professional life to environmental education, conservation, and the new portfolio of endeavors heaped together as “sustainability” initiatives. 

A selection of my beliefs: I believe the natural world, meaning the interconnected web of life and the geophysical and biological systems that support that web, is changing in ways that certainly spell the end of life as humans have known it during our brief evolutionary moment, and may in fact spell the end of humanity’s role as assigned, at least in the Western canon, by the God of the ancient Hebrews, with “dominion … over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”

I cannot understand how people, who by general and tolerant standards must otherwise be considered “intelligent,” can deny that the climate is changing, or that the preponderance of sophisticated analysis of rigorously collected data establishes, beyond a reasonable doubt, that anthropogenic factors are primarily to blame for the acceleration of that change.

Imagine my horror, then, to find myself agreeing wholeheartedly with none other than Rupert Murdoch, a significantly influential climate science denier, who is on record pronouncing in the tweetosphere, “If the sea level rises 6 inches . . . we can’t mitigate that, we can’t stop it. We’ve just got to stop building vast houses on seashores.”

He is right: we can’t stop sea level rise, if it’s going to happen – and of course it has already happened, measurably.  He’s probably right, too, that we can’t significantly mitigate sea level rise, beyond some minor defenses.  And he is certainly right that we’ve just got to stop building vast houses on seashores – unless, of course, we don’t care how long they last, how much money and effort we put into protecting them, and how much havoc such efforts wreak on the ecosystems surrounding those houses. 

It would be a heavy lift to carry Mr. Murdoch as a champion of coastal conservation and resilience science, an effort my colleagues and associates in the environmental protection movement would be horrified to be asked to consider. 

The sad truth is, however, that Mr. Murdoch’s quotation hints at the end-game strategy humans will soon have to embrace, like it or not. 

I repeat, I am not a scientist, and I make no claim to being comparatively well read in the literature of climate studies.  Perhaps I am just a pessimist.  I cannot shake the conviction, nonetheless, that we have already crossed the threshold, what Columbia Earth Institute professor James Hansen calls the “tipping point,” the point at which “forcings” affect the Earth’s systems enough to bring on a “cascade effect,” the fall of environmental dominoes the recovery from which, “in a timescale meaningful to humanity,” is highly unlikely.

How the cascade effect unfolds is still a matter of scientific debate.  But for human beings, the precise mechanisms and microcosmic effects hardly matter: as a species, we will probably not survive long enough to observe those mechanisms or to measure those effects.

Certainly not if we continue to tolerate the political nonsense and industrial wrongheadedness that wants us to believe that “mitigation” can reverse the trends set in motion by the last several centuries of human activity. 

If we hope to survive, indeed, if we can learn to be compassionate enough to hope for the survival of planetary ecosystems familiar and beloved to us now, nurturing every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, we cannot put our faith in merely mitigating.  Mitigating, according to current thinking, means planting trees so that we can burn coal, which can never be “clean,” no matter how often certain presidential candidates say it can.  Mitigation means patting ourselves on the back for reducing CO₂ emissions by shifting from our dependence on oil to a dependence on natural gas, resulting in the coincidental release of vast volumes of methane with a global warming potential 30 times that of CO₂.  Mitigation means driving (more) in hybrid and electric vehicles, the batteries for which require lithium, nickel, cobalt, and aluminum mined and extracted with significant collateral damage, and which are charged with electricity produced by burning coal, oil, and natural gas. 

Mitigation is a red herring, a feel-good diversion from the reality we must face.  Just as we have forced change upon the earth, the resulting cascade effect will force us to change, in a desperate attempt to adapt to the harsh realities of the world we have helped to create.  Rupert Murdoch has got it right: we will have to stop building on the seashores; we will also have to stop driving, one passenger per vehicle, and use our feet, our bicycles, and when necessary, our trains and buses, if they exist.  We will have to stop flying all over the world for business and pleasure, and instead pursue our business and find our pleasure closer to home.  We will have to stop expecting that Times Square will be lit brighter than day through the dark of the night, that our indoor spaces will be t-shirt warm in the depths of winter or sweatshirt cool in the dog days of summer, that our food will arrive by truck at our door in pre-portioned packages. 

We can make these changes now, and hope the systems of the Earth settle into a balance that can sustain some version of a life we may recognize.  Difficult, to say the least, but maybe worth the effort.  Sadly, we may have missed that chance, stumbling blindly along the mitigation path toward human doom, dragging myriad other forms of life with us. 

Time will tell.  In the meantime, as the dominoes fall, I suppose we should try to enjoy the entertainment of watching politicians quibble over policies that have little to do with the reality facing us all.

© Samuel G. Huber, October 10, 2016

Cannibalism in the United States

November 28, 2016

Election season is not over yet, though the election has passed.  Our national nightmare continues.  (Do we even have a word for horrific visions that haunt our waking hours?)

Jill Stein (who?), one of two alternative presidential candidates, has decided to call for a recount of the popular vote in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan.  These were identified as the "battleground states" in the presidential contest, the states that would determine the outcome of the election.  Some were surprised that voters embraced Donald Trump.  Margins were narrow enough, perhaps, to justify the expense of bureaucratic cost and emotional energy required to undertake such efforts.  No one, I think, expects that the results will shift the ultimate decision.  

My concern is not with the recount itself, even less with the principles of democracy behind such an initiative, nor with the real or imagined consequences of the result.  My concern is with the irritation and inflammation of the wounds opened by the campaign, wounds that continued strife cannot hope to heal.  Trump has fired up his Twitter feed in response.  It is hard to share in the shock or surprise that greets his latest outburst.  Twitter was invented for the likes of Donald Trump, and has become the medium of choice for those who have aligned with him, who feel (or have felt, until now) excluded from deliberations that occur within the corridors of power in these Divided States of America. 

Like many, I have been thinking all too much about conspiracy theories, paranoia, and the politics of fear and hate.  Over the past two centuries of our country's history, forever since the Old World powers of England, France, and Spain became fed up with New World graspiness, our national pathology seems to have suffered from periodic bouts of internal cannibalism, where we turn upon each other in some frenzy of self-hatred and suspicion.  The roots in fact stretch as deep as European settlement on the continent, the famous Salem witch hunts first establishing the genetic mutation of this self-immolation masquerading as moral patriotism.  Others have already drawn parallels to Jacksonian populism, to the national hysterias set off by Joe McCarthy and George Wallace, to the lesser cancers fed by David Duke.  And now we are in the clutches of the most terrifying of cannibal kings, Steve Bannon.  

As a country, we have long behaved as a republic of haters: our hatred of England gave us our national identity; we wrapped Spain and France up in that hatred for a half century following the Revolution, all the while nursing an inwardly focused hatred of slaves and Native Americans.  We have proved the concept in our malevolence toward each successive wave of immigrants: Bohemians, Italians, Irish, Chinese, Japanese, Jews; for years, we devoted untold resources to targeting Communists, and now, of course, the dreaded "Muslim."  Apparently we find enemies everywhere, and we are possessed by the idea that they wash ashore in droves.  Traditionally, our animosity has been trained on identities, be they national, racial, or religious, but we also have succumbed to hatred of the rich as well as the poor, of our institutions -- Academia, Wall Street, the Corporation, the CIA, Washington -- and of the people associated with those institutions, including labor unions, teachers' unions, CEOs, "hedge-fund guys," politicians.  We are, in fact, equal opportunity haters. 

This mutation has evolved to reveal a powerful susceptibility to conspiracy theory, the idea perhaps most famously captured in McCarthy's tagline, "There's a Red under every bed."  Whoever the current focus of our paranoia, we condemn them all for plotting to deprive "us" (whoever "us" is) of "our" America.  And such suspicion, of course, drives the delusion that our recent national election was somehow "rigged," that the call for a recount is evidence of both collusion and fraud, or perhaps that some nefarious network of cyber-criminals, once thought to be Russian, must be at work.  In any case, we cannot trust anyone.  Everyone is suspect.  As Walt Kelly's Pogo proclaimed some time past, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."  

The nightmare from which we cannot awaken is this notion so starkly revealed by the outcome of the election, whatever it may be, that we do not know ourselves, do not understand each other, and, frankly, don't trust each other.  As we talk in conciliatory post-election talk of dissolving the shells of our Balkanized bubbles, we must acknowledge, too, the underlying disease from which we may be hoping to recover.  Our greatest risk factor, as hard as it is to admit, is our predisposition to hate.  We may reach out, we may find connection, we may even work together toward common good. But lingering doubt continues, it seems, to fuel smoldering suspicion, a volatile mixture that at this moment in our national history has burst once again into the flames of hatred.

And the conspiracy theorist in me pauses to ask, who benefits from all this hatred?  What does Steve Bannon want?

Is tolerance dead?

November 9th.

At approximately 2:55 am, abc news announced that Hillary Clinton had telephoned Donald Trump to concede the presidential election.  She has lost, to his campaign fueled by bigotry, hatred, and anger.  Middle-aged, middle-class white men between the ages of 18 and 54 have found new strength for their convictions, their belief that they have been cheated, that whiteness itself is under siege.  Now they will fight back, with the White House and both houses of Congress likely to take up an agenda that will advance their cause at the expense of civil discourse and compassion, eviscerating many of the tools of democracy that human society has fitfully assembled over the millennia.

Soon enough, we will see a supreme court justice confirmed, someone who passes whatever litmus tests this agenda will devise.  At risk, civil rights generally, but particularly Roe v. Wade, marriage equality, and voting rights.  There will be no possibility of gun control.  Citizens United will remain in place.  The effects will be felt throughout the regulatory environment, not least including environmental laws seen as unfavorable to industry, banking laws, trade restrictions -- the list goes on and on.

Chris Christie is likely to end up as, or at least be proposed for, Attorney General, a position that could give a relentless bully a very big stick and a free pass.  Rudy Giuliani, a man who has spent the last year demonstrating how truly unhinged he has become, will assume some position of authority in a Trump administration.  With this team in place, law and order will move to a very different place, beginning, it must be admitted, from a very low point of departure.

The immigrant community in the United States must be in terror.  I can't even begin to imagine what happens now that this fury has been legitimized.

The Affordable Care Act is perhaps as good as dead.  Its demise will once again put tens of millions of people at risk, exposing them not only to myriad health risks but also to the risk of financial ruin should they be faced with catastrophic illness or accident.

Ironically, the rich will get richer.  Tax codes will be re-written to favor established wealth even more advantageously, thereby decimating public budgets, including so-called "entitlement programs" such as Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, housing subsidies, aid to education and school lunch programs, not to mention Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.  Funding for public transit will disappear.

There is more.  I am no expert.  How all this unfolds remains to be seen.

For now, for today, I walk around the streets (of Atlanta, which is part of the problem, since I'm not familiar enough with this part of the world) not knowing the people around me.  I have lived a privileged and protected life, and I have naively refused to admit how alien my personal philosophies are from those of half of US citizens.  (I find myself resisting the use of "Americans."  Citizens of other countries on the continent should object to the appropriation of a regional label and ascribing to it values and behaviors in which they play no part.)  In my lifetime, the workings of the United State's democratic system have shielded the center from the extremes.  Today, that fragile shield has fallen.  The coming era could make past periods of suspicion and retaliation seem mild by comparison.

My more measured and thoughtful friends do not see the stark picture that I see, a vitriolic, atomized world that vilifies cross-cultural compassion.  But as far as I can tell, right now it's every man -- and I do mean "man" -- for himself.