Those Less Fortunate

One of the essays I have recently been asked to write for my politics degree was titled “Should democracies be concerned about the losers in a capitalist system?” As part of the process I went through in answering the question I asked a few of my non-politics student friends the question to get their views and almost unanimously they answered ‘yes’. Their gut reaction was that we as a society should care about the people who are given the short end of the stick by the capitalist system we have in operation. When I pressed them to ask if they would be willing to pay more taxes to finance this caring they were almost unanimous again in their answer: No.

I tried to get to the root of this apparent (well, to my mind anyway) contradiction of opinion. How did they envision the government would help those who lose out if they were not to spend any money on helping. They didn’t want the losers to be helped, just for their to be concern that they were losing out. I was confused. I tried to argue that concern without action was the same as no concern at all. Their argument was that we can be concerned and use that concern to limit our actions and so make sure the losers don’t lose out too much. I asked who was to police this, they didn’t want anyone to. I asked how we would ensure that the losers don’t lose too much, they said we didn’t. I asked who defined too much and they said it was down to the individual. I asked how this was to stop anything. I was missing the point.

I don’t think that concern without any action, limits, etc, is actually concern at all. I think concern without action is simply ego stroking. We can be concerned without acting and so we can feel better about paying slave labour wages. We are concerned after all, that’s enough. We can be concerned without acting to stop mass species extinctions. We are concerned after all, that’s enough.

When a question about change is asked it is almost always limited, qualified, in such a way as to be essentially: How can we change everything without changing anything? For example: How can we make a sustainable society while protecting economic growth? You can’t, sustainable and growing are against one another. If something is growing then it’s not sustainable. The economy is part of society, if it’s growing then society is growing. If society is growing then it’s not sustainable. How can we change everything without changing anything?

How can we cut greenhouse gas emissions without slowing economic growth. Well, economic growth is almost predicated upon the release of greenhouse gas emissions. It almost necessitates the externalising of costs, for example efficient, effective clean up of pollutants. How can we change everything without changing anything?

The question posted by my politics tutors was aimed at generating a discussion between the works of John Rawls and Robert Nozick. Rawls believes that society should protect and help people and should use taxation as a method of doing this. Nozick believes we have three rights: Life, liberty and property. Any taxation of the state which is not used to ensure the protection of the first two breaks the third and should therefore be illegal and is immoral.

Rawls wants us to imagine how we would like society to be ordered, but he first wants us to imagine we don’t know what position we would have within that society. As a white, middle-class male I might find a certain way of doing things where women or blacks bore the brunt of the costs of society as fair. However, as a free-floating entity creating society from scratch and destined to be a part of it without knowing what part, would I be so happy with that arrangement? If I might be black then I’ll want a better deal for blacks. If I might be a woman I’ll want a better deal for women. Etc. So Rawls believes.

Nozick believes the state’s only legitimate role is that of protection of our rights. This is legitimately done through the police, to protect our rights against each other, and the army, to protect our rights against the people in other states. Any taxation not for these two purposes is theft and slavery. It’s the state demanding we work for them. If we are taxed at 25% above what it takes to finance the military and police, and we work 40 hours a week, then the state is enslaving us for 10 hours every week, in Nozick’s vision.

In my experience, most people agree with Nozick’s analysis of taxation and slavery, but want Rawls’ society… contradictory.

Exponential Growth

I have previously echoed Richard Heinberg’s question, are we smarter than yeast? I’ve also previously written about the problems of endless growth within a finite system. However, these seem to be two of the least popular (according to my Dashboard blog stats) of my entries. I asked myself why and it seems obvious. They don’t have a happy chapter.

Unlike many dire predictions about the fate of all of us if we don’t change our ways, I don’t believe there is a way to continue ‘business as usual’ and save the planet. A lot of the time we are told that if we just recycle then we’ll be fine. If we reduce and recycle we’ll be fine. If we reduce, reuse and recycle then we’ll be fine. If we reduce, reuse, recycle and invest heavily in renewable energy then we’ll be fine. Business as usual, no worries. Go back to sleep, we’ve got this one sorted.

Recycling requires energy and many, many things cannot be recycled forever. They stop being able to be turned into new things. Even the best recycling in the world will still require influxes of new stuff, new metals, new raw materials. It also takes lots of energy. Machines wear out and will need replacing. Parts break. These are the constants of life. We might make all of the wind turbines, solar cells, tidal barrages, geothermal turbines we need tomorrow, but that wouldn’t be the end of our resource use. We’d need to replace them as they broke. Even if we could get into a steady state with all of the resources we use being reused until they can no longer be reused, we still need more stuff. Even in a non-stone-age, ’steady-state’ society, there will still be the need for more stuff to be dug out and used.

This is assuming that the people who are investing in these things, the governments that are pushing them, the companies profiting from them, are abandoning growth. They’re not, of course. We can recycle, because it creates jobs, but we must grow. We can reuse to a point, but we must buy new as well, we must grow. We can reduce packaging, but not consumption, we must grow. We can invest in renewables, because that creates some jobs, but we must grow. We will invest in nuclear, because that creates tonnes of jobs, and we must grow. The economy must grow, or it will die. The implication of that statement is that the economy is more deserving of life than wild nature, or humans. The economy is master and we are its slaves. We are well-kept slaves (in the UK, US and other ‘Western democracies’, at least), but we are slaves.

As Derrick Jensen says, what we need are stories. Stories to tell our children, to warn them and educate them. Stories which will warn of the dangers of taking a steady state system and building from it a system based on growth. The stories will need to be better than just telling them they can’t do it, or appealing to the dictates of some deity or other. There will need to be a web of interconnected, self-supporting stories, a culture, which makes the thought of starting a growth based economy repugnant, insane. These stories will need to be supported by stories about the wonder of nature, its beauty and value. They will need to tell of the death of nature, massive, massive death, horrible death which a machine based on growth causes to priceless nature. They will have to make clear that the death causers also die from the very machine they use to cause the death. In short, they will have to be the exact opposite of the stories we now tell, of infinite growth being logical, necessary and good. They will also need to form the backbone of every culture in the world.

Every culture in the world will need the same core cultural stories because if any one decides that growth is okay, or good, then every other will fall before them. A growth based culture isn’t better because it wins cultural battles, it’s just more violent, more efficient at casting people onto the fire to fuel it. Its greed leads to its hegemony. Winning doesn’t make it right, it makes it repugnant.

Guns and Gun Control

In my youth I was very anti-guns. Guns kill people. The argument that people kill people is stupid. Although it acknowledges that people will kill other people with or without guns, it ignores the numerous instances of people shooting each other by accident (something decidedly harder without a gun). This is especially relevant for children, who are able to get hold of keys, are very inquisitive and boastful, and who are not renowned for their ability to listen to basic instructions or their finesse and subtlety of grip.

It seemed to me that it was obvious that a nation with easy access to guns would necessarily be a nation with very high levels of gun crime and homicide. I looked at America and it was instantly obvious that this was the case. Things like the number of Americans, per day, dying from gun crime compared to the number of people in the UK made the case seem water tight. I was unshakable in that conviction for many years and got into many debates with people about the need for weapons.

Most of the people I argued against believed that hunting was the best and most sure-fire way to win the gun control argument. As a native of the UK, this argument was lost on me. We have no big game. We have no hunting traditions. We wouldn’t have anything worth buying 9mm ammo for, which we would be allowed to hunt.

Then I found out about the gun ownership laws of Switzerland. They have fewer deaths per year than America has per day. For this to be comparable on a per capita basis the population of Switzerland would have to be little more than 825 thousand. It’s 7.5 million. The rate of gun crime in America is around nine times higher. There must be a reason, other than the availability of guns, to explain this difference.

If you look at figures for homicide, America outstrips most ‘civilised’, democratic nations in the world. Compared to Finland, the US has around seven times the gun related homicide rates and twice the overall homicide rates.

Gun ownership is clearly not causing the murder rates, see Lithuania as a country with stong gun controls yet very high murder rate, so the question must become “What is?” And I think it’s clearly cultural. The US is in love with violence. The South Park movie might have its tongue firmly in its cheek when it has a parent saying that “Horrific, deplorable violence is okay, so long as people don’t say naughty words” (or something to that effect), but it is clearly exemplified in the shows you can find coming out of the US. Very little swearing of any kind, yet lots and lots of violence.

Now, as I’ve matured, I’ve come to see what the Second Amendment is FOR. It’s not so some stupid Yank can go shoot some animals with a high powered assault rifle. It’s so the government fears its people. As Jefferson said, “When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears its people, there is liberty.” Gun ownership should be about the prevention of tyranny, not hunting, nor defending oneself against ones fellow citizens. It’s about protecting your liberty against your government. You have a right to defend yourself against others within your society, but your gun is not the first or best means through which that should be done, the government is. Your gun’s primary purpose should be the protection of your liberty from tyranny, plain and simple.

Since I came to this realisation I have been in favour of fewer gun controls. The people should be able to buy armour piercing bullets, high explosives, high velocity rifles, assault weaponry, etc. They should because they need it against their government. You don’t need an AK47 to take down game, you need it to take out soldiers who are coming to take away your freedom, your property, or your/your families life. You don’t need high explosives to go fishing, you need it to make the government think twice about sliding into fascism. You don’t need a pistol in your bedside table in case of break-ins, you need it in case of late night Nazi-style round ups of your friends and family.

You need a weapon capable of protecting your liberty from the one thing most capable of taking it. Your own government.

The survivalist angle that you need guns for hunting come the collapse is also flawed. Ammunition has a limited shelf life, primers stop working, without the easy access to the means of maintenance guns stop being reliable, etc. If you want a gun so you can hunt you would be much better advised using the last few years of cheap, easily availability of everything to learn how to make an implement from natural materials and use it to hunt with. That will set you in a much better position to survive than having a static stockpile of ammo and guns.

Even the best, most prepared and most heavily provisioned person can be dropped by a stray/lucky shot. Making a strong point and defending it might be a very civilised way to go about self defence, but a nomadic, light and knowledgeable person, capable of simply walking away into the wilds and finding food and water has a much better chance of surviving the fall of civilisation. A house is a target for gangs looking for food. A shelter which is concealed, made by someone who can, if needs be, leave it at a moments notice and make another somewhere else, is much better.