Monday, December 21, 2020

Angels Singing?

Has anyone ever heard angels actually singing? To judge by the Christmas carols we sing routinely, one would have to say ‘yes.’ Here are just a few carols that mention angels singing:

Adeste Fidelis (2nd verse: Sing, choirs of angels…)

It Came upon a Midnight Clear (that glorious song of old, of Angels bending near the earth, to touch their harps of gold…)

O Holy Night (fall on your knees, O hear the angels’ voices..)

Hark the Herald Angels Sing (Hark the herald angels sing, glory to the newborn king..)

Joy to the World (And Heaven and Angels sing, And Heaven and Angels sing…)

Angels We Have Heard on High (Angels we have heard on high, Sweetly singing o’er the plains.)

Silent Night (Even this all-time favorite gives us a second verse that goes: Heavenly hosts sing alleluia...)

So what’s going on here? In fact, there’s a rather substantial literature about this phenomenon, or, we might call it, Christmas miracle. Or perhaps we should follow Yuval Harari in his book Sapiens, where he points out that one of the abilities that set Sapiens above all other primates was the ability to invent fictions—such as god, or corporations, or justice—and then get millions to believe in them, and thereby cooperate as if such legal or corporate fictions were real. But either way, how is it that so many millions, perhaps billions of us, believe in and celebrate in song this idea that angels sing? What is angel singing anyway? What does it (or would it) sound like? And where does the notion come from?

Most people point to the Bible as the source for the concept. Passages in the New Testament, such as Luke 2:8-20, where angels announce the birth of Jesus to the shepherds, are prime referents. Then there’s Job 38:7, where the Old Testament says that during Creation, “the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy.” But as Ryan Fraser points out in the Jackson Sun of Mar. 6, 2015 (www.jacksonsun.com), “the text mentions morning stars singing, but not angels.” Fraser goes on to debunk each biblical reference in turn (including Luke 2:820 which reads that the angels were “saying” not “singing”) and reaches his conclusion: even according to the Bible, angels don’t sing, and actually can’t sing; only humans can do that. In contrast to this, however, we see Youtube posts that purport to be recordings of angels really singing. For example, this one below, which even has commentaries by people who cite their ecstatic responses to this heavenly music:

Angels singing Heavenly Music for you - YouTube

www.youtube.com › watch

 

And one of the many responses:

Aw God bless this beautiful music I am not scared because Jesus is with me we.re all going home soon I'm so excited.”

In addition, one can find detailed explanations about the experience a person may have with such angelic sound, and why it’s not what you might expect. For example, Whitney Hopler, who claims to be a “religion expert,” wrote this Twitter post that made its way to the website learnreligions.com:


Your guardian angel may send you a message of sounds you can hear audibly while you're contacting him or her through prayer or meditation…Since angels often transmit information to you through electromagnetic energy, you may hear a ringing sound in one or both of your ears during prayer or meditation with your guardian angel…It’s a high-pitched sound because angelic energy vibrates on a high frequency. The information that angels send is contained in energy that must be slowed down for humans to understand its message…

 

Interesting, and authenticated with scientific-sounding paraphernalia (‘electromagnetic energy’ which ‘vibrates on a high frequency’), though it still doesn’t confirm that angels sing. At least not in a way that we can hear. So perhaps we need to investigate the nature of angels a little further. On a website called christiancourier.com, there is a dialogue between a professor and some students leading to a piece called “Why do Christians believe in Angels?” (part of an overall article, “What Does the Bible Say About the Nature and Role of Angels?”) by Wayne Jackson. There we learn much technical information, such as that the word angel “derives from a Greek term which suggests the idea of sending a message.” Thus, angels would seem to be primarily God’s messengers. We learn further that angels are “created beings,” and, as such, are not immortal, as only God is. The Bible suggests that along with the universe, they were created in that frantic first week of divine creation. Their nature seems to be that of “spirits,” and they are held accountable by God for their actions (some of them actually ‘sin,’ like that rebellious old Lucifer.) Finally, they are very useful beings to God:


… the Lord indicated that at the time of the judgment angels will be used to gather evil persons out of God’s kingdom (Mt. 13:41). It is significant that at the time of Christ’s return, He will be accompanied by “all the angels” (Mt. 25:31).

OK. So now we know what angels are and usually do, but we still don’t know why they’re depicted as singing around Christmas time, nor what they sound like. 

What, then, can we conclude? It seems to me that many Christians—and Muslims and Jews and others—have a felt need to believe in some sort of supernatural beings, whose voices are so pure that they evoke the idea of that place of purity, Heaven, or Valhalla, or whatever your place of eternal peace and innocence might be called. Our language is replete with metaphors of “angelic singing,” most commonly, “she sings like an angel.” And to judge by the sample on Youtube, that would be a soprano accompanied by organ music, perhaps singing in a pristine forest. Or perhaps a boys’ choir would be a closer fit. Clear boy voices would evoke the idea of innocence—before puberty, and all it implies, leads to a big change in the male voice and behavior. The depiction of angels by painters (putti—the winged infant child in Greek and Roman art) would seem to confirm this; all are youthful, and innocent, and apparently pure, fluttering about on gossamer wings. And all this is prior to, we assume, the corruption and decay of earth and earthly life spoil the ideal creation we suppose the Creator meant. Were it not for humans, and those rebellious angels, who spoiled it all. 

This is what, presumably, angels are singing about in all those carols: the Savior has come to redeem the world, e.g., to make its pre-lapsarian purity and innocence possible again. And he does it accompanied by choirs of angels, or via the announcement of messenger angels, who come to bring the good news to, among others, the virgin who will innocently and without the earthly stain of intercourse, give him birth. So they sing, these Christmas angels, even though singing is not in their nature. And we in the millions sing about them, absent-mindedly giving credence to the altogether preposterous existence of angels themselves, and of their ethereal singing. After all, it makes for a nice story. And for the lovely Christmas carols we all love to sing. 

Merry Christmas, everyone, and merry singing. 

 

Lawrence DiStasi 

Wednesday, December 9, 2020

The Social Dilemma

Some of you may recall a John Prine song popular in the 1970s titled, “Blow Up Your TV.” The first two lines are: “Blow up your TV/ Throw away your papers.” 

That song came to mind after I watched the terrific documentary, The Social Dilemma, because essentially the same advice is coming from people like Jaron Lanier, featured in the film. Lanier wrote a book titled: Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, only that Lanier is not a folksinger; he’s a computer scientist who may know more about computer technology than anyone around. And what he, along with many others, is now recommending is this: ‘get rid of your social media apps now; they’re a danger to everything we claim to value.’ 

To be sure, not everyone in this film offers such extreme advice. But they come close. For the ‘social dilemma’ of the title refers to the dilemma we all face with a technology that has brought us major benefits and advances in communication, but whose basic design and workings have brought us and our putative freedom great harm that is growing greater by the minute. And what makes it so persuasive is that the major voices sounding the alarm are almost all veterans of the media giants of Silicon Valley like Facebook, Twitter, Google, Youtube, Pinterest, Instagram, etc. They include Lanier, already mentioned; and Tristan Harris—founder of The Center for Humane Technology, CHT—who was a Design Ethicist at Google; Justin Rosenstein, also a former engineer at Google; Tim Kendall, formerly of Facebook and Pinterest; Aza Raskin, formerly of Firefox and co-founder of CHT; plus a galaxy of experts in related fields like Roger NcNamee, venture capitalist, and Dr. Shoshana Zuboff of Harvard, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, and Dr. Ann Lembke, of Stanford Medical School. This does not exhaust the list, but it gives one an idea of the heft of these critics, and their inside knowledge of what they’re criticizing. And what they’re basically saying is that, while we ‘users’ of computers and smartphones and their social media programs think we’re getting to choose all these neat services free, they are anything but free. To quote Aza Raskin, 

“If you’re not paying for the product, then you are the product.” 

To which Jaron Lanier adds that it’s worse than that: it’s not just your attention that these giants want as their product:

“It’s the gradual, slight, imperceptible change in your own behavior and perception that is the product.”


Think about that. You are not only an object—a product being sold—but the target of a sophisticated campaign to change your behavior so that you become less and less capable of looking away from that screen, and thus more likely to look at what advertisers want to sell you. The certainty of your attention is what makes so much money for social media companies. As Shoshana Zuboff says, “That’s their business; they sell certainty.” The certainty Zuboff means is the certainty that you will watch their ads, and their ability to predict that some of you, even a small percentage, will buy what they’re selling. Those predictions are worth billions, trillions. 

To get that absolute reliability, media companies like Google and Facebook employ AI, artificial intelligence made possible by supercomputers, that compiles mountains of data. This data is compiled in such sophisticated ways that your every move is recorded and known, as well as what you will likely do. As Jeff Seibert, a former executive at Twitter puts it: “Every single action you take is carefully monitored and recorded.” And what do they do with all that data that they so assiduously mine? Aza Raskin answers: “They build models that predict our actions, and whoever has the best model wins.” In the film, this is made graphic by showing an avatar for some of the people being monitored. And the goals of all this data mining (some would call it “hacking our minds”) are threefold a) to guarantee one’s engagement (that is, what gets your attention); b) to foster growth (that is, get you to invite friends); c) to sell advertising (that is, to make as much money as possible from companies that pay a lot for that certainty, that predictability). Jaron Lanier sums this up: 

“We’ve created an entire global generation for whom the very meaning of communication, of culture, is manipulation…We’ve put deceit and sneakiness at the center of everything we do.”

 

That’s because while users think they are making their own choices, and getting all this cool information free, in fact, they are the object of a massive and powerful technological complex, whose aim is to drive them to make the choices that will produce the most certainty, and the most money. And all in the service of supplying buyers for the useless products being sold. 

The problem with all this is that you, the user, have no idea you are being manipulated. Tristan Harris likens the smartphone to a slot machine that gives the gambler just enough hits to get him habituated, or hooked. “You are a lab rat,” says Tristan Harris. We’re all lab rats in this huge experiment to see what colors and patterns and posts work to grab our attention and keep it; and every bit of brain science and psychology available is fed into AI and those who run it to see what manipulation works best. Chamath Palihapitiya, former VP of Growth for Facebook puts it this way:

 

“So we want to figure out psychologically how to manipulate you as fast as possible, and then give you back that dopamine hit.”

 

Dopamine, of course, is the brain neurotransmitter involved in giving us rewards, and thus pleasure, and is crucial in motivation, memory and attention. It is the target of enormous attention by media experts in getting people hooked on their devices. And all of it—the data mining, the brain hacking, the profit motive—is done behind the curtain, without the user’s knowledge. Sneaky. The film adds an important statement by Edward Tufte:

There are only two industries that call their customers ‘users’: illegal drugs and software.

 

And Dr. Ann Lembke, of the Stanford School of Medicine, confirms the rightness of this metaphor:


“So here’s the thing: social media is a drug. I mean, we have a basic biological imperative to connect with other people.”

 

Does this use of media as an addictive drug have real world effects? You can bet on it. First of all, it means that these computerized algorithms know more about what we are likely to do than even we do. That’s predictability on steroids. Then consider Jonathan Haidt’s statistics, shown on a graph in the film. First, U.S. Hospital Admissions for Non-Fatal Self Harm: girls 15-19: up 62% since 2008. girls 10-14: up 189% since 2008. Second, Suicide Rates for the same girls: ages 15-19: up 70%. pre-teens: up 151%. Haidt sums it up this way: “A whole generation is now more fragile, anxious, more depressed—and much less comfortable taking risks.” 

This is all worrying, in many ways terrifying. But the most revelatory segment for me was the one about how these technologies are now confirming, indeed, abetting the massive increase in disinformation. And in the U.S. at least, usually not for nefarious reasons; it’s all in the service of getting people more addicted, and thus more susceptible to advertising. Some might see this as benign: ‘it’s just the marketplace operating.’ I do not. Because at least with a dictator, one knows one is being manipulated; here, no one seems to have any idea, and so all of us are less guarded, more susceptible, more resigned. This becomes very important when we learn that these platforms actually tailor their responses to what they know the user wants to see or hear. Justin Rosenstein: 


“When you go to Google and type climate change, you’re going to see different results depending on where you live.” 

 

WHAT!! Yes, you read that right. If you live in a conservative zip code, you might see several entries saying climate change is a hoax, or is not scientifically verified; if you live in a more liberal zip code, you’re likely to be fed entries confirming its validity, its human cause, and the dangers of melting icecaps. And it’s not just Google. Your Facebook newsfeed is driven by this same manipulation, and it’s even more powerful. Tristan Harris points out that Facebook provides each person with a different news feed, based on the computer’s calculation of what fits with that person’s known interests. So, if data shows you have shown a preference for conspiracies in the past, you’ll get that reinforced with posts alleging conspiracy theories and related subjects; if you’ve shown an interest in weapons or philosophy or left-wing or right-wing activism, you’ll get those reinforced—and all in the interest not of conspiracy theories or activism, but of getting you more hooked. Roger McNamee points out the perils of this:


“Each person [i.e. on social media] has their own reality, their own facts…Over time, you have the false sense that everyone agrees with you because everyone in your news feed sees the same—and once you’re in that state, it turns out you’re more easily manipulated.”

 

Now we see how the polarization that is so disturbing to our politics comes about, and gets reinforced daily. Social media is strengthening, is in fact shaping that very polarization! We see this when we learn that the people one wonders about—the ones who believe outlandish theories such as QAnon or Pizzagate—are simply not seeing the same information as someone who reads the NY Times or the Washington Post. So their beliefs are constantly reinforced by seeing more of what fits their world view. Perhaps the worst part of this manipulation is that fake news is now known—via a study of Twitter—to spread six times faster than real, that is, verified news. Sandy Parakilas makes this vivid:


“We’ve created a system that favors false information not because we wanted to, but because false information makes more money.”

 

If you’re not outraged by now, you need to get your outrage organ checked. But I digress. This problem now affects every aspect of our society, and it is only getting worse. And, as noted above, the worst part is that it’s all driven by the greed of Silicon Valley corporations, their perceived need to “monetize,” i.e. make bundles of money. Tristan Harris puts it this way: “It’s a disinformation-for-profit business model.”  Disinformation for profit. And this is leading us, all unknowing, to a situation where there is no longer a consensus based on agreed-upon truth. There is no longer even agreement about scientifically-validated truth. Everything is up for grabs. Every fact is in dispute. Which we see right now in the Trump-disputed election—not based on any evidence or facts, but on shared conspiracies reinforced by social media. 

Is this serious? Tristan Harris again: “We in the tech industry have created the tools to destabilize and erode the fabric of society, and in every country of the world.” Jaron Lanier adds.   “If we keep on doing this, we probably destroy our civilization.”

         And one can’t help wondering, why do we keep on doing this? Why isn’t something being done? Why isn’t this an urgent topic for regulators, for the U.S. Congress? And the answer is, Harris and others have testified about these issues before Congress not once, but twice: once before the Senate on June 25, 2019, and once before the Subcommittee on Consumer Protection and Commerce, on January 8, 2020.  The latter hearing was entitled, “Americans at Risk: Manipulation and Deception in the Digital Age.” And what has been the result? As far as I can tell, nothing. Nada. Zip. Which points to the essential problem: The problem lies with the fundamental business model. That model, which Harris characterizes as “disinformation for profit,” says that it’s ok to fleece and manipulate and deceive consumers, to lead young girls into depression and suicide, to undermine the very fabric of democratic society and of humanity itself, of truth itself, as long as it’s in the interest of making money. In short, where so many trillions of dollars are concerned, virtually anything is permitted. And those dollars virtually guarantee that nothing will be done by lawmakers. 

         Unless, that is, the public, millions of concerned citizens and parents of the generations now having their brains and lives hacked, rise up with indignation and outrage over what is being done to them and theirs. Then, and only then, will this Frankenstein’s monster we’ve created be regulated, and controlled, and made to serve not profit, but human beings. 

         One can only hope that that day comes in time. But based on what has happened so far, there is little cause for optimism—unless, again, enough people watch the documentary (available on Netflix), or join the Center for Humane Technology (www.humanetech.com ), and, having absorbed its message, take to the phones, the airwaves, the streets with their anger and outrage on full display. If that were to happen, the whole pernicious system could be forced to change. 

         But there isn’t much time. The freedom of every mind, of whole generations to be able to make their own decisions, hangs in the balance.  

 

Lawrence DiStasi

Tuesday, November 24, 2020

Sense Making and Why It's Become So Problematic


Let’s start with definitions. We humans have senses. And so, the beginning of sense-making is always located in our five senses: sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste. Most of us have heard and uttered the phrase, “that doesn’t make sense to me,” which means, literally, that my senses tell me things such as ‘the earth is not round but flat.’ And so, for most of human history, the way we understood our planetary home (we didn’t know it was a planet, of course) was as an essentially flat surface on which life unfolded. It made sense. We also understood the sun and the moon in the same way: they were discs we could see moving across the sky, their point of rising and setting shifting south or north along the horizon in a more or less regular way. An eclipse of the moon likewise, seemed to our senses to indicate that the sun was eating the moon, or perhaps that it was a marriage of the two (which now turns out to simply be the alignment of the two that blocks out our view of one of them). And when the ancient Greeks tried to make sense of the most critical object in the sky, they saw a god like Phoebus Apollo riding the sun’s chariot across the heavens. In other words, they personified natural phenomena to make them “sensible.” The ocean was a god, the wind was a god, earth was a god, the moon was a goddess, and so on. Since the gods were like humans, the often-puzzling behavior of these entities made sense because, like humans, they all had quirks. 

            Then came science, the (more or less) objective observation of such phenomena, and with it, concepts about the natural world that did not “make sense.” The earth is a sphere, not a flat surface. The sun doesn’t revolve around the earth, but just the opposite: the earth, while itself rotating, revolves around the sun. Nor is the earth the center of the universe, but a relatively insignificant dot in an almost infinite gathering of stars and galaxies, an observation that nearly cost Galileo his life. And the sun looks like a disc in the sky not because it’s small but because it’s 93 million miles away, whereas the moon, actually orders of magnitude smaller, simply reflects the light of the sun, not its own. All these are simple notions now, which any 4th grader “knows” and takes for granted. But if there were to be an instance in which the moon disappeared, or the sun stopped emitting its rays, that would be hard to make sense of. And our sense-making equipment would be sent into overdrive. For that is how sense making is defined:

 

Sensemaking is literally the act of making sense of an environment, achieved by organizing sense data until the environment “becomes sensible” or is understood well enough to enable reasonable decisions.

 

And these days, sense making usually comes into play when our brain responds to “novelty or potentially unexpected stimuli as it integrates new information into an ever-updating model of the world” (both quotes from R. J. Cordes, “Making Sense of Sensemaking,” www.atlanticcouncil.org).

            So, we make sense of our environment (which we literally must do to feel secure) by either relying on data we’ve already learned, or by “integrating new information” into our model of the world. That is, our rapid-fire brains operate, and enable us to negotiate outside environments, by constantly updating that world model we have with which to accommodate new data. And of course, this is where our problems enter. For some of those models we rely on are very much fixed. We like them; depend on them; even cherish them because they make our world sensible, which is to say, survivable. And we don’t take kindly, often enough, to new data which demands a radical restructuring of our model’s way of interpreting things or, in the most radical situations, seeing things—literally. Pathbreaking artists and thinkers are doing this all the time. Picasso forced people, with his cubist paintings, to see reality in a new way. And many condemned him for it; ridiculed his inability to see or draw straight. The reception met by Stravinsky’s ballet music for Rites of Springwhen it was first performed in Paris on May 29, 1913, is a dramatic instance of this—the audience actually rioted and jeered its outrage at what it considered the desecration of musical form. In short, what the audience expected was something more in line with the classical ballet and music they had come to love and expect. When they heard loud, primitive, cacophonous music, and seemingly soulless dancing by puppets, rather than the human emotions they wanted and expected and had paid for, most simply could not tolerate it. It was too jarring; too wide a gulf between their model of what ballet was, and what they were seeing and hearing onstage.  It made no sense, and that made them violent. 

            In many ways, that is what has been happening in our time to many people on a more pedestrian and widespread level. The world we are operating in no longer fits the model which has served us humans so well for so long. Communication now takes place at almost instantaneous speed. Where once we had to be in physical contact with others to communicate with them, or write letters which took days or weeks to reach them, or even hear them via telephone wires over the phone, now we can email them almost instantly, or, faster yet, text them instantaneously. No matter how far away they are. We can also talk and see them on screen via facetime or skype or zoom. None of this requires the wires that once made communication sensible to us. It’s all wireless. We say we “understand” this; but do we really? Or do we simply accept what is clearly taking place via our computers, which most of us don’t truly understand either? The same is true of diseases. We say we understand that viruses are these microscopic creatures that are not really alive, but somehow manage to hijack our cells into manufacturing their DNA so that they, the viruses, can multiply and make us sick. But do most of us really understand this? Do we understand; that is, can we make sense of an organism that is far too tiny for our human sensory equipment to feel or taste or smell or see? No, we can’t. And we must take the word of scientists, who have access to equipment like electron microscopes, that these creatures exist, and infiltrate our bodies in this way. And that there are more creatures like this—billions of them actually—that make possible our digestion of food, and a host of other functions that we couldn’t perform without them. And it all makes sense—if by “making sense” we now mean what others, whom we trust, assure us is true. 

            The problem enters when millions, perhaps billions of people no longer accept as fact what scientists are telling them. Many people, indeed, have never even heard of the most puzzling “facts” of our time, like “spooky action at a distance,” that even Einstein did not believe. That is, in the quantum world, we are informed, experiments have proven that subatomic particles can simultaneously exist in two separate places. And also, that they can communicate important data to each other instantaneously, without any intervening matter or known force carrying that data. These phenomena violate all the classical, i.e. sensible, laws of physics that most of us have been taught. This and other puzzling phenomena in this unseen quantum world violate these laws routinely—though none of us can “sense” this—except for the physicists who can “make sense” of it through elaborate machinery, and infer it via elaborate experiments. 

            So how do we poor humans not in the scientific community “make sense” of the world as it is now structured —so we are told—at the most basic level? Do we simply choose our particular specialist(s) and believe what they tell us? Or ignore the whole thing? Here is where sense making becomes really problematic in our time. 

            We can, for example, take some really humble (from humus) phenomena. Dirt: arguably,  the most humble material we can think of. And yet, we are now informed by science that simple dirt is one of the most complex and precious materials on Earth. Created by the eons-long breakdown of rock, a were spoonful of it is inhabited by millions of critters all performing the indispensable work of digesting and converting indigestible matter into life-giving soil. And that soil is, in turn, the indispensable substrate upon which our entire human existence is based, being the source for all the life-giving plants that we depend upon for food, not just for us, but for the livestock that provides our protein nourishment. We have also recently been made aware of the communication that goes on between trees and the soil and plant life around them—the same trees which are also indispensable for much of our human existence. None of us can “sense” this on our own. We need the time-consuming experimentation, the sophisticated instruments, and the devotion of scientists to inform us of what they find. The same is true of mundane things like our own blood distribution and the workings of this body that we can sense, but whose inner workings—the communication that goes on between billions of cells and nerve endings and chemical neuro-transmitters, the functioning of lungs, liver, kidneys, heart, stomach lining—we have no way of discerning except via either illness and breakdown, or the experiments of science. In short, this need to rely on specialists for almost everything we now “know” is what makes sense-making so problematic in our time. 

            The problematic goes way beyond just having to rely on others to make sense of our world, moreover. It goes to the necessity for each of us to choose whose opinions and which experts to believe. This is not only because people vary so tremendously in what they choose to pay attention to for making sense of their world; it is also because in a “free” society, people are free to choose which science they believe. And many people, especially in our time and nation, choose to ignore conventional science and what used to be called ‘received standard opinion’ to follow the doubters and conspiracy theorists who claim much conventional scientific opinion is all a fraud designed to rob ordinary people of their freedom. This has come to fruition in the deniers of the truth of the Covid-19 virus. Mostly followers of Trump, these people have decided that the virus story is all a hoax meant to frighten people into ceding their freedoms to an all-consuming government. And so, the admonitions of scientists to take simple precautions like mask-wearing and social distancing are made sense of by the most roundabout and generally discredited mechanism: the government conspiracy. It is government that wants to circumscribe our freedoms, they believe, by exaggerating and distorting the dangers of a virus that is no worse than the common flu. And can be cured by easily-available drugs like hydroxychloroquine. This lunacy “makes sense” to an astonishing number and array of otherwise ‘normal’ people. The same applies to “making sense” of climate disruption. Huge percentages of Americans refuse to believe the science—or in fact, the evidence of their own senses in warmer temperatures or more frequent, increasingly-destructive storms. And this, in turn, is due to the fact that these large events take place on too slow a timescale to be really ‘sensed.’ We need to rely on the painstaking measurements of climatologists and hurricane specialists and glaciologists and those who can measure carbon concentration in the atmosphere to really gauge how much is changing, and how rapidly over time, due to increased carbon levels. And, as with the virus, that which people cannot see or feel or touch can be dismissed as “making no sense.” Increasing this hazard is the rise of social media, and platforms which people can choose to confirm their own biases and misperceptions. One such platform recently financed and sponsored by right-winger Rebekah Mercer is Parler.com—a website devoted to the disinformation (they call it free speech—where you are free to choose what to follow and believe, no matter how preposterous) promoted by Trump and his MAGA zealots. Another is the astonishing rise in the popularity of QAnon, and its bizarre conspiracy theories about baby-raping and -eating cults centered in Hollywood. 

            To sum up, sense making in our time has become even more precarious than usual in a world “where we humans are poorly adapted to the environment we’ve created.” That is to say, not only are we non-specialists unable to make sense of the most basic modern science on our own, i.e. through our evolved senses; those who wish to can literally choose what makes sense to them and fits with their already-formed opinions. No need to try to understand what reputable scientists are telling us. No need to be disturbed by dire predictions of what could happen if we ignore those predictions. Those millions who wish to can simply ignore the evidence that is supported by observation and experiment, and believe that which “makes sense” to them in their more comfortable and predictable bubble. Can choose to ignore that the real disinformation, the real conspiracy is that perpetrated by those who stand to profit from mass ignorance—the wealthy, the purveyors of fossil fuel and trash consumer products, the ones who stand to lose their fortunes if masses of people were to actually wake up to what is actually happening. And it takes no particularly rare insight to see that if the susceptibility of millions to this disinformation conspiracy continues, more people will end up in ICUs dying of Covid, and millions more will perish as the climate continues to worsen—all while singing their anthem of “Ain’t nobody gonna take my freedom from me.” 

Because that, against all the evidence, is apparently what makes sense to them. 

 

Lawrence DiStasi

 

 

Friday, September 25, 2020

Justice: What and Whence?

 

We in the United States are experiencing a surge in demands for justice, mostly prompted by the videotaped murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer last May. The outpouring of rage and grief by both African Americans and white sympathizers was immediate and nation-wide; even world-wide. While there is much to be said about such a response (and indeed about the varying responses from our elected officials such as the President), I am interested here rather in the basic concept behind the outrage. In a word, I am interested in what we understand as justice, and where the concept derives from. It turns out that major thinkers, including some of the greatest minds in the western tradition, have been pondering this question for millennia. 

            We can begin, as usual, with the ancient Greeks. Plato in The Republic and Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethicsboth discussed the problem at some length. Without getting too deeply into the weeds, we can say briefly that Plato has Socrates argue that the essence of justice is harmony—harmony between the parts of a human, and a corresponding harmony between the parts of a city-state. Socrates makes the argument, self-interested to be sure, that a city-state will be well-run if a philosopher (or philosopher-king) makes the important decisions. Why? Because a philosopher is the only one disinterested enough to understand, and to aim, like an expert navigator guiding a ship, toward the good. Of course, the question immediately arises, what is the good? But Plato seems to imply that it is both an unknowable and self-evident and formless ideal.

            Other thinkers, like John Stuart Mill, have not been so content with this kind of vague ideal. Mill argued for something we all might ascribe to: that what is just is what has the best consequences for the most people. Simple and solid. For John Locke, however, justice in society is what accords with “natural law”—that is, giving to groups or individuals what they deserve. Then there are theories that align justice with the idea of fairness, basically an impartial distribution of goods, with no concern for deserts. But on what basis is this to be decided? John Rawls proposes two basic measures for just distribution: distribution based on, say, hard work; and distribution based on simple humanity, which everyone has. Karl Marx was an adherent of this latter idea: that is, goods should be distributed in a just society according to the principle, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” regardless of what is earned, or what one’s social status might be.  But property rights theorists strongly object to this redistributive justice idea. Robert Nozick, for example, considers that all attempts to redistribute goods according to some ideal, without the consent of their owners, are theftand that even taxation (to achieve some kind of fair redistribution) is a form of theft. 

            There are more theories, to be sure, but the basic question remains: where do these ideas of justice, of fairness, of equality before the law, come from? Many people would argue that justice comes from, and is only achievable by the Divine: Justice is mine, saith the Lord; except that the actual words are “Vengeance is mine” (Romans 12: 17-19, from Deuteronomy 32:35). It is notable that here, justice seems to be equated with the primal concept of vengeance, or punishment. This is all well and good, if one is content with the idea that justice comes from God (the word "just" occurs eighty-four times in the Bible, and "justice" occurs twenty times), and that’s that. But even Plato in Euthyphro elucidated the dilemma with this question: does God command the morally good because it is inherently good, or do we consider it good because it’s commanded by God? The implication is that if it’s commanded by God, we can’t really understand the good, or justice; whereas, if it’s because justice is inherently good, then it exists independently of God and therefore can and should be subject to human judgment. 

            But there is one other aspect of vengeance or justice belonging only to God that bears some scrutiny. Giving the right to exact vengeance only to God is a kind of sign of the advance into complex society, a way of curbing the impulses of each human trying to take vengeance into his or her own hands. It is easy to see that this kind of primal, individual vengeance, in larger societies, can lead to escalating and uncontrollable cycles of violence—one killing, say, leading to another in retaliation, which leads to another vengeance killing, ad infinitum. So it is that the prerogative of vengeance or justice becomes limited—to the powerful god, leader, king, lord of the manor, and finally to the state. Justice becomes, to a degree at least, limited to certain entities, and thereby becomes more or less impersonal, or objective. An injured party is no longer permitted to seize someone who has committed a crime against him and punish or kill that person outright. In complex societies, the state reserves for itself the exclusive right to punish, to exact vengeance, to kill; and its offices for doing so are given the name and attributes of Justice—usually, in name if not in practice, blind or equal justice under the law—depending always on whatever set of laws pertain in a given society.

            Before getting to legal justice and its implementation, however, perhaps we should look further into the idea that justice is “natural,” that is, stemming from nature. And here, there have been some recent studies that are of great interest—though not so flattering, perhaps, to the human need to feel unique. Several studies have been done in recent years to investigate whether nonhuman primates, in particular, exhibit a sense of “fairness” similar to that of humans. Franz DeWaal has experimented and written extensively about this, and his studies, documented in, among other places, his 2013 book, The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates, (Norton: 2013), reveal what he maintains is the evolution of fairness (the rudimentary germ of justice) among primates. DeWaal and his associates engaged capuchin monkeys in a variation of what, for humans, is called the Ultimatum Game—where one player, the proposer, has a sum of money to split, either fairly or unfairly, between himself and the other player, the responder. When humans play the game, they almost universally favor splitting the money evenly; brain scans of those facing the unfair distribution of rewards “reveal negative emotions, such as scorn or anger,” and often a refusal to accept an unfair split at all. With monkeys the reaction to unfair distribution is strikingly similar. If two monkeys, unrelated but cooperating partners, are given unequal rewards for a task—one receives highly-prized grapes; the other receives not-so-highly-prized cucumber slices—the deprived monkey (the one given the cucumber) simply refuses to play, and often destroys the game. DeWaal comments: 

Refusing perfectly fine food because someone else is better off resembles human performance in the Ultimatum Game. Economists call this response “irrational,” given that something is always better than nothing…If these responses are irrational, however, it is an irrationality that transcends species… Fairness and justice are therefore best looked at as ancient capacities. They derive from the need to preserve harmony in the face of resource competition. We share both stages of fairness with the apes, and the first stage with monkeys and dogs (DeWaal, The Bonobo and the Atheist, 231-34).

 

In short, Franz DeWaal and many others now have found that, especially in ‘higher-order’ species that cooperate in hunting, fairness in reward distribution outweighs what economists would judge to be rational (is it not better to accept some money or food as opposed to none at all?). This is not only common but appears necessary, probably because it ensures sustained cooperation between rivals in a life-giving pursuit. Since humans, too, are pre-eminently a cooperating species (having evolved in hunter-gatherer groups), the sense of fairness and justice that has evolved goes very deep, and runs along a similar line of emotional rather than what we call rational judgment.

            What we can conclude, then, is that an evolved sense of fairness predates humans in evolution, and informs human notions of what is just. Justice means that people with whom we have some relation (e.g., all members of our family, tribe, community, nation, continent, and ultimately, of the species homo sapiens), are felt by most of us viscerally (if not intellectually) to deserve fair treatment, or justice.  Without fair treatment, whether it is from the economic system or the justice system, we can expect either refusal to play or refusal to cooperate. And we can see that this refusal comes about when the perceived unfairness or injustice passes a certain threshold. Most humans, that is, can tolerate some injustice as “just the way it is:” the system is stacked, and always has been, against the poor, the marginalized, the foreigner, the differently colored or gendered or endowed. But when the injustice gets beyond a certain point, then those at the receiving end of such injustice either refuse to play the game (rejecting the rules) or seek to overturn or destroy the game altogether. You then have peasants’ revolts, or the French Revolution, or urban riots in the streets, or whatever form the refusal takes. 

            And this is where the notion of the reigning power having the exclusive right to mete out vengeance or justice comes in. For when many people begin to see that the system is rigged—usually in favor of those with some inside access to information, or to the reigning monarch, or to the officials in charge of overseeing the fair distribution of goods, or the fair enforcing of justice—then that system begins to be seen as corrupt or irrelevant or of no value except to those insiders whose goods or property are being protected. Indeed, the late Howard Zinn maintained that the highest court in the U.S. justice system was essentially useless to the average American. In a 2005 essay, he maintained that the only way justice has ever been implemented for the mass of people without power, was when they took to the streets and demanded change. Then, and only then, would the Supreme arbiters of Justice, regardless of affiliation, move to align themselves with the significant shift in opinion. Otherwise, they would simply maintain the status quo best suited to the powerful with whom they identify (Howard Zinn, “Don’t Despair About the Supreme Court” The Progressive, Oct. 21, 2005, www.progressive.org). 

            Where does that leave us, then, regarding the concept of justice and its utility? We can, I think, certainly agree that in modern complex societies, it won’t do to have individuals taking vengeance for each wrong committed against them (as we see often in gangster movies, or dramas about rogue cops who implement rough justice on their own): there would be slaughter in the streets on a regular basis. Still, we must admit that we usually cheer when the “bad guys” can no longer hide behind the law, and get their comeuppance directly, though we also know this won’t work in actual practice. We know this because of what has actually happened in the streets of America, both historically and  recently—where vigilante groups have either threatened or killed those they deem “outlaws” or violators of what they deem “good” social behavior. We have also seen it too frequently on the part of the police when they gun down or choke or otherwise inflict mortal injury on people they deem either dangerous, or just insufficiently responsive to their commands. Too often, these law officers are excused from liability for their murders (as has just now happened in the Breonna Taylor case). Too often, also, public servants in high office judge it a good thing that this punishment is meted out—as for example, when the President of the United States, the chief law enforcement official in the nation, actually said on Fox News that the killing of Michael Reinoehl by U.S. Marshals sent to arrest him (Reinoehl was accused of killing Jay Danielson in Portland), was “the way it has to be. There has to be retribution when you have a crime like this (The Oregonian, Sept. 13, 2020).” This is an astonishing statement. For what it appears to justify is extra-judicial murder—with the officers acting as judge, jury, and executioners. No trial. No legal rights. No presumption of innocence. No right to witnesses or examination of proof or the right to face accusers in a court of law, all basic rights of Americans enshrined in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Such rights and protections have long been established in most states as fair exchange by citizens for giving up personal vengeance and conferring it on the state. They mean that neither the state nor any of its rulers any longer has the right to seize people and execute them without at least a show of these legal procedures—all of which together symbolize and represent Justice. For a chief law enforcement officer to express approval of officers killing a suspect without any procedures at all—that takes us backwards several degrees to kings and dictators taking the law into their own hands, and simply killing their enemies. Which is little better than mass vengeance killings. Too much of this kind of practice and a state is likely to lose all its legitimacy—which is to say all pretense of justice.

Thus, we see that defining justice is difficult enough when we are talking about legal or court-of-law justice. But when we are talking about implementing social justice, the difficulty is compounded. That is because, as was hinted at above, the just distribution of a society’s goods gets into very knotty problems. Who should get what from a just society’s production? Many people in our culture would argue that only people who work should get a fair portion of a society’s goods, and that the amount each gets for his toil must be determined by the marketplace. But that leads to the situation the United States is in currently. That is, people who do little that can be called work—at least traditional work—are receiving an overwhelming portion of the society’s goods, i.e. wealth, preeminently from their investments in the stock market. And a few at the top—Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, or Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, or other dot.com billionaires—earn more in an hour than average workers earn in a year—with the workers doing actual physical labor, while the dot-com-ers gather dividends from the automatic workings of the market.  The statistics are forbidding: some 2,000 men of this kind have gathered to themselves more net worth than over 60% of the world’s population combined. This is inequality—which many would call ‘injustice’—of the most visible and insulting kind. And it raises the question about a society’s priorities; questions about what a society values, and on what basis does it reward its members. 

These are all question of social justice—which many would deny even has legitimacy as a concept. But many others would maintain that these are the real questions that matter in any society. They lead to the root question about which is more important: property or people. And whether preserving and protecting property—regardless of how it has come to be owned (Balzac once observed that behind every great fortune lies a great crime)—is so much more important than preserving and protecting individual life, protecting the entire planet’s ability to support life.  For that is the other aspect of justice that is looming over our world these days. Do those who earn billions have any obligation to not just contribute to the well-being of those who work for them and actually create their wealth, but to the rest of life, to the planet and its health? For the most part, especially in recent years, the answer to this question has been, a resounding NO. Such considerations are “externalities,” is the economists’ argument, and businesses have no obligation to take them into account, nor take responsibility for the damage they cause. And of course, the type case is multi-national oil companies and their responsibility (or not) for the alarming rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and hence global warming. Is it fair and just, that is, for companies and their leaders to make billions in profits from a product that is leading to the displacement and probable death of millions of human beings? The same question could be asked of countless corporations that produce plastics that are polluting the oceans and our cells; of farming giants whose production of meats leads to the pollution of vital water supplies; of giant farms whose use of pesticides leads to the demise of critical insects and pollinators; of manufacturers whose production and use of paper destroys virgin forests; and on and on. What is the responsibility of these critical parts of any society, and what is the responsibility of a society in general for the well-being of all of its members? Can it be that the most important job of any society is to simply protect the property if its wealthiest contributors, and let the health of overwhelming numbers of poorer people care for itself? Growing numbers of people think not. Many now think that a just society would and should make health care a universal right. Many others think that societies can be designed to put the well-being of all their members—not just the wealthy, and not just physical but mental and social well-being as well—at the forefront of their duties. Such a society would include, for example, care for family well-being by providing flexible work-time to allow mothers to spend more time with their growing children; worker cooperatives to give employees more control over their workplaces (including profit-sharing and company governance), giving greater meaning to their working lives; the obligation of all producers to  take responsibility for what happens to their products when they are worn out and disposed of; all of which could help with the gross inequality and resulting mental and physical health problems increasingly plaguing modern capitalist societies like the United States (see Tabita Green, “What a Society Designed for Well-Being Looks Like,” 9/18/18, resilience.org). These and other changes are not that radical either; many Scandinavian nations already have many of these practices in place, and their so-called happiness and health and longevity indices far surpass that of the United States and other nations which leave all such allegedly ‘socialist’ considerations to the marketplace. 

All this doesn’t even begin to broach the subject that is so noisy these days—the question of how to change the system that has left African Americans and Native Americans and people of color in general at the bottom of the social ladder for so long. It has been traditional to say that each of these groups has the same rights and advantages as the rest of American society, and only need to use their bootstraps to raise themselves to equality. But that rationale has all but collapsed with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, which makes it quite plain that the justice system in America, if it exists at all, is far from blind when it comes to skin color (the numbers of black and brown people in our prisons should be a national scandal—see Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow for a searing account of this). For it is clear that this has never in all American history been the case, and, with so many murders of black men that the incontrovertible evidence of video has demonstrated in recent years, that it is perhaps less so now. Police are several times more likely to see people of color as a threat, and resort to their weapons to subdue them, than they are with white suspects—even those carrying automatic weapons, with evidence of their having used them. And when such cases get to the courts, the difference between what happens to those with ample money to hire expert lawyers, and those who must depend on public defenders, is a graphic and a visible blot on the entire system. Nor does the overt prejudice of many white judges help. All of this to say that, though our system claims that American justice is blind and we’re all equal before the law, the evidence proves the opposite:  that justice American-style depends on who you are, what connections you have (when I was in college and working a summer job, I got vivid evidence of this: a bunch of us got drunk one night, and swam in the club swimming pool, throwing chairs in and generally creating mayhem, after which the police seized a few of us and were about to throw the book at us, until one of the guy’s parents, a local judge, intervened; we got off with nothing more than a mild warning, and a “boys will be boys” eye roll), and how much money you can afford for bail and/or lawyers.

What then are we to conclude? Does justice even exist here on earth? And even further, does the arc of the moral universe bend toward Justice, as Martin Luther King famously claimed? Or must we wait for the Last Judgment for everyone, including the evil-doers, to get  their just deserts? Or for karma, as in Buddhism, which may take more than one lifetime to take effect, to work? Often enough, in our world, that seems to be the case. The real world, the samsaric world, is hopelessly corrupt. The good too often die young; evil-doers and those with no discernible morals or ethics, seem to thrive. We still maintain hope that they will get their comeuppance in this life; we identify with films and dramas in which poetic justice prevails and the good are rewarded, while the evil ones suffer as we believe they should. But does this truly ever happen? 

It’s hard to provide a firm conclusion here, but we can say, I think, that true justice is rare, just as the truly just man is rare. And so we are left with the consolations of philosophy; or religion (in which justice will come in the afterlife); or karma, in which the effects of evil deeds are to be fulfilled several lifetimes from now, when rebirth as worms or rodents or other disagreeable characters fulfills the iron law of karmic retribution from which no one escapes. Until then, though, most of us will have to find some way to adapt: either by accepting the fact that justice is not for this world; or by working—generally regardless of any great expectation of success—to make the justice systems we have better, fairer, and more just. Or by working to slowly or rapidly overturn the entire system in an effort to begin anew. Something like that may be happening now, and for my part, I do not hope, but do wish fervently for its success. Whether that can happen in time to stave off several impending catastrophes is something else again; but do any of us, if we truly believe in justice for all, really have a choice? 

 

Lawrence DiStasi

 

 

Tuesday, September 15, 2020

Recycling Plastic: Yet Another Corporate Con


I have written about plastics several times in recent years, and each time I have expressed my frustration with the intractability of dealing with this ubiquitous material that only humans make. But now, after reading the latest exposé of the plastics industry, I am not just frustrated, I am feeling betrayed and really pissed off. That’s because what the NPR report by Laura Sullivan (“How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled” Sept. 11, 2020) reveals is that the recycling that all of us have long thought was at least mitigating the problem, by turning much of the plastic waste clogging our world into many repurposed plastic products we could use, was an elaborate con. A con that lured many of us, who have dutifully separated our plastic waste for years, looking for the triangle symbol at the bottom, and feeling relieved that it could be recycled rather than thrown away, have gone for hook, line and sinker. I personally have tried to gather my plastic bags into little sacks (I have several in my living room right now) that I can drop off at Safeway’s bins to be turned, I always believed, into plastic benches or something else useful. This so they wouldn’t clog up the oceans or beaches or our landfills—already groaning from the ever-increasing amounts of waste, including plastic, that we bury. This became especially urgent when we learned from reports two years ago that China and India would no longer accept our plastic waste at all. So the nice Recology (even the name is reassuring) trucks that come around weekly to collect my waste sport two separate bins—one for recyclable material, including appropriate plastic—and the other for regular waste destined for the landfill. And that belief that what was able to be recycled was being recycled has eased my earth-respecting conscience some. 

            Laura Sullivan’s report blows this all out of the water. It turns out that not only is none of this recycling happening where plastic is concerned, that it’s all been a ploy to quiet our minds about all the plastic being consumed, but that the oil companies that produce plastic have known, since at least the 1970s, that recycling plastic simply could not work. Here are the words from the report uncovered by NPR:

We found that the industry sold the public on an idea it knew wouldn't work — that the majority of plastic could be, and would be, recycled — all while making billions of dollars selling the world new plastic (NPR report, Sept. 11, 2020).

 

That pretty much sums it up; but the details, many of them from industry insiders who were in charge of the deceptive advertising, are staggering. Listen to Larry Thomas, former president of the Society of the Plastics Industry, about the logic of the con in which he was involved: “If the public thinks that recycling is working, then they are not going to be as concerned about the environment” (ibid). And so the industry set out to fool the public into thinking, through artfully-designed advertising, through secretly financing recycling companies and ‘recycling machines,’ that plastic could be recycled—all so that people would feel better about the cascading mountains of plastic being used for virtually everything in our world. Indeed, the oil industry used a playbook similar to the one used earlier by the cigarette industry, with an identical outcome in mind: ease their minds about plastic, as industry eased their minds about cancer, and sell billions more of our product. And they knew, all along, industry documents show, that it was all a lie, an elaborate con, because of the singular brute fact:


All used plastic can be turned into new things, but picking it up, sorting it out and melting it down is expensive. Plastic also degrades each time it is reused, meaning it can't be reused more than once or twice (ibid).

Since it’s cheaper to produce new plastic from oil than to do all this laborious sorting (which in any case results in ‘recycled’ products that can only be minimally reused), that is precisely what the oil and chemical industry giants like Exxon and Chevron and Dow and Dupont have done: produce ever-increasing amounts of new plastic. And meanwhile, their public relations geniuses have come up with the bullshit about recycling, and codes on the bottom of plastic containers, so people will dutifully check the triangles to see which level of recycling they signify—all of which has done nothing, zero, nada. Because in all the time John Q. Public has been recycling, the truth is that “less than 10 percent of plastic has been recycled” (ibid). Less than 10 %! Into this breach, meanwhile, the oil companies have plunged with always new plastic products and new plants (the latest a $6 billion facility in Sweeney, Texas, by Chevron Philips) still making billions on the manufacture of new plastic:

The oil industry makes more than $400 billion a year making plastic, and as demand for oil for cars and trucks declines, the industry is telling shareholders that future profits will increasingly come from plastic (ibid).

 

Your read that right: the oil industry’s future profits will come from plastic. If this doesn’t make you angry, I don’t know what will. 

 

            What we really need to do, though, is examine the roots of this plastic menace, because we are all deeply involved, if not complicit. That’s because those roots run deep in the human psyche. What, to begin with, does plastic do for us; e.g., what human need does it satisfy? The answer is pretty simple: our lust for permanence. We want to be invulnerable to decay; we want protection from it and from the elements; we want homes and pipes and car parts and clothes and containers and tools that last; that won’t mix with the always corrosive effects of the natural world. That is what deeply frightens us after all: the habit that organic matter (including our own bodies) has of rotting, spoiling, yielding to the thousands of mites and worms and bacteria and fungi that feed on it. And so we try to insulate it as well as we can (all structures built now are draped in a protective layer of plastic). And for millennia, there was simply no good way to do that, no material that was proof against the natural cycle. But then along came oil, and then along came plastic. Able to be molded into whatever shape and size we wished, plastic was seemingly impervious to decay. Eureka! Our problems solved. Shirts didn’t need to be ironed: dacron and rayon solved all that. Pipes didn’t need to be molded out of iron that sooner or later failed: plastic pipes lasted almost forever. All our containers were easily molded from plastic that didn’t break when dropped. Now we have computerized 3-D printers that can forge any shape simply from a drawing—to make plastic guns and plastic machine parts and plastic animals and plastic little men. Our world has become a world made almost entirely of plastic, or if not made of it, then wrapped in it. Packaged in it. 

            Only there eventually emerged this little problem. Plastic did, indeed, last almost forever. It was proof against decay, because being unnatural, no natural creature fed on it. I once saw a comparison of electron-microscope images of organic matter, and alongside them, of plastic. The organic matter had structure, logical orderly structure. The plastic was chaotic, a mess of fibers jumbled together. In a word, unnatural. We know this instinctively. We are organic creatures and we respond automatically to others of our kind—organisms. And we know, equally organically, that plastic does not belong in our world. To put the matter in terms we can easily understand, and which important thinkers like Daniel Schmactenberg are now using: organic matter is part of nature’s system—a closed-loop system. That means, simply, that nothing is wasted. Everything in nature goes through its life cycle, and dies, whereupon it is used as food by some other organism in the fully-integrated system. Trees fall and die, are fed on by fungi and insects, which is to say, they rot, and become humus, which in turn feeds other organisms. The same is true of animals when they die, and humans when we die (if we’re not removed from the system by burial in a plastic container). The loop is closed: everything is used by everything else; nothing is wasted. This both pleases us aesthetically—a flower is beautiful to the extent that it dies and we know that the essence of its beauty is its evanescence—and terrifies us existentially. We know we are temporary creatures, like all other organic life, we know we will die, and that knowing leads inevitably to ego-driven fear. But again, that evanescence is also what makes every human life precious. 

            Plastic, on the other hand, is part of an open-loop system. A human-created system. It does not partake of the organic round. It is not consumed by fungi or bacteria or anything else we know of (though there are some innovations claiming to have developed bacteria or fungi that do consume plastic), at least not for thousands of years. It is what economists call an “externality”—something that the corporate world of capitalism disposes of but takes no responsibility for—like the waste generated by monstrous factory farms that pollute our waterways, or the waste produced by electronics manufacturers, many of whose components, not incidentally, are made of plastic. That means the system is open: outside the closed, recycling, integrated loop of nature. It does not become part of the whole that keeps going forever on its own. Its discard is a full stop. For this reason, our landfills are being overwhelmed with plastic. Our oceans are filled and overflowing with huge gyres of degraded and degrading plastic. The tiny plastic balls that result from this ‘photo degradation’ are mistaken by fish and seabirds for organic morsels that they normally feed upon. And so we have the terrifying spectacle of birds dying with their stomachs full of indigestible plastic bits; of fish dying in the same way; and of humans eating fish that contains some of this indigestible plastic—that has now become part of us. Indeed, a recent report in wired.com presented these alarming facts:


…in 11 national parks and protected areas in the western US, 1,000 metric tons of microfibers and microplastic particles fall from the sky each year, equivalent to over 120 million plastic water bottles—and that’s in just 6 percent of the country’s land area. Last month, another group described how the ocean is burping up microplastics, which then blow onshore via sea breezes. And last year, still more scientists reported that 7 trillion microplastic particles flow into the San Francisco Bay annually (Matt Simon, “Who’s to Blame for Plastic Microfiber Pollution?” wired.com, 6/22/20.)

 

Where do these microfibers come from? Why, mainly from those wonderful no-iron clothes we all wear and love. So convenient. But there is a price we pay for convenience, and we had all better heed it because, as Matt Simon puts it, it‘s those


cheap synthetic clothes that during each wash shed perhaps 100,000 microfibers, which then flow out to rivers and oceans through wastewater. (Consider that 70 years ago, the textile and clothing industries used 2 million tons of synthetic materials; that figure had skyrocketed to almost 50 million tons by 2010.) Everywhere scientists look, these microfibers turn up; they’re blowing into the Arctic and to the tops of (formerly) pristine mountaintops (ibid). 

 

So yes: we have the convenience of synthetic clothes to wear; but we also have these microfibers that research is beginning to show have become parts of the very cells of fish, and have affected their reproductive capacity (“From Fish to humans, a Microplastic Invasion May Be Taking a Toll,” Andrea Thompson, 9/4/2018, scientificamerican.com). One study with hamsters injected with microfibers shows that they can lead to blood clots. So are we all now contaminated with plastic—from the fibers in the air we breathe, from the soil in which we grow our crops (and many of which are fertilized with sewage sludge laced with microfibers)? It is beginning to seem likely. And while no direct studies, for ethical reasons, can be done on humans, the prospects do not look good for us, if the ubiquity of plastic is not cut off. 

            The deeper problem, as always, is the system in which the manufacture of plastics, and the economics of that manufacture, are embedded. That system is corporate capitalism. The essence of the system, as most people now know, is profit; and not simply profit, but the elevation of profit over every other consideration. Profit over people more or less sums it up. This is what drives oil companies to not simply produce oil for cars and electricity generation and factory production, but to counteract the growing movement to shift from fossil fuels to more sustainable forms of power by a consistent program of deception—muddying the science with countervailing views about global warming so that average people will remain baffled and unconvinced of the urgency of change. And the fossil fuel giants do this knowing that the fate of all life hangs in the balance. How is this possible? First by treating carbon pollution—directly caused by their product—as an externality. ‘We are not responsible for what happens after the product leaves our facility.’ And second, by appealing to the needs of stockholders (mainly themselves) that profit must reign supreme. Even at the cost of all life on the planet? Even so. Profit is the irreducible minimum of every capitalist enterprise; and it has been made into an idol, unassailable, permanent, and given the unimpeachable attribute of being an integral part of human nature. Which of course it is not. Humans existed for millennia without it. But our current economics casts it in this light. And the advertising which is meant to convince us of this—using specious and false logic—drums this profit mantra into the mind of every human on the planet. And so far, it has worked. Why else would Americans be satisfied with the obscene spectacle of the wealthy few possessing more wealth than the rest of the population combined, able to conspicuously consume and waste while the majority can barely eke out of living? Simple: because they have convinced most of us that this is the natural way of things. Inevitable, perfect, what god or nature has intended.

            Now, though, there is plastic—infiltrating our very cells. Now there is global warming, caused, without doubt, by humans and their industrial civilization. Now there is the real threat that humans, homo sapiens the species, will indeed become what Daniel Schmactenberg fittingly calls a “self-terminating species.” It is a forbidding term; a frightening term; but one that is stunningly apt at this time. It suggests, that is, that unless we change our systems to model them on nature’s closed loop system, change our very ways of thinking to restore organic life to the top of our pyramid of concern, we shall end ourselves, not as individuals, but as a species. That is what is at stake: not the existence of the planet as is commonly stated (the planet will survive without us as it did for millions of years), but our very survival as a species. Homo sapiens sapiens. Wise humans. Which often seems like a joke. For would a wise species come up with plastic? With a power source whose externality threatens all life? 

            But perhaps we should say that the term really points to an ideal yet to be achieved. 

That some day—and it had better be soon—homo sapiens will be wise enough to no longer put all our energy into trying to make what is ineluctably temporary, permanent. No longer be fooled by the promise of plastic. No longer be fooled by viciously deceptive advertising that gulls us into believing that we can invent a material that can be of the natural system, but outside its natural cycle. Wise enough perhaps to know that it cannot be done—not without severe consequences, that is. Perhaps we will get there. For now, though, it might have to be enough to condemn, with all our being, these evil hucksters that have sold us on plastic and recycling. Condemn them and throw their evil product back in their well-pampered faces, and tell them in no uncertain terms that their nasty little game is over, their reign is over, and they had better revise their ethics and their thinking very very fast. Or there may not be the opportunity for revision or remorse or repentance or atonement ever again.  

 

Lawrence DiStasi