Faltering Humanity

Bill McKibben has been a warrior in the arena of climate change for many years. One of the co-founders and leaders of the climate group 350.org, he has researched, written, demonstrated, gone to jail numerous times and helped sue the government for failing to act to stop the rise in carbon emissions in our atmosphere. His books, beginning with The End of Nature, have been bestsellers over many years and galvanized millions around the world to protest the inaction of governments regarding the existential threat of global warming. Now he has a new book, Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? and the theme is similar. But this time, McKibben takes aim at bigger game.

            This is not to say that Falter neglects to warn about the threat of climate change. He devotes several chapters not only to the dangers accelerating from the rising levels of carbon in our atmosphere (now at over 414 ppm, well above the 350 ppm that 350.org proclaimed to be the upper limit of sustainability), but also to the vicious and deliberately deceptive campaigns long mounted by the fossil fuel industry. For example, he cites this infuriating instance when, in 1977, one of Exxon’s senior scientists, James F. Black, addressed the company’s top leaders: 

“There is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels.” McKibben then comments: That is to say, ten years before James Hansen’s Senate testimony made climate change a public issue, Exxon, the world’s largest oil company and, indeed, in those days, the world’s largest company period, understood that its product was going to wreck the planet (72). 

For another example, this one new to me, McKibben documents one of the oft-overlooked side effects of excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere—that the basic foods we now grow are losing their nutritional value. Citing a paper in the journal Environmental Research, McKibben points to the conclusions that rising carbon dioxides levels, by speeding plant growth, are reducing the amount of protein and other key nutrients in basic food crops: 

When researchers grow grain at the carbon dioxide levels we expect for later this century, they find that minerals such as calcium and iron drop by 8 percent, and protein by the same amount…In 2018, rice researchers found “significantly less protein” when they grew eighteen varieties of rice in high-carbon dioxide test plots (38).  

As one researcher of the study put it, “We are completely altering the biophysical conditions that underpin our food system” (39). Indeed we are, and not only for our food. The protein content of pollen from goldenrod, a plant we call a weed but one needed by bees (whom we need for our domestic crops as well) “has declined by a third since the industrial revolution” (39), e.g. when the carbon dioxide increase really took off.  

            As to the campaign by fossil fuel companies and their cronies in the political establishment to deny outright or confuse the public over the reality and threat presented by climate change, McKibben sums it up in one paragraph:

So: global warming is the ultimate problem for oil companies because oil causes it, and it’s the ultimate problem for government haters because without government intervention, you can’t solve it. Those twin existential threats, to cash and to worldview, meant that there was never any shortage of resources for the task of denying climate change (121).

In other words, the money accumulated by oil companies and which they see at risk, married to  the hatred of politicians, especially Republicans, for truly significant government intervention, have formed  an almost impregnable wall against the information and government action that’s needed to stop global warming from truly wrecking our planet for human habitation. 

            All this might be predictable in a new book by McKibben. What is not so predictable is the emphasis he devotes to the alarming effects of new technology—both as a solution to the dangers of global warming, and as a distraction from the painful realities it presents. He cites some alarming statistics (alarming at least to me) about, for instance, the habitual use of cell phones:

The average person now touches, swipes, or taps his phone 2,617 times a day. Eighty-seven percent of people with smartphones wake up and go to sleep with them (176).

But he doesn’t stop with just these frightening stats. McKibbben cites a recent article in the Journal of Physical Therapy and Science that found “significant differences in the craniovertebral angle, scapular index, and peak expiratory flow depending on duration of smartphone usage” (177). McKibben comments: 

That is, having taken a few million years to stand up straight, we are hunched once more—text neck, iPosture…We spend roughly ten hours a day looking at a screen and roughly seventeen minutes a day exercising (ibid). 

McKibben, like others, is clearly disturbed by this dependence on our devices. Or rather, on our growing lack of distinction between machines and humans. As he notes with a pungent quip, but one meant to be taken very seriously: “a man with a phone more or less permanently affixed to his palm is partway a robot already” (ibid; emphasis added).

            Mckibben is also clearly alarmed by the growing power and influence of the anti-human ethic presented by Silicon Valley engineers and billionaires. This includes the not identical but closely related biotech industries. Given the rapid advances in CRISPR technology, for example, biotech scientists are drawing ever closer to the ability to modify the human genome before babies are born (McKibben cites the example of the now-disgraced Chinese bioengineer, He Jiankui, who has actually done this). Thus, the real possibility exists that parents can have their babies designed to be more intelligent, or healthier, or taller, or more agile. McKibben relates this danger to the related danger of climate change: “As climate change has shrunk the effective size of our planet, the creation of designer babies shrinks the effective range of our souls” (172).  And of course, the additional danger is that those who can obtain pre-designed babies will be those who can afford it—thus magnifying the already critical problem of wealth inequality by giving the progeny of the wealthy even greater advantages.  

            For McKibben, though, it is the moral stance of the technologists that presents the greatest risk. One of his prime examples is the renowned computer nerd, Ray Kurzweil, the “director of engineering” at Google. Kurzweil, interviewed by McKibben, compares the coming linkage of our brains with computers to the development of the neocortex two million years  ago—“the enabling factor to invent language, art, music, tools, technology, science” (113). Then he notes how humans can advance even more without having to grow the bigger brains that would make our skulls unviable: 

“My thesis is we’re going to do it again, by the 2030s. We’ll have a synthetic neocortex in the cloud. We’ll connect our brains to the cloud just the way your smartphone is connected now. We’ll become funnier and smarter and able to more effectively express ourselves. We’ll create forms of expression we can’t imagine today, just as other primates can’t really understand music” (135).

Apparently, Kurzweil’s boss, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, thinks the same way: “You should presume that someday we will be able to make machines that can reason, think, and do things better than we can” (ibid). Given computers’ recent success at beating humans at chess and the even more complicated game of Go, and the advances in language learning, and driving by computers, not to mention robotic simulation, there seems little reason to doubt these forecasts. 

            For McKibben in this book, though, the critical question is not “can we?” but “should we?” And that is where the moral heart of this book lies. McKibben gives us some instances of the kind of technological initiatives that are already under way. Jeff Bezos, for example, the world’s richest man as CEO of Amazon, has already invested in the hunt for extending life, possibly indefinitely. He is said to have “diverted some of his cash” to San the Francisco-based startup, United Biotechnology, which is said to be “hard at work on a ‘cure for aging’” (184). Then there is a company called Alcor, which “currently has 147 human beings on ice, each of whom paid $200,000 to preserve their whole bodies.” Alcor also offers a cheaper, or ‘neuro’ option, costing only $80,0000, which involves sawing off the individual’s head and preserving only that relevant (to the brainiacs in Silicon Valley) part (184). This appears to be the macabre direction in which the “best and brightest” are headed—preserving themselves and their precious embodied existence, if possible forever. And if that involves becoming more and more robotic, that’s perfectly fine with them. The life of the individual human is, after all, to them the most precious commodity of all.

            And it is here that McKibben cries halt. His cri de coeur is worth citing at length. 

…it’s that incredible self-absorption that should be the clue to what a bad idea all this really is. I’ve taken the time to lay out the various advances we may be capable of if we fully embrace the newest technologies—we can “improve” our children; we may be able to live without work (or we may have to); we may be able, in some sense, to live forever—but none of that is living, not in the human sense (187).

            So what, exactly, does McKibben think is ‘living in the human sense’? He gives us another one of his little aphorisms:

            Those who exalt humans too highly devalue humanity (188).

Not a bad way to put it. Here is what he means. The technologists, he grants them, value individual humans—which is, after all, the core of our western heritage. But, he insists, they actually place too much value on individuals: “no one can be allowed to die; we must collect their heads in a giant thermos.” The result of this hyper-valuation of the individual is that “they value humanness far too little.” Humanness. Humanity. The full spectrum of humanity, which involves, whether we like it or not, sickness, aging and death, which must come to us all. The knowledge of which end is what makes us humans. The ancient Greeks knew this too, the centrality of this knowledge of death, and had a felicitous way of putting it. Animals, they said, don’t know they are going to die, and so are less than human. Gods, they said, don’t die at all, and so are deprived of the aching sense of their mortality that humans have. Only humans, said the Greeks, know they are going to die, and that very knowledge amounts to both a sadness, and a glory, for it gives our life its human savor. 

            McKibben puts it in a similar but slightly different form. 

A world without death is a world without time, and that in turn is a world without meaning, at least human meaning. Go far enough down this path and the game is up (188).

That is it exactly. Give humans a world without death, give them indefinite life extension, albeit robotized or preserved in a giant thermos, and life no longer has meaning. And humans without meaning, as we’re already seeing, will never be able to organize sufficiently to save humanity. If only individuals matter, then the game, the human game—which has always involved, preeminently, humans working together, for each other, even or especially in the face of death—is lost. So says Bill McKibben. And I think he’s right, not just about global warming and the existential threat it presents, but about our future at the human game itself. One can only hope that enough humans believe him—in time. 

Lawrence DiStasi

Big Men

The multiplying sex harassment scandals directed at leaders in all areas of American and world business force one to question the ugly dynamics at work in countless workplaces and in modern capitalism in general. It almost appears that sexual favors with underlings have become one of the perks of American business, especially given the growing wealth-and-power disparity between corporate heads and average workers. The more dependent workers are on the favors of bosses, the more likely it seems that workers, especially females, will have to come across with favors of their own. This dynamic hits one hard with the reading of Ronan Farrow’s gripping narrative about the Harvey Weinstein scandal, Catch and Kill, and the viewing of the award-winning documentary, American Factory. Both deal with “big men,” the one with Weinstein and the higher-ups at NBC, the other with the Chinese “Chairman” (Cao Dewang) of the new factory in Dayton, Ohio, Fuyao American Glass. 

            Of course, powerful men have nearly always displayed an appetite for taking advantage of whatever attractive women come within their field of influence. One has only to think of JFK and Marilyn, or Clinton and Monica, or even FDR and his longtime secretary, “Missy” LeHand. The similar scandals that have rocked congressmen in recent years could fill a small volume. And the mind-bending and costly accounts of Roman Catholic priests abusing young boys, and rich and famous TV ministers indulging in similar perversions, form yet another area where men in power extract ‘benefits’ from powerless underlings.

But what I would like to focus on here are the ‘big men’ and what they think they can get away with. That includes prominently, of course, our dear *president, who famously set out the parameters of what ‘big men’ think, and think they can do:  

“I don't even wait. And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. ... Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”

This seems to have been the attitude of Harvey Weinstein, the head of some of the largest and most successful production companies in Hollywood (Miramax and The Weinstein Company). Now, the perks of the ‘casting couch’ have long been proverbial in tinsel town. But Weinstein’s bull-like predations appear to have taken things to a new level. 

Let’s take just one case Farrow relates, that of actress Rose McGowan. She had grown up hard and poor, but sometime in the late 1990s, with her first directorial debut, thought her life was “finally getting easier.” Then McGowan’s manager set up a meeting with Harvey Weinstein, her boss, first at a restaurant, then switched to a hotel suite (this last-minute switching seemed to be a common pattern for Weinstein). He began by praising her performances in two films. But, as she relayed to Ronan Farrow on videotape,

“On the way out, it turned into not a meeting…It all happens very fast and very slow. I think any survivor can tell you that…all of a sudden, your life is like ninety degrees in the other direction. It’s—it’s a shock to the system. And your brain is trying to keep up with what’s going on…I started to cry. And I didn’t know what was happening…And I’m very small. This person is very big. So do the math.”

            “Was this a sexual assault?” I asked.

            “Yes,” she said simply.

“Was this a rape?” 

“Yes.”  (p. 61, Catch and Kill)

After much anguish, and on the advice of her attorney (she’d done a sex scene in a movie that would be compromising in court), McGowan decided not to press charges, and her attorney then brokered a large financial settlement with a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). But non-disclosure was only the beginning. McGowan was then blacklisted and shunned by other industry power brokers, who she says were all complicit in her ostracism. “I barely worked in movies ever again” (62). And the first time she saw Weinstein again after the rape, she threw up in a trash can (63). 

            Ronan Farrow got as many as thirteen more women to recount their experiences on camera. And with one of them in particular, Ambra Battilana Gutierrez, a Filipina-Italian model, he managed to obtain a tape in which Weinstein is heard not only trying to get her into his room, but basically admitting to sexually assaulting her and many others. That is, when she asked him why he had groped her breasts the day before, Weinstein said to her: 

“Oh, please, I’m sorry, just come on in. I’m used to that. Come on. Please.”

“You’re used to that?”

“Yes,” Weinstein said. He added, “I won’t do it again.” (89).

With this “I’m used to that” evidence, Farrow now believed he had a bullet-proof story and went to his bosses at NBC for approval and an air date. And here is where the proverbial ‘old-boys network’ kicked into high gear. Farrow had learned, both directly and indirectly, that Weinstein and his cronies had learned of his reporting and were pulling out all the stops to shut him down. This included having him tailed by what turned out to be two Ukrainians, and the machinations of an Israeli organization called Black Cube, made up of former Mossad spies and Israeli special forces. So alarming was this latter development that friends told Farrow to get a gun. This turned out to be not needed, but it attests to how serious were these attempts to kill the story (the title, Catch and Kill, by the way, is taken from a process employed by the National Enquirer of paying women, like Karen McDougal, for her story about her affair with Donald Trump, and then ‘killing’ it, e.g. never publishing it.) Still, at this point, Farrow was sure his own network would not turn down such a timely and sensational story. He was wrong. Apparently, Weinstein’s reach extended to the heads of both NBC and its parent company, Comcast. Suddenly, Farrow was being told to stop all interviews and all reporting on the case. His immediate boss, Noah Oppenheim, after letting Farrow know that NBC would probably not air the story ever, even suggested that perhaps he could get the story into some print medium—far less prestigious, in his eyes, than TV.

            Ronan Farrow eventually did get his story run by The New Yorker, and its impact turned out to be shattering. He also found out about some of the depradations of higher-ups at NBC, including Matt Lauer, all of whom are eventually outed. But these revelations are really only part of the larger story. That story is that sexual abuse is ubiquitous at the upper echelons of American business, and that the tentacles of the enabling and then the covering it up extend very far indeed (Weinstein is also one of the major donors to the Democratic Party). And that, in turn, is because the money and the power at the top flow so liberally and are used with such abandon that they usually succeed in keeping the dirty secrets from coming out.  

            Usually. But not this time. Thanks to Ronan Farrow, and David Remnick at The New Yorker, the piece that Farrow had assembled ran there on October 17, 2017 and blew the elaborate cover machinery out of the water. And the reader of Catch and Kill is finally satisfied that not only the serial rapist that is Harvey Weinstein faced his accusers and justice (he is currently on trial), but that the enablers at NBC were outed as well. Including the star Today show host, Matt Lauer. 

            American Factory reveals a related but different story. There, the ‘big man’ seems incidental to the main narrative, which is to expose the problems in American factory closings of recent years (the plant that Fusao takes over was a General Motors plant that went belly up in 2008, costing thousands of Dayton workers their jobs), and the need for American companies and workers to compete with cheap labor in China and elsewhere. The Chinese bosses show their contempt for ‘soft’ Americans who require coffee breaks, lunch hours, and weekends off. American workers, in turn, complain about the low pay (one worker notes that he was paid $29/hour at GM, and $14/hour for a similar job at Fusao.) The Chairman expresses doubt that the Americans will ever be able to keep up with Chinese worker zeal and willingness to sacrifice for the good of the company. So to help “train” the Americans in good worker practice, he sends a delegation of workers to China to see how things are done. This becomes an eye-opening journey for both the workers and the film’s audience. 

            We see constant reinforcement of the idea that Chairman Cao has become a god-like figure, at least according to the songs and dances and constant adulation that is heaped upon him. Children dance and sing and hop about with great joy and precision, and adult dancers sing “happy happy” with abandon. All is done to express the great happiness that is brought to the underlings by the Chairman. His beneficence knows no bounds (even though what really happens is that both men and women leave their families in the countryside for years for the ‘opportunity’ to work at Fusao in the city). In this ‘brave new world’ in China, it seems the required posture is smiley dancing workers, unable to contain their joy about having been allowed to work themselves to death eighteen hours a day, including weekends. And hovering over it all, smiling benignly (one knows there is an iron fist beneath the grin, for it comes out when raking over the lazy Americans, and excoriating their temerity in calling for a union), is the great Chairman, strolling proudly through his factories, decked out in celebratory ribbons and oozing the fat satisfaction of the global billionaire. 

            In short, Cao Dewang, the great Chairman, is another of the world’s ‘big men.’ And he reveals that, like his American counterparts, he will brook no refusal on the part of workers to sacrifice all for his enterprise. When the workers try to lobby for the ‘right’ to have a union, he calls in a major union-busting firm to spread as much disinformation as it takes to crush it. And crush it he does: the workers vote against allowing union representation, i.e against their own self-interest. Then, of course, he fires those who have been the main proponents of the union, including one female forklift driver, who has just managed to get herself a real apartment (she had been living in her sister’s basement). She is the most charismatic figure in the film, but she suffers for her courage in trying to better the lot of herself and her fellow workers. In the global marketplace as it now exists, unions are characterized as halting progress—e.g. manufacturing that can compete with the poorest laborers on the planet.  And they therefore must dance and sing their gratitude to the ‘big men’ who allow them the opportunity to live, if only barely. Anyone who objects, who tries to speak up and organize for better conditions, is, one way or the other, quickly dispensed with. 

            We in America have grown used to the idea that somehow the little guy always gets a chance, that the equality and fairness and justice of the overall system wins out over greed and cruelty and power in the end. But the story of ‘big men’ and what they see as their divine right to do whatever they choose and be revered for it, should provide a counter-narrative to this nice story. Vigilance is required; vigilance and organization and courage are always required to keep the bigs in check. For when they are not, the outcome is always rape, in one form or another. 

Lawrence DiStasi