We need to mature into a post-growth adulthood, in which we can find comfort and grace in a long slow recession—otherwise we will be the only species to move from adolescence to senescence with no maturity in between.

Trust Dale Pendell to forge a metaphor that’s both obvious and unexpected… revelatory common sense. Could the maturity of the species, the only alternative to live-fast-die-young, be anything different from the maturity of the individual? A long slow recession…

From indefatigable comedian and activist Mark Thomas, an impassioned rant against “neo-liberal capitalism” given at the Put People First G20 rally in Hyde Park, London, 28/3/09:

And a more in-depth, though equally passionate call for the decentralization of currency from media theorist Douglas Rushkoff, given at the Web 2.0 Expo, San Francisco, 2/4/09:

Obviously, in the face of the urgent need for action on climate change, this is lunacy, on the part of E.ON and everyone supporting them. What’s more, I’m more convinced each day that the current economic crisis has to be taken as a cue to stop listening to the pro-growth voices in society—which are either almost silent, as we take the benefits of growth as gospel, or loud and rabid, in defence against the increasing awareness that growth enriches the few, impoverishes the many, and endangers the planet (to paraphrase Richard Douthwaite). Equating growth with better quality of life is a delusion that will go down in history as a far greater disaster than the belief that a guy with a beard in the sky controls everything.

What to do? Well, one current bit of online activism put forward by Merrick on Head Heritage is to Google bomb E.ON‘s website. Check out Merrick’s article for details.

This post is my contribution. All the links to E.ON here are pointing somewhere other than their website—click to find out. If you’ve got a blog or website, join in and add your little spanner to the works.

As decades rather than years began to roll by, I sometimes thought that my lack of real comprehension of our financial systems—mortgages, inflation, interest and other such oddities—might be amiss. Surely I should have a good grasp of the basics of the society I lived in? Of course the basic mechanisms seemed clear enough when spelled out. But the “a-ha!” part of me just never got it. I could see how they worked, in a flat, literal sense; but some essential part of my understanding just glazed over and reached for a nice cosy book on occult philosophy.

When I read a quote by someone (Hazel Henderson, it turns out) saying, “Economics is a form of brain damage,” I realized I wasn’t just being intellectually lazy. (Physical laziness is much more my cup of tea.) I had always felt that to bring myself to truly grok our financial system, I would have to lead my neurons down pathways that would be inimical to their health. Naturally I knew that many fine minds had comprehended it all enough to critique it, and survived without descending into dribbling and hallucinating odd smells. But I realized more and more that I didn’t feel the risk was for me.

This morning, drifting in and out of sleep, I was fixated on the idea that the insanity of economics was being demonstrated with greater clarity than ever before by Gordon Brown. Forget the fact that Brown’s financial “steady hand” is a mere artifact of his dour appearance and recent economic events beyond his control (in 2004 he said: “in budget after budget I want us to do even more to encourage the risk takers”). Ignore the bland salad of jargon that’s used to make it sound like he knows what he’s doing. He’s clearly one of the more retarded specimens. A global crisis caused by excessive borrowing and irresponsible financial institutions? No problem. Let’s borrow even more, and give this money to the institutions!

I know, a Nobel Prize winner weighed in and said that Brown had “defined the character of the worldwide rescue effort, with other wealthy nations playing catch-up.” From where I’m sat, it looks like everyone suddenly got freaked by an apparent confirmation of that sneaking suspicion that our entire system isn’t built to last. And their denial was mightily relieved to see someone else—Brown, whose battle with denial was lost long ago—lead the way out of the unappealing corner we’ve painted ourselves into. Not as many people as you’d hope have seen that Brown’s solution is to just slap paint on our eyes.

Well, doing a quick web search for “economics brain damage” to track my favourite quote down, it was a sobering surprise to find a recent item on a “neuroeconomics” study in the Wall Street Journal titled ‘Lessons From The Brain-Damaged Investor’:

The 15 brain-damaged participants that were the focus of the study had normal IQs, and the areas of their brains responsible for logic and cognitive reasoning were intact. But they had lesions in the region of the brain that controls emotions, which inhibited their ability to experience basic feelings such as fear or anxiety. The lesions were due to a range of causes, including stroke and disease, but they impaired the participants’ emotional functioning in a similar manner.

The study suggests the participants’ lack of emotional responsiveness actually gave them an advantage when they played a simple investment game. The emotionally impaired players were more willing to take gambles that had high payoffs because they lacked fear. Players with undamaged brain wiring, however, were more cautious and reactive during the game, and wound up with less money at the end.

Some neuroscientists believe good investors may be exceptionally skilled at suppressing emotional reactions. “It’s possible that people who are high-risk takers or good investors may have what you call a functional psychopathy,” says Antoine Bechara, an associate professor of neurology at the University of Iowa, and a co-author of the study. “They don’t react emotionally to things. Good investors can learn to control their emotions in certain ways to become like those people.”

Now, as an avid J.G. Ballard fan, I’m not instantly repelled by the idea of “creative pathology”. And the article balances out in the end with a note that the brain-damaged participants in the study often performed less well in the real world (highlighting the “pathology” inherent in the blinkered nature of many controlled scientific experiments). The authors also remark on the fact that our evolved emotional reactions, especially regarding fear, may be maladapted to the modern world, which has arisen much faster than biology can remould itself.

Still, anyone who doesn’t accept the modern world without question can’t help but wonder whether neuroeconomics may end up undermining the worldview it’s designed to serve. To what extent does the potential “advantage” of brain damage in economic activity point to the inadequacy of our neuropsychology? To what extent does it highlight the inhumanity of economics?

One needn’t be fixated on a static idea of humanity to object to economics; to what extent does economics block us from healthier, more desirable ways of being in the world that have yet to be realized?

In any case, we need more than lip service to the fact that crisis is opportunity—not just a dire situation in need of patching up.

Further reading

• ‘Money and the Crisis of Civilization’ by Charles Eisenstein
• ‘No Money Down’ by Douglas Rushkoff
• ‘Bring on the Recession’ by George Monbiot
• Hormones ‘may fuel market crises’ (BBC News)

I saw my old mucker Merrick at the Anarchist Bookfair—he has more stamina for selling wares than me, bless him. He seems to still be shifting the odd copy of Neither Work Nor Leisure here and there. He’s been photocopying from old copies, so it seemed like a good time to resurrect the fusty old Quark files and get some new, slightly up-to-date masters to him for future copies.

Going through the layout, I found a page I had lifted from The Decadent, something published by a nineties group called Decadent Action. It was encouraging people not to quit their jobs (losing a good source of cash), but to just slack off: pull as many sickies as possible, doss around, that sort of thing.

They don’t seem to be around anymore, but a manifesto is to be found, and they have an entry on the Wiki:

Decadent Action was a mock “consumer terrorist group” and “High Street anarchist-guerrilla organisation” (or culture jammers) which argued that only a credit collapse through excessive consumer spending could bring about the end of capitalism. It argued that bringing about excessive inflation through unrestrained consumer spending was the sole lever which could precipitate the economic collapse upon which any revolutionary action is predicated. Therefore it promoted the idea of irresponsible credit and excessive spending on hedonistic pursuits to achieve its goals.

Wow—result!

Still, this is just the beginning. As George Monbiot highlights, the economic crash is merely a prelude to the coming ecological crash. Our relief at apparently heading back for business-almost-as-usual may last long enough for us to deny the onset of that, too:

As we goggle at the fluttering financial figures, a different set of numbers passes us by. On Friday, Pavan Sukhdev, the Deutsche Bank economist leading a European study on ecosystems, reported that we are losing natural capital worth between $2 trillion and $5 trillion every year, as a result of deforestation alone. The losses incurred so far by the financial sector amount to between $1 trillion and $1.5 trillion. [...] The two crises have the same cause. In both cases, those who exploit the resource have demanded impossible rates of return and invoked debts that can never be repaid. In both cases we denied the likely consequences. I used to believe that collective denial was peculiar to climate change. Now I know that it’s the first response to every impending dislocation.

And glancing through the rest of the article, I fear the government’s tough policy on cannabis may be failing miserably. Surely only habitual skunk use on a previously unimagined scale could account for such sort-term memory loss? I guess they’re quietly turning a blind eye. After all, how else could we champion Gordon Brown as a stolid, reliable saviour?

I congratulate you Lord Mayor and the City of London on these remarkable achievements, an era that history will record as the beginning of a new golden age for the City of London.

And I believe the lesson we learn from the success of the City has ramifications far beyond the City itself—that we are leading because we are first in putting to work exactly that set of qualities that is needed for global success:

• openness to the world and global reach,
• pioneers of free trade and its leading defenders,
• with a deep and abiding belief in open markets,
• [...]

And I believe it will be said of this age, the first decades of the 21st century, that out of the greatest restructuring of the global economy, perhaps even greater than the industrial revolution, a new world order was created.

[...]

So let me say as I begin my new job, I want to continue to work with you in helping you do yours, listening to what you say, always recognising your international success is critical to that of Britain’s overall and considering together the things that we must do—and, just as important, things we should not do—to maintain our competitiveness:

• enhancing a risk based regulatory approach, as we did in resisting pressure for a British Sarbannes-Oxley after Enron and Worldcom,

Speech by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Rt Hon Gordon Brown MP, to Mansion House, 20/6/07

[...] in budget after budget I want us to do even more to encourage the risk takers, those with ambition, to turn their ideas into reality and make the most of their talents.

Speech by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Rt Hon Gordon Brown MP, to Mansion House, 16/6/04

Of course, no surprises. He was doing what seemed politically expedient. Just as he—and every other politician—is doing now. Throwing money at a creaking system to prop it up, hoping desperately the lynch mob won’t be able to track them down when it crashes even harder.

Anthony Seldon, the biographer of Blair who recently introduced “Happiness Classes” to the public school he heads, has popped up in the news saying that drugs are “too sinister” to tolerate. He goes on:

They are so evil, massively evil – even cannabis. … I heard the other day about an adult who smoked a joint—his first joint—and he lost his mind for six months. … You can just be unlucky. You can have this predisposition which can tip you into psychotic disorder and malfunction which can be cataclysmic and from which some people can never recover their baseline sanity.

BBC News, 4/10/07

The foolish demonisation of drugs by authorities is dangerous because drugs are simply not 100% dangerous (let alone “massively evil”). Once kids discover there are pleasures and treasures in drug use, they more often than not reject the wild warnings of their elders—including any sane cautionary notes.

I wonder whether, in people like Seldon, who seems to be reacting against the “lenient” or “soft” attitudes of recent times, we are at least partially seeing a rebound effect going the other way. Even though cannabis, in itself, is drastically less dangerous than portrayed by the media and government, are people like Seldon reacting to the excesses of pro-cannabis campaigners? Maybe they once questioned the authorities’ line on it, but in the face of seeing real problems involving the drug, they turn away from the idea that “cannabis is harmless” all-too-drastically, swinging back to the Manichean rhetoric of unthinking tabloids.

An interesting thought, maybe. But it doesn’t seem to hold much water. For one thing, the basic point about demonisation by the powers-that-be looks at the dynamics of trust between adults and children, and the obvious damage done to that dynamic if adults deceive kids (and maybe themselves) about life’s dangers. Seldon’s an adult, not a kid. He should be able to take any over-enthused declarations of cannabis’ harmlessness with a pinch of salt to keep a balanced view. Instead, he’s ranting like an ill-informed bigot.

There’s an important distinction to be made here, and that is that Seldon’s prime concern is the use of cannabis at school by pupils. For adults, once the horrors of the black market are removed, it’s largely a victimless act; any problems it entails are generally medical or mental health issues to be treated appropriately. For kids, of course, drug use should be strongly discouraged.

But Seldon’s rhetoric—as with many like him—casually veers towards a more general social condemnation, with the ridiculous background logic that adults should be barred from doing what is dangerous for kids to do.

There’s some very interesting and admirable thinking in some of Seldon’s views. He favours a more rounded approach to education. He “wants to end the culture of exam results, league tables and narrow academic learning”; he believes “we all have seven intelligences, and schools focus on only two: linguistic and logical-mathematical intelligence, ‘and even those we do in a dull, unimaginative way’. The other intelligences—personal, social, artistic, physical, spiritual/moral—are largely neglected.” His “Happiness Classes” seem a little glib from the outside, but they’re surely a step towards truly paying attention to what education should be to encourage a good, rather than merely functional and prosperous, life.

But for all his challenges to the educational system, he’s content to leave other basic mistakes of our status quo in place, and nurture them.

What is the point of schools if they do not help children to learn how to live their lives to the full, how to enjoy themselves and be happy, and how to live intelligently? Drugs are not intelligent living. Alcohol is part of intelligent life for many, and with older school children the art is to help them to realise that drink, properly used, can be a significant enhancement to life. With drugs, there is no half-way position. Everyone—government, the media and schools—needs to give the same message: “No.”

The Independent, 15/4/07

The preposterous nature of his position is pretty clear from these statements. If he’s intent on overturning received wisdom in enlarging and enriching our concept of education, why would he slavishly align with our culture’s silly notion that, approached sensibly, alcohol can enhance life, but that other drugs are impossible to approach sensibly, or that they fundamentally degrade rather than potentially enhance life?

Of course it’s difficult to approach drugs other than alcohol sensibly when they’re illegal and are talked about in the way Seldon chooses to. This is a tricky conundrum; but it’s not one that will go away by ignoring it. On the contrary, just pushing it away will only empower it to drag us further in.

Are there any other reasons why Seldon might have a bee in his bonnet about cannabis?

I had a very bad experience when I was 18. I don’t want to talk about it. I’ve been too nervous, too aware of the fragile state of my own mental equilibrium to want to put an unknown chemical into my head.

Education Guardian, 29/5/07

I never like reductionism, pinning a complex issue on a single cause. To say Seldon’s position stems entirely from his own inability to negotiate the changes to consciousness that cannabis induces would be as silly as his belief that cannabis was the single significant causative factor in an adult allegedly losing their mind for six months. But his admission casts a little doubt on his objectivity in the matter.

He has some valid objections to cannabis:

One reason I have always loathed cannabis is it makes people so boring. Not boring to themselves maybe, but boring to others. The drug induces apathy, self-centredness and a lack of engagement with others and the world at large. It is the very opposite of what true life is all about.

The Independent, 15/4/07

Well, Jello Biafra had pretty much the same abhorrence of stoner culture (which only bolstered the strength and honesty of his pro-legalization position). It’s hard to deny that excessive cannabis use can take the shine out of someone.

But… boring, apathetic, self-centered, unengaged with the world at large? Ignoring for a moment the vibrant, life-affirming, joyous and even religious experiences that cannabis can trigger in the right setting, ask yourself: do these negative qualities strike you as exclusive to cannabis users? Do they not strike you as a pretty good summary of the worst aspects of advanced consumerist societies? Could cannabis use be a mild and insignificant exaggerator of what is fostered by the very mainstream of our culture? Could—shock fucking horror—illegal drugs be being assigned the role of scapegoat here, easier to point the finger at than the more challenging, prevalent and destructive dangers of capitalism’s disintegration of community, social responsibility and ecological health?

It would be a little hypocritical of me to move straight from decrying “easy finger-pointing” to looking at Seldon’s father, the deeply influential economist Arthur Seldon. But it’s interesting that Seldon’s father, joint founder president of the free-market think tank The Institute of Economic Affairs, “was one of a small band who, in effect, launched what eventually came to be known as the Thatcherite revolution.” (Guardian obituary) The increasing social inequity and disintegration fostered by Thatcherism, and its development and mutation in Blair’s policies has created a depressing and debilitating cultural atmosphere. I’m not surprised that expanding your consciousness in such circumstances can put some fragile people at risk of psychosis.

I welcome the highlighting of the downsides of drugs. If Seldon embraced the wider context of the problems being faced as we address “the drugs issue”, he might be a productive part of the debate rather than a cartoonish demagogue.

By the way, for any regular readers, I’ll hopefully be back to more frequent posts soon. A revamped dreamflesh.com, and a book of my essays, are imminent—watch this space!

An American investment banker was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellowfin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.

The Mexican replied, “only a little while.”

The American then asked why didn’t he stay out longer and catch more fish?

The Mexican said he had enough to support his family’s immediate needs.

The American then asked, “but what do you do with the rest of your time?”

The Mexican fisherman said, “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siestas with my wife, Maria, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine, and play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life.”

The American scoffed, “I am a Harvard MBA and could help you. You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. With the proceeds from the bigger boat, you could buy several boats, eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing, and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then LA and eventually New York City, where you will run your expanding enterprise.”

The Mexican fisherman asked, “But, how long will this all take?”

To which the American replied, “15 – 20 years.”

“But what then?” Asked the Mexican.

The American laughed and said, “That’s the best part. When the time is right you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich, you would make millions!”

“Millions—then what?”

The American said, “Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siestas with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos.”

Bristol’s Festival of Ideas kicked off today with a short lecture by social philosopher Steve Fuller, which I popped along to. A flaky friend didn’t show, so you, my dear readers, get what would have been my post-lecture pub ramblings.

Before we get the first round in (mine’s a pint), let me say I’ve not yet read any of Steve Fuller’s fascinating-looking books. An hour or so of listening to the guy talk and respond to questions gives a good impression, but I’ve probably missed some of his subtleties.

Fuller seems to be doing what I’ve always thought should be done, and only recently, through this lecture, realised is being done: he applies the principles of sociology and anthropology to science itself. He studies our own science in the way we might curiously observe the beliefs of a foreign tribe. Obviously this ruffles his colleague’s feathers, especially when the relativism that this stance necessitates sees him standing in defence of “Intelligent Design” (in court, no less). ID, according to almost anyone who hates fundamentalist Christianity, is a contemporary ruse with which to smuggle Creationism into classrooms. Fuller is much more generous towards ID – too generous, many would say.

Given the ludicrously limited choice of neo-Darwinism and Creationism, I side with Dawkins & co. as the lesser of two evils. ID, Creationist links notwithstanding, tries to hold out the promise of a “third option”. I’m not sure it wholly fulfills this role, but it’s the most publicly visible concept that has the potential to complexify the standard face-off between scientists whose concepts of science’s bounds have become worryingly fuzzy, and monotheists whose rationality has suffered a similar fate.

Fuller’s great contribution here seems to be to use ID as a tool for critiquing the calcified strata of belief that often underpin the dazzling commitment to objectivity in science. He contends that belief in a designer actually initiated and fertilized much, if not most, of the origins to modern science.

OK, so Newtonian tradition (if not Newton himself) has God as some great rational designer of an artifact universe; but why should the beliefs that got science off the ground not be shed, like scaffolding, when they outlive their usefulness?

Indeed, says Fuller. He took the work of Kenneth Miller, a biology professor at Brown University, who stood against ID in the court case where Fuller stood in defence of it, and who Fuller regards as the bee’s knees when it comes to the orthodox anti-ID evolutionary position. Tracing most of the arguments that Miller rallies back to the Journal of Molecular Biology, he decided to look at what is really being said about evolution by hard-nosed scientists. Not in their pop science titles where expressions implying a “designer” at work might be forgiven as convenient metaphors, but in their own technical periodicals, where their language is free to be as tediously bereft of such needless personifications as it wants to be.

Well, Fuller claims to have discovered that every step of the way, the concept of a “designer” at work is at least implied in the language of the discussions in this austere journal. This, he says, marks the Darwinists as disingenuous folk trying to have something both ways, with ID at least coming clean and trying to grapple with the issue as it can be conceptualized.

This is where he lost me. It’s an interesting take, perhaps, but it’s more than a little specious. He did, at least, come clean himself; he confessed that he personally can’t conceive of “design” without a “designer”. Suddenly I saw that he’s probably not as well qualified for the job he’s got as one might hope. How can someone so fundamentally trapped within a specific (if currently widespread) model of the world hope to offer useful meta-critiques of science itself?

Perhaps he addresses this in his books, but he made no mention this evening of Chinese thought. Alan Watts, in a lecture I was listening to a few nights ago, remarks that the Chinese ideogram for “nature” literally translates as “that which happens by itself”. Clearly, the Taoist appreciation of spontaneous order affirms that “design without a designer” is a humanly possible conception, even if it might be an effort to grasp from within a culture not used to the idea. Taoism, I feel, has a lot to offer the frustrating, explosive debate between science and religion in the arena of creation and evolution. Indeed, it’s no coincidence that John Gray‘s biting Darwinian attack on secular humanism, Straw Dogs, takes its title and opening quotation from Lao Tzu (“Heaven and earth are ruthless, and treat the myriad creatures as straw dogs”).

What is more, post-Darwinian Western science is home to another legitimate current of conceptions of spontaneous order: Chaos theory. Are Darwinians really being dishonest? If science is able to coherently formulate theories of spontaneous order arising in matter, surely the fact that writers in the Journal of Molecular Biology aren’t able to avoid language that implies an active “designer” simply begs questions about the limitations of our language? Our verbs may all need subjects, but does every action need an actor? Are we perhaps projecting limitations of our language onto the world? Fuller, at least, seems to be.

In all, an engaging and important thinker. But he may be more effective after a long meditational retreat.

I must finish here with another take on “spontaneous order”. Last night I found Adam Curtis’ most recent documentary, The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom, on Google Video (you might have to click around for the 2nd and 3rd parts). Not as wholly gripping as The Power of Nightmares and The Century of the Self (also to be found on the net for free viewing), but essential if you’re interested in the arguments he built up in those works. At heart it is a critique of post-World War II laissez-faire social and economic policies, and has some good analysis of the failures of the theory that “spontaneous order” arises when the state apparatus is dismantled (a la Reagan & Thatcher, Blair & Clinton).

My favourite part was near the end, and reminded me of that wise adage, “Economics is a form of brain damage.”

In economics, the whole idea that the free market is an efficient system is coming under serious attack. Over the past five years, many of the Nobel Prizes for Economics have been awarded for studies that show that markets do not create stability or order; that what Adam Smith called “the Invisible Hand” is invisible because it isn’t actually there; and politicians do have a powerful role to play in controlling the markets.

And a new discpline, called Behavioural Economics, has been studying whether people really do behave as the simplified model says they do. They show that only two groups in society actually behave in a rational, self-interested way in all experimental situations: one is economists themselves; the other is psychopaths.

Curtis believes that simple models of reality (here, John Nash’s game theory and classical economics) have been taken too literally, and in the process of applying them to society, people have been subtly moulded to conform to the image of people required by the model. The economic theory that people are rational, self-interested agents who behave in a roughly mechanical way is held at least partly responsible for creating a world where people are cut off from their non-rational feelings and altruistic empathies.

This all resonates strongly with David Kidner’s contention in Nature & Psyche that industrialism’s minimal conception of the natural world has led, through the forceful application of industrialism, to the literal reduction and destruction of much of the natural world. A simple model is enacted, and the world, like the taller guests of Procrustes, is violently made to conform to the model.

My vote for Curtis’ next project would be a dramatic exposition of Kidner’s thesis. So far Curtis has delineated the crucial issues at stake in politics, business and society; with ecological awareness bearing down as the weightiest contemporary issue, it would be fantastic to see his documentary series extend to our relationship with the natural world.