The idea of the Earth’s Carrying Capacity necessarily involving more than just the amount of food we can produce can lead to some pretty depressing thoughts. I shall ramble about them a trifle.I wish people (at least a majority in democratic countries) would gain the sophisticated insight and breadth of consideration to be able to make decisions favoring sustainability. But I also recognize that most people behave in a short-term and selfish manner (and always have – there’s a surprisingly insightful book about the greed of America’s founding “Freedom Just Around the Corner“).

This idea lies at the heart of many of my current notions about government and its appropriate role: I believe a significant majority of people are kind, earnest, generous and hopeful, fully entitled to life, liberty and their pursuit of happiness. I also believe (like Hamilton, for whom I have a profound affection), that human institutions which govern by consistently supporting the free actions of the majority court peril when such majorities are energized by passion, focused only on self-interest, or bereft of wisdom.

This fear of laissez faire governance and the tyranny of the majority leads me to conclude that deeply disturbing consequences are likely to arise from unbridled free market economies, over-reliance on voluntary self regulation, and the prioritization of election and budget cycle issues over looming existential threats.

How might one legitimize a government though, if not via appeal to the people? Even Jefferson, that patron saint of populism, seems to have been conflicted. At one point, in a letter to William Bently (1815) he said,

“A more rational government [is] one in which the will of the people should have… a moderating and salutary influence.”

Yet at another time, he commented in The Anas (1792),

“Every people may establish what form of government they please, and change it as they please, the will of the nation being the only thing essential.”

How might the tyranny of the majority be balanced with the need for sagacious guidance of benevolent and informed selflessness? I suspect that the Bill of Rights shows the way: By virtue of enshrining protections to all, even against the majority, government might put a stopgap on persecution. These laws are essential paternalistic, telling society (and government) what it must do for its own good – regardless of majority sentiment. Even then, a vast majority, via a constitutional amendment, may negate such paternalistic laws.

The conundrum then becomes: How to safeguard paternalistic laws from widespread (supermajority) dissent? To use a colloquialism, “The proof is in the pudding.” Perhaps only by virtue of seeing the benefits to society (and one’s self) of the application of such laws, might the dissent be safely abrogated. For surely (to paraphrase Franklin), only principles of governance which demonstrably effect positive long term security without sacrificing essential liberties will garner the continued support of the people.

I remain deeply convinced of the efficacy of the free market coupled with Keynesian guidance. Only a free market has the potential to give rise to the innovations and distributions which raise the quality of life for all. To apply Adam Smith’s analogy to a Keynesian principle, government does well by the governed when it guides the invisible hand. Both the hand and the guidance are completely essential to prosperity, innovation and self-actualization.

I go further though, with a contention that the unbridled actions of The Hand, even if guided, can be a perilous fist. If you’ll allow me a poetic anthropomorphism, the Earth cares not a whit about economics.

Oil, frogs, bacteria, forests, sunlight, water, sulfuric acid, methane hydrates, fields of sorghum, meerkats, jetstreams, hydroelectric damns, Snicker(tm) bars and baseball caps – and everything else comprising the natural and constructed world have no inherent ability to predict the future or make strategic plans. Entities of the world simply “are”, and, if endowed with a brain, possess only the most basic desire for immediate satisfaction. Only humans are a possible exception. Everything else just “is”, in a tautological way that presupposes nothing but existence. If the methane locked in hydrates on the ocean floors boil off into the atmosphere and kill all oxygen-breathing creatures, it is not a moral event but a scientific and natural one. Life will continue and explosively evolve, the Sun will keep shining, galaxies will still whir in the heavens and other worlds will still be born and die. But we won’t be here to revel in the rapture of comprehension of the stars in their courses.

Only humans can imbue processes with a moral dimension and act to change the world on a global scale. If our actions lead us near a precipice, only we can stop our suicide. The Earth and its denizens won’t care. The Invisible Hand is similarly dispassionate – it seeks to level marketplaces and fulfill both essential needs and capricious whims. The problem is that the Hand has no context, morality or concern – it “knows” nothing about ecological destruction, the mathematical certainty of personal/corporate/national income inequality rising over time, of limits to production and distribution due to energy constraints. The Hand will try to level the marketplace even in the event of catastrophe, by ensuring only the few with tremendous accrued wealth can afford the prices of incredibly rare goods obtained from vanishing species, dwindling resources and paltry non-renewable energy. Eventually, even their dollars, diamonds and euros will not be fungible for food calories and the market will be anything but free.

When we talk of cross-scale governance and complexity in this class, I cannot help but consider that context is king. For a system to be appreciated as being cross-scale and as having wide-ranging impacts outside of the artificial demarcations we believe or expect it to have, it is not the system itself that grows more complex, it is only our own purview – the perceived context. Humanity’s purview is now being expanded to the point where we see that the Hand does not exist in a completely free context of: supply, demand, goods, services, technological innovation, labor, opportunity costs, utility and prices. Contextual factors such as dense and transportable energy, interwoven cycles of renewable resource and fixed-resource abundance must now be viewed with an eye toward finite supply, profound fragility and depleted reserves. Optimism that the unfettered market and high technology will solve all woes is a point of view available only to those with myopic and outdated contextual purview. Technology cannot make anything for several billion people without applying vast energy (in the physics sense, not the psychic friends sense) to vast resources. Yet our world, as Carl Sagan said, is but a “pale blue dot” – beset by inherent limitations to both which we are only now beginning to appreciate.

Whence then might we seek optimism? I offer the following: The Invisible Hand should not only be guided, but shackled in a velvet cuff bound to an elastic cord. Elastic allows complete freedom of movement until a certain limit is reached – at which point continued progress meets with proportionally powerful resistance. The binding is not abrupt and absolute, but gradually more insistent as the boundary is crossed. Free markets will never of their own machinations artificially shackle themselves, just as they do not inherently give rise to Keynesian guidance. The only other way the Hand will be constrained is if it smashes painfully against an absolute barrier, built not by governance, but by Nature. One of these haltings must occur, should we not chose the one more consistent with continued civilization?

Circling back to the original theme; what balance between paternalistic governance and populism will ensure sustainability and human survival? Paraphrasing Franklin again: It is that governance which provides essential freedoms while limiting absolute liberties. Freedom is the wellspring of life, liberty, prosperity and the pursuit of happiness. But taking our liberty of the Earth and one another with selfish abandon will doom all of us. The new context of our World will leave us free only to scrape for food and grieve for remembered glories.

I have some specific ideas about the construction of the elastically-bound Hand, but your time is valuable and if you’ve read this far, I thank you for indulging my musings.

Wednesday, January 31st, 2007 @ 10:34 am Towards a New Liberalism
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