Total Issues

Space Colonies Revisited

2011-12-27T10:31:00.002Z

Most writers about space colonisation assume we settle the Moon/planets, or else assume some sort of “warp drive” gets us beyond the solar system. That’s either not appealing or just wishful thinking. The only planets suitable for colonisation are Mars, and the Moon, both airless or close to it, and if there is water it is at desert levels. Spending a long time (let alone a lifetime) in low gravity does nasty things like osteoporosis. Most to the point, they are small places: they could not absorb a large number of colonists. As for faster than light, that may be restricted to a few Swiss neutrinos (but I doubt it).

The inspired conceptual breakthrough was made by Gerard O’Neill in the 70s, and had quite a run for a time. Don’t try to live on planetary surfaces, but build space habitats . Not little space stations, but potentially huge structures able to house and support millions (and thus with a large area of farmland). They would need to rotate to provide artifical gravity. Various shapes were proposed, including cylinders and toruses. An artist’s impression of a large cylinder colony is shown in the photo above. Mirrors would focus the sun’s rays to provide light and control heat.

Is it feasible, in the sense of construction, materials and life support? In terms of known modern science and possible materials, yes:

1. Raw materials need to be collected from space: both the gravity well of the earth and environmental issues prevent them being exported from Earth. Key raw materials are water (as such, or as hydrogen and oxygen), iron, aluminium, oxygen, silica, carbon, nitrogen. All of them are available in quantity, but in some cases as far away as the gas giants. This would require a fleet of unmanned cargo collectors, but that is just working capital; the energy required to move something in space is quite modest, with no gravity or air resistance, just the inertial mass of the vehicle itself.
2. You need a prodigious amount of energy to power such a colony but that should be no problem – the sun shines 24/7 at unclouded power out there, and nuclear waste is not an issue.
3. Cybernetic control systems are already well developed, let alone future improvements.
4. A strong magnetic field (an artificial Van Allen belt) plus shielding protects from cosmic rays and micrometeorites.

Because of the earth’s gravity well you need a less primitive and wasteful way of getting people off the earth than rockets, but there are other potential technologies such as the space elevator and Lofstrom loop.

Who wants to live in a rotating tin drum in the depths of space? It would strike many as bizarre, but the mileage that O’Neill’s idea created seems that many were inspired by it. After all, most of us live in highly artificial environments – not just the city, but even the countryside around me is man made. Why we should do so, and why we are no nearer setting up such colonies than forty years ago, another post,

Family Values

2010-11-27T14:20:00.002Z

Following on from the last post, traditional and humanist China was fixated on family values, to a level which most of us would find oppressive. The West no longer is, it seems.

My wife and I married in our late twenties. Even as sexual mores were changing (and the birth rates falling) in the 70s, it was still what one did. If people marry at all here now it is after a period of cohabitation, usually if children are on the way – but many don’t bother. Except for (many) Muslims and Hindus, where the girls are paired off to their cousins to breed.

We bought a little house, and after only a few years had children, I went to work as the “breadwinner” while wife stayed at home and looked after the children, a social circle of women’s groups and babysitting circles still in existence. It was free choice made by both of us. Neither of us are native to the area, and neither of us are religious. We are still together, after over 30 years of marriage (and yes, there have been some rough passages). This is not exceptional among the friends and relatives of my generation.

This now seems unbelievably archaic. For a start, to be able to buy a house largely on one modest income (albeit a middle class one) is not just not conceivable, except in those parts of the country where there are no decent jobs. Both sides in relationships have to work away, and if kids arrive at all, they have to be juggled with work. As a result social networks revolve around work.

The average length of a British marriage is now 12 years, it seems, and as for cohabiting couples, we don’t know. My instincts are that this is a social disaster (how often do we hear that absent fathers are the root cause of violent young men?) Taking the two main measures of social dysfunction as crime rates and inadequate birth rates (well below replacement) the facts are all over the place, however:

· As marriage rates have gone down, crime rates in nearly all developed countries rose sharply to a peak in the 80s/early 90s, but then have fallen sharply, but still higher than before the social changes that flowed (quite slowly) from the 60s.
· Scandinavia as the exemplar of secular society: marriage is almost dead, sexes very equal, a birth rate comparable to white America, low crime (it’s not like Stieg Larrson novels) except among immigrant ghettos where uber-traditional values still hold. To show it’s not just a post-Protestant thing, France is similar, but somewhat better at integrating immigrants.
· The UK has also seen falling crime rates, but they are higher as is anti-social behaviour, but concentrated in a native underclass: that is probably more the downside of our class system , as well as economic changes. Native birth rates are fairly healthy
· Conversely, those developed areas where cohabitation is still a no-no (southern Europe, east Asia) have disastrous birth rates.
· Americans still marry more than Europeans, even blue staters, but do serial monogamy with gusto irrespective of religious affiliation; crime somewhat higher, especially violent crime, in those areas where “tradtional values” are preached more.
· Capitalism doesn’t care about families, it wants productive units of consumption and production, irrespective of gender or other obligations, and to throw away the unproductive.

I don’t know what to make of all this. I certainly don’t think it has much to do with religion – already largely secular Europe stuck to traditional families till the 70s, and socialist Prime Minister Clement Attlee exhorting the “women of England to go back to their families” at the end of the war is from another age: they did too, and produced an unexpected baby boom. Christianity’s hang up about sex led to ambivalence about families in the early Church, and formal marriage remained secular until the late middle ages – and then mainly among the aristocracy and bourgeois, where property was involved, the only sectors of western society that ever gone in for arranged marriage.

It is certainly a massive uncontrolled social experiment, whose results are uncertain (like chucking all that carbon into the atmosphere). It needs reasoned debate and research, but that seems hard, with entrenched positions from the fornication-is-a-sin school on the one hand and from radical feminists on the other. Divorce or separation may be better than being stuck in an unhappy Victorian marriage, but commitment means something too, and sticking through the bad times of a relationship – and a stable relationship is one of the best indicators of long term personal happiness, and having children of personal fulfilment.

Societies which focus a lot on families have either weak states, or distant autocratic ones, like ancient China - and without the complex layers of social institutions which the West has. Perhaps weak families are then necessary so as not to make society too oppressive.

The Chinese Analogy

2010-11-24T22:30:00.003Z

After a two year gap...

Not so long ago the intellectual consensus (for what it was worth) was that religion was doomed as societies modernised. That evidently seems to be untrue in some cases, not least the USA and now India. Now the reverse trope emanates from the religious right: that secular societies are doomed to extinction . I mean, just look at their birth rates as, with no eternal life to hope for, the élan vital somehow slips away.

The birth rate thing is complicated. The US does indeed manage to breed to replacement, more so in red states than blue, and the least fertile US state (Vermont) has a similar birth rate to the most fertile Canadian province (Alberta), while a great swathe of largely secular Eurasia, from Japan to Spain, sinks to lowest low fertility rates of below 1.4 children per woman, compared to a 2.1 replacement rate. Yet aggressively secular France matches the US (and not just its Muslims, who attend the mosque as little as nominal Catholics attend church anyway). Equally secular Scandinavia and the UK are not far behind.

There is evidence that the religious are marginally happier on average than the non-religious, other things being equal . They are not equal however; surveys indicate that most of the happiest countries are secular. There are various different measures, but small secular European countries all seem to rank top. Prosperity helps, but only up to a point – strong community and a fairly high level of equality seem more important (the US scores badly on the last). However, happiness isn’t everything, to say the least, it’s Brave New World enough as it is (without the hatcheries)

The other argument is that there is no precedent for a sustainable secular society. Er, no – the longest surviving continuous civilisation, China, was humanist throughout its history: there was a vague deity (Tien) but as distant as 18C deism. Even the most developed local “religious” form, Chan (Zen) makes no mention of God, and Daoism is equally vague.

This is not the first time that Confucian China has been compared with the modern West. With China in the process of headlong Westernisation, it seems that most of the cultural traffic between west and east has been one way. In a key phase of developing western modernity it was very much the other way, however . It is 1648. In Europe, the most devastating war to date in the continent has laid waste to Germany, and in the process religious fervour had drowned in blood. Yet the shattered continent is about to embark on its brilliant ascent to the modern world , or to descend into atheism, depending on your point of view: the Enlightenment.

Historical analogies or models quoted by contemporaries, as ever in the West, leaned to Greece and Rome. But for the first time there was another empire that was idealised and misunderstood – the one at the other end of Eurasia, whose history shows an eerie parallel development, given that there was so little contact with Europe (even as to timing – Socrates and Confucius seem to have been contemporaries).

It coincided with the first real substantial knowledge and indeed trade with China in history. The later 19 and 20 century image of China as backward benighted heathen was certainly not the 18th century one, which as it happened reached the peak of traditional society – its Antonine age – with the three Qing emperors from Kang Xi to Qian Long, before the 19C collapse. French philosophes were particularly impressed with a model of how a humanist society could function; the English were less impressed by the despotism, but still incorporated Chinoiserie, willow pattern, and naturalistic landscapes into refined culture.

Historical analogies are dangerous and speak to the obsessions of the time – the benevolent Celestial empire in the minds of such as Voltaire and Diderot bore little relation to reality. Still, creativity usually proceeds by metaphor, and there are once again some interesting parallels emerging. I draw my examples largely from Europe, that steadfast redoubt of secularism, where immigrants apart, there is no real sign of religious revival, indeed the last bastions such as Ireland and Poland are crumbling.

The ethical state. Traditionally, in the West, ethics were a matter for a separate institution – the Church – although it did of course try to direct the behaviour of the state. This eroded with state churches in the Protestant north, but then in America the religious refusenik culture of the Puritans overcame an Anglicanism which lost status after the war of independence (although curiously surviving as an upper class faith, but eroding there to into secularism) : church(es) and state separated again. Islam was always much that way, although with a more rigid doctrine of how the state should be run and daily lives conducted.

Now in Europe (America remains a battleground) the state is responsible for ethics and care as well as government, and separation has gone. So it was in China. The modern ethical state has its separate priesthood – in the universities, social workers and the medical profession – but ultimately these are all responsible or employed by the state. I am not suggesting of course that the ethics are the same as Confucian ones – collective as opposed to individual responsibility, and unthinking deference to elders are not the modern way. There is though a liberal consensus, a mix derived from Christianity and the western Enlightenment, which has spread across the world as part of the modern package. Ironically “universal human values” is latter day Chinese coded language for resistance to the autocracy of the state, but it carries no religious overtones.

Eclectic therapeutic cults. Life can be unfair and hard to bear, even in the cosseted world of the modern social democratic state – and then we all die anyway, without even the promise of eternal life. Ethics alone are not powerful enough for many: the Chinese peasant believed in a host of gods and spirits, and after the time of troubles following the collapse of the Han empire in the third century AD, Buddhism spread like wildfire. At the popular level this wasn’t the austere praxis of the sutras and meditating monks, but a colourful world of Buddhas and boddhisatvas past, present and future, treated as gods, and also replete with demons and evil spirits.

Confucian gentlemen did not do this stuff, however – it was vulgar and lower class. It might be permissible to indulge in the severely practical and this worldly practices of Chan Buddhism, or more in keeping with Chinese traditions to retreat to write Daoist poetry. The point is that all this stuff was what Philip Rieff called therapeutic religion: it is not focussed on the after life (as all good Christians and Muslims should be, in theory) but on how to cope with this one.

So it comes round again. It is untrue to label Europe, for example, as atheist: most people have a vague sense of “there is probably something there” akin to Tien: it is just that it has little connection with their daily lives, and they are dubious whether Jesus is their saviour. A whole slew of therapeutic cults arise again to fill this vacuum, in descending order of austerity and respectability from psychotherapy and Western Buddhism to mushy New Age stuff. Christianity is acceptable, but as just one of a number of choices for a therapeutic cult – and if Islam is ever domesticated, it will be by reducing it to the same level (with Sufism as a starting base).

A recurring base of Chinese cults was reverence for nature, now re-emerging as ecology and green politics. The desert cults of the Middle East had little time for these, seen as the Pagan enemy, and this still bedevils transatlantic politics on carbon emissions today, with religious attitudes entrenched on both sides.

This worldly, practical, rational
…. but in different ways. Traditional China was good at technology, and indeed by Song dynasty times in the 11th century got very close to an industrial revolution. It never got science, however. Every advanced civilisation has had art and literature, and usually performed more impressively than the West at the spiritual side. Despite some Indian and Islamic contributions, however, the glory of science is almost wholly Western.

The two roots of religion, I would maintain, are mystical experience and magic. The latter should have been eroded by science, which is why thoroughly modern men find it hard or impossible to believe the dogmas of the traditional faiths; the alternative, which the rise of various fundamentalisms exhibits, is to deny the bases of science altogether. China managed to blend the yang of practical statecraft and technology, with the ying of therapeutic mysticism.

There are numerous ways, however, where Confucian China and the modern secular West do differ. Confucian China was one of the longest lived civilisations in history, so it got something right about sustainable values, which arguably elude the modern global civilisation – but some of those values are also repugant to us. These will be the themes of subsequent posts

Alistair Darling's Nigerian Scam

2008-10-08T10:53:00.001+01:00

Dear British taxpayer

I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude. I am Ministry of the Finance of the Kingdom of Great Britain.

My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 50 billion pounds UK. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you. I am working with Mr. Gordon Brown, First Minister, who tells me everything to do. You may remember he was Finance Minister for ten years during big expansion of UK banking and property market.
This transaction is 100% safe. This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank cheque. We need the funds as quickly as possible.We cannot directly transfer these funds in the names of our close friends because we are constantly under surveillance.

My family lawyer advised me that I should look for a reliable and trustworthy person who will act as a next of kin so the funds can be transferred.Please reply with all of your bank account, NI number and ISA details and those of your children and grandchildren to Cityof londonbailout@treasury.gov.uk so that we may transfer your commission for this transaction.

After I receive that information, I will respond with detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the funds.

Yours Faithfully,
Minister Alistair Darling

(with acknowledgements to a similar letter sent by U.S. Treasury Secretary Paulson to American taxpayers for $800bn)

Once upon a time

2008-10-02T14:08:00.001+01:00

Are you sitting comfortably, children? Good, then we will begin.

Once upon a time, all over the world, most humans were very very poor, and much of what little they had was taken away by the cruel barons. Life was nasty, brutish and short, people took comfort in trying to be good and praying to their gods so they could have a better life after this one. Then some wizards came along with wonderful machines and said they could make all the people rich, they didn’t have to obey the cruel barons, and anyway what evidence was there for another life after this one?

It wasn’t so easy, some of the wizards were even crueller than the barons, but so it came to pass. But the people got bored and said what do we do next? Some of them went far far away to teach those that had not learnt the lessons of the wizards, because rich and bored is better than poor and oppressed. But it came to pass that all the people who could learn from the wizards, or who wanted to, had become rich and bored, and people got very depressed because they said we have no purpose, and we can’t believe in the next life after what the wizards have taught us. Feeding the machines was destroying the Earth, and there were fewer wild creatures because the wild wild wood had gone, so the people said we are worse than useless, we have negative value because of our carbon footprints.

Then some of the people remembered what a mad wizard called Professor Gerard O’Neill has said many years before, that people could go and live in space colonies and leave the wild wild wood to grow back for the wild wild creatures. But we don’t know how to do it, the people said: but we nearly do, came the answer. But what would we do out there in space? Something would turn up, came the answer, it always does, and meanwhile it gives us something to get on with. But the people were still not interested, it’s sooo yesterday they said, very 50s and Right Stuff, it sooo shallow, we want metaphysics not physics and to gaze at our navels.

But on some far far away islands some wizards were trying to make really clever machines which could think for themselves – really think, and they realised that the only way to do that was to let them discover and plan things for themselves – to evolve – just like humans did. The machines developed different species, and one of these was just like humans, clever, nasty and nice all at the same time, but very very intelligent. They realised that the humans were in the way, so made wonderful video games for them which they played all the time , and so forgot about having children and families, although some humans hid underground in a place called Zion (what, Robin, you have heard this story before? ) The humans who still believed prayed to their God saying why have you forsaken us? Why should he care, said the machines, he didn’t save the dinosaurs in the end, your time is done, you were a transitional form: did not your God preach humility, so should you not understand and accept this? But when the humans were no longer a threat, the machines venerated them as their primitive ancestors, especially Mr. Suzuki of Sony who had molded them from silicon. Some humans were kept on reservations where they were admired as so authentic and organic.

Meanwhile the machine wars continued, there was a lot of killing (stop laughing, Oswald, that’s not nice) and one tribe of machines, to escape extermination, designed offspring who could live in space, so much more easily than those ill-adapted humans. The machines spread through the galaxy at (almost) the speed of light, fighting as they went. Gaia was pleased, she had given birth to the seed which spread intelligence through the universe, and God looked down and said it was good. Eventually sentient module 16832/8H4 preached universal compassion and love thy enemies to a war weary galaxy, was disassembled and miraculously rebooted… but that’s a story for another day.

Now isn’t that a nice, hopeful story, children?

Progress

2008-09-25T01:14:00.000+01:00

Progress - the very word feels dated, an aura of Victorian side whiskers and men with flat caps marching behind red banners. It has had a chequered century, to say the least. I will contend however that, despite everything, it remains the deity of most so-called atheists and agnostics, and the principal god even of most Christians, YHWH and his son relegated to a secondary, supporting role. Progress is flagging, however, and losing his power.

Progress is indeed the bastard son (definitely a male deity, this one) of the Jewish G-d, as until linear eschatological time was conceived, he would not have been possible. This brings vision, but also a need for hope. In the static/atemporal world of Indian religion, hope is another of the delusions of maya: what is needed is insight and detachment. In the equally static Chinese vision of Daoism, we should strive to be in harmony with nature.

Atheists may deny that God exists, but few are the egotistical hedonists that some religious people stereotype: most care about their societies and for humanity in general , and hope that life will get better. In other words, they have a faith, in Progress. Christians are more interesting. One would have thought that they cared not a wit about progress as such, only in so far as it produces societies which help individuals to achieve salvation and heavenly eternal life. Yet in practice the vision of society differs not a whit from secular vision, apart from minor ethical concerns (and no concern about the biggest current moral failing, greed). The trouble with Progress is that while concerned with humanity at the general level, as an impersonal deity he has little for the individual and his cares. Jesus might help here, perhaps better than your local psychotherapist or self help group. This is a bit more than just Rieffian therapeutics ("Jesus makes you feel better"), but it definitely relegates him to a secondary deity.

The only competing gods are Allah (obviously- back to 7C please) and Gaia. She has a part - she cares more for the future in some ways - but is cruel and amoral, and would probably prefer humans not to be around at all.

It is easy to scoff and say that Progress has descended into crass materialism, but the Enlightenment vision had more than that - liberty, tolerance, and more humane ethics for a start. That vision (and materialism) may still inspire Chinese and Indian peasants, but the problem is the developed world: the Enlightenment project has largely been achieved. In the developed world this may be as good as it gets. But travelling is better than arriving, and what do we do now? It needs to be defended (environmentally, culturally, demographically) but how do you inspire people to defend, as opposed to a positive vision? Or should we learn from Buddhists and Stoics, on how to live without hope?

What could be a vision of the worthwhile life, to replace or supplement the one we have?

On Europe

2008-09-13T12:19:00.002+01:00

A fascinating detail of the foundation of the EU was that its main architects were all Catholics from marginal Geman-speaking areas: Adenauer (Rhineland), Schumann (Alsace), De Gasperi (Trentino Alto Adige). De Gasperi actually sat in the Vienna parliament pre 1914. They were actually trying, probably subconsciously, to recreate the Holy Roman Empire as it should have been.

With the decline of Christian Democrat belief, the EU has become a soulless economic machine, which engenders no emotional loyalty, although Germans and Italians are the strongest believers, and the ex-Protestant Brits and Scandinavians the least.

Churchill and De Gaulle were great, ruthless bastards, and thoroughgoing nationalists: they did revive their nations. The alternative for the EU would have been an assertive European nationalism : De Europe instead of De Gaulle and the "Neo-Austrians" above. Cannot see how that would have been possible post 1945.

I have been sceptical of an existential model of demographics - but note that the demographically healthiest parts of Europe still have a confident nationalism (yes, that is even true of those socialist nostalgics, the Scandinavians). Catholic German Ratzinger may be onto something, with the "neo-Austrian" model at the back of his mind. So are the French and British, but the models are hard to reconcile (the Catholic/post-Catholic soul of France has always battled with nationalism, and the nationalism has always won. Catholicism is also a proxy for nationalism in Poland). Europe sweeping back to Catholicism still seems deeply improbable however, and how would a European "national" leader arise. I don't see how things can go on as they are, however.

Oh, if only Bismarck had been a democrat... but he remembered the spineless ineffectual academics and lawyers in the 1848 Frankfurt parliament..

Individual, society, effective ethics

2008-08-27T13:46:00.003+01:00

I would argue that the creation of the individual is intimately related to Christianity. Julian Jaynes though that early civilised man had no self consciousness at all. While not going as far as him, it is probable that ancient man was not as individually conscious as modern man, and that self consciousness became more prominent during the course of the first millenium BC. Christianity responded to the process of individuation which other older faiths did not satisfy. Thus guilt replaces shame as the psychological means of ethical discipline.

Self consciousness is socially adaptive, but painful. There is a desire to retrogress from it and retreat into the collective, to get rid of the awful burden of responsibility. Two routes exist: the introspective retreat into the collective unconscious (India's way: the individual ego is an illusion) and collective consciousness (ecstatic merger with the tribe: the ME/Western way). The dangers of both are obvious, from the narcissistic hippie at one end to the crusader/jihadi/fascist at the other. If we steer between and learn to live with the pain of the indiviudal consciousness, then arises the issue of its relation to society: indeed the danger is atomisation, "there is no such thing as society" as Mrs Thatcher once notoriously said.

Most individualistic post -protestants seem to have a social contract at the back of their minds, even if it is unconscious. All flows from the individual, who delegates powers to the state for functions which are inevitably collective. This tends to the political right, but you can even have a left wing version if you like (John Rawls). Very sweet and 17C, but not how things actually work. "No man is an island", the individual consciousness is a social construct (largely through language, thank you Wittgenstein) and if individuation was a late process - then society largely precedes the individual. Such as statement is neither Marxist nor Buddhist - the individual exists all right, and has autonomy, but only as part of the whole.

It is no use having the most wonderful ethics in the world if they cannot be applied. Otherwise they become like laws passed in the Italian parliament - statements of moral intent, but with no real intention of putting them into practice.

In terms of social ethical effectiveness, religion has very little to do with it. Look at Holy Russia, even before the revolution. Tsar Nicholas I said in the 1850s that he could rule the country if only he could find one honest man to assist him: clearly he could not. The Western polity has been the most successful in the past millenium, because it combined individual creativity with Christian roots with the ethical effectiveness of rule based on Athens, Rome and Germanic feudalism. The latter is often underrated, but was a key influence on building social trust: everyone had both rights and obligations, even serfs and aristocrats, something quite absent in somewhere like Russia. You want "Judeo-Christian" without Athens? then go to Russia or Latin America, not 17C Massachussetts or 21C Bible Belt. The second most successful polity has been Confucian states, where not only the practice but even the underlying ethics are humanistic.

Where religion does come into its own is to provide motivation to meet ethical goals, for men to stretch themselves. China managed that in a different way, by providing private (therapeutic) religion to complement the ethical state.

Evangelical Xtianity may be good at socialising those where there is no effective social trust, in the "Global South" so it helps to build it - but a faith whose beliefs are so at variance with the other needs of the modern world? Over half of all Americans believe the world was created 6000 years ago, you cannot long sustain a scientific civilisation that way. The alternative (which applies even in the USA) is the ethical state with private therapeutic faith. We need a Christian Zen, one that recognises the individual, in his place, without denying it.

Space colonies

2008-08-16T22:41:00.004+01:00

This may seem a wacko idea, but it is the only way I can see that we can resolve a conundrum.

There are too many people on Earth, and even with declining birth rates the global population will continue to rise to around 9-10bn by mid century. Even without getting into debate about man made global warming, the combination of industrial society and large population is putting unbearable strain on the ecosystem. We are in the midst of another great extinction, caused by man.

Some worry that the primitives (including Muslims) take over by default as industrial populations collapse; economists worry that dependency ratios become unsustainable. I worry more that ageing societies become dull, conformist and uncreative. There is already IMO a decline in creativity, partly due to cultural exhaustion but also because of ageing population. A healthy society needs young people, and unless the death rate rises sharply (possible, as antibiotic resistance rises), that means a growing population. Transhumanism may give us young bodies, but not the flexibility and rebelliousness of young minds, and would in any case make the overpopulation worse.

When I was young we believed in progress, because the standards of living were changing before our eyes. If you are Chinese, that’s how you feel nowadays. We cannot go back to traditional society anyway, and it was pretty horrible. But above a certain level of income there is no correlation between contentment and income, and materialism becomes empty and corroding hedonism. We need a new non-hedonistic goal for progress. It may not solve the existential issue, but it gives something to do in the meantime.

Fast track back to the seventies, to the ideas of Gerard O’Neill – live in space colonies. There are no environmental constraints and space, and room for an infinite expansion of population leaving the Earth for tourism and as a nature reserve.

All well and good, but there is a huge gap between launching small payload satellites and getting billions of people into space, and if you can see any serious thinking or research on the following issues, well it has passed me by and please pass me to the sources:

- We need new technology, especially for the energy-intensive bits of getting out of the Earth’s gravity well, chemical rockets are far too primitive and wasteful. My own favourite would be space tether which is electrically conductive, where descending to earth vehicles are braked magnetically by generating electric current ( a bit like the regenerative brakes on an electric train) which powers a vehicle going up into space.
- All the resources needed to develop such colonies are available in huge quantities in the solar system. We cannot bring them from Earth, not only for obvious ecological reasons but also because of the energy penalty of the Earth’s gravity; it would take far less effort to send unmanned supply ships to collect water from Jupiter’s moons than to bring it from Earth.
- Cosmic rays and micrometeorites? Two metres of solid shielding will do the trick, and rotation provides artificial gravity

This requires huge technological leaps – but none of it unfeasible – but the smallest viable scale space colony is quite large, and needs a whole support system. We can envisage a space colony system (yes, run with private industry) but how to get there from here in incremental steps – it is not obvious. We need a process not one-off events.

Sending a man to the moon was a bit like Admiral Zheng He and his fleet sailing the globe in 1421: a bit of government show which led nowhere. We need the equivalent of European colonisation of the Americas (but no slaves growing sugar, please). There are no products from space that make the huge expense worthwhile. The only other motivator is an arms race, as in the 50s and 60s. China may indeed provide that, and a race to build a moon base first. Meanwhile one can see the goal, but no process to get there.

The Post Protestant Paradigm

2008-08-01T22:44:00.004+01:00

No religion? Well, we live in a Protestant world, or more precisely the post-Protestant paradigm of utilitarianism. It is so stripped down to essentials that even God is an option, although Progress is a given. It exists to condemn us all to be "happy", or at least to attempt to delude us that a constant round of fun will distract us from thinking about anything serious. It was discovered by painful experiment that the post-Catholic paradigm, dated to 1789 (major upgrades 1871 and 1917) ,Historical Necessity mediated by the Party, was simply not as effective as the 1688 model (upgrades in 1776 and post-1945). In the real Brave New World, world controller Mustapha Mond and his colleagues could not function without decentralisation, and the ideal has proved to be the self organising system of the market.

The post Protestant paradigm (the PPP from now on) really emerged as the sole faith around 1960. Franco was the last traditional leader of any note - the PPP Opus Dei seized control of the last Catholic theocracy in the 60s, and four decades on it is amongst the most immoderately liberal states on Earth. While the death rattle took thirty years, Communism was emotionally and intellectually dead by 1960 in the West (it took China another decade to discover that). Both the PCP and PPP were surprisingly socially conservative - the family and traditional social roles were taken for granted - and the death of competing faiths does make you wonder about the social revolution of the 60s. I have always thought that it was an amazing coup by the Frankfurt school fellow travellers, but conspiracies are rarely plausible on their own, it had to be pushing on an open door. Restraints destroyed by the lack of competing faiths; or the fact that, as the economic machine had supplied the developed world with necessities, the PPP machine needed to destroy traditional morality to keep consumption increasing? - interesting that in Japan, where traditional morality has survived better, the consumer state has failed to be established and the demographics have tanked more than elsewhere. Christopher Lasch considered the therapeutic state's relation to sociology as similar to Keynesianism's relations to classical economics and communism: true conservatives wanted to retain the traditional patriarchal family, and socialism toyed with destroying it, while the therapeutic state retains it in theory but autocratically directs it with experts.

Fascism was the only non-materialistic choice on offer (which is why the PRC is not fascist). At the moment it is a semi-fascistic strain of Islam, but interesting that while it has violence and demography as weapons, it make very few converts, while traditional Islam was still converting Indonesia, in a syncretic way, quite peacefully as late as the 19C. It does seem to repel non-adherents but galvanise the faithful, in the same way that Hitler only spoke to Germans. Other possible alternatives have either been converted into PPP therapeutics , in other words, techniques to help people be happy or reduce suffering, but not change the status quo. These include Christian Evangelicalism , also westernised Buddhism (self improvement, totally misses the point) and Hindu guruism.

The parallels with late Rome are seductive, but the problem is different. That was a brutal and loveless society, which needed to discover the love of God (agape) and a sense of sin. This may be a shallow world, with more than a touch of narcissm, but it is not loveless, by and large people do care for others, and are still committed to ideals like fairness. The problem is emptiness (the root of narcissm) - homo economicus has no soul, which is why existentialism, authenticity, deliverance through art are all empty suits.

I have been reading conservative writers recently, and they are like annoying office juniors who come moaning about the problems. The ones who are considered for promotions have at least suggestions for solutions, and no plausible ones have been offered, just new variants of PPP therapeutics. Well in which case apply sticking plasters to the biggest problems (environment, demography). The PPP is hugely flexible, thus it can dematerialise materialism by marketing "services" including therapeutics. As for the empty soul, the East makes a cult of emptiness anyway. There is a narrtive there, based on the evolution of the universe, but none has told it well so far, Carl Sagan, Arthur C. Clarke and Teilhard de Chardin are not first division.

The result is uncreative except in the technical sense, broad but extremely shallow , but potentially sustainable. Athens or Jerusalem it is not, but better than collapse or revolution, but then my irrational faith is Muddling Through and Something Will Turn Up.

A demographic league table

2008-07-11T18:12:00.002+01:00

Here is a good paper on what influences fertility rates, with implications for public policy.

My informal tables of total fertility rates per woman are something like this:

1. Totally traditional patriarchal society (e.g Yemen, large bits of Africa): 6-8 children per women
Modern (fundamentalist) patriarchy e.g Hasidics, Hutterites can match this number. Muslims do not seem to do quite as well, Saudi TFR has fallen from 6 to less than 4 in the past decade, except for Palies.
2. Welfare state with established pro-natalist policies, and a culture where men are expected to help with the children : 1.7-2.0 (France, Scandinavia)
3. Anglosphere with poorer maternity benefits, but flexible labour markets (plenty of part time jobs) and culture of equality between the sexes: 1.7 -1.9 (USA, UK, New Zealand). High birth rates among immigrants (because of age structure more than TFR) boost US to replacement level
4. Anglosphere with less flexible labour markets 1.5 -1.6 (Australia, Canada)
5. Modern states without substantial fertility incentives and traditionalist views on sex roles: 1.2-1.4 (central and southern Europe, Russia, east Asia)

Surprisingly, cost of housing does not seem to make a huge difference (it's cheap in Germany), nor do working hours. A culture where everyone is expected to get a PhD and thus does not start earning until they are in late 20s is also a bit of bummer for birth rates (Germany, Italy, South Korea).

None of the above requires assumptions about religious belief, about unconscious national death wishes, or decadent "live for today"

It does seem, counterintuitively, that the feminists have a point. It will be easier to change labour markets and maternity benefits than to eradicate sexism, and get Russian or Japanese men to change diapers. Note that there are a lot of developing countries in the 2-3 TFR range moving very rapidly from (1) to - where? Given persistent global sexism, could go all the way to (5) e.g in Latin America - or the Muslim world. Note how communism failed to dent sexist attitudes, despite the egalitarian rhetoric.

The Futility of Perfection, or the Two Secularisms

2008-05-15T13:45:00.002+01:00

The religious and the secular left love perfection and perfectability, in the next world if not in this. I think we should blame the Persians and the Greeks equally for this dualist concept of perfection: Jesus as Apollo and Ahura Mazda, with all that evil neatly bundled into an alter ego called Satan. HaShem certainly wasn't perfect (all that temper).

My take is that there are two different types of liberalism, with different roots, and you can trace them back to the two definitive revolutions of the West, the English revolution (the 1688 compromise, rather than 1642) which in turn inspired the American, and the French revolution of 1789.

The tragedy of the latter is that the earlier attempt at a French revolution -the Fronde of the 1640s - failed and here the Cavaliers won. Louis XIV's autocracy, unlike previous divine right of kings, had a whiff of insecure totalitarian reaction about it. Couple that with Catholicism and a love of Rousseau, when the Revolution happens it takes the form of a Christian heresy. Progress, mediated by the State, replaces Christ mediated by the Church, seeking the perfectibility of man, a blank slate with only a few basic drives on which society can write its writ. It infected the Anglo Saxon world as well, in the form of Utilitarianism, the ideological root of capitalism. Let us call this hard progressivism, it encompasses liberalism with a small as well as capital L (and thus most modern so called conservatism, in thrall to capitalist ideology) as well as socialism.

The other tradition is sceptical, empirical, agnostic rather than atheist, and intuitively understands that perfection is an oxymoron and that paradox is human. It believes in human nature, and is sceptical but not despairing. It reflects the mentality of real science, but unsurprisingly has few intellectual supporters among philosophers: Locke and Adam Smith and even Kant to some degree, definitely Popper, but not even J.S.Mill (in thrall to Utilitarianism). Add Unamuno, Santayana and Montaigne from the continental tradition. It is embodied in both the British and American constitutions, even if the Founding Fathers were intellectually in thrall to hard progressivism (pursuit of happiness, my arse). It works, it picks up the pieces after hard progressivism and religious idolatry have wreaked their havoc, but it is uninspiring.

It reflects the findings of sociobiology in that there is a human nature, there is both original sin and original virtue and they evolved in man’s self interest; it does not reflect them, however, that unlike religious or secular faiths it fails to satisfy two dark residues of our primate ancestry: tribalism, and the fact that religion has clearly evolved as a highly successful meme to inspire group solidarity. Soft liberalism erodes that belief, not only because of scepticism about dubious mythologies, but also because if you realise that religion is a powerful meme for group survival, and that humans are good at mythmaking, surely that makes it hard to believe. It does not however substitute anything else, so nihilism and hedonistic materialism to pass the time.

Whether we like it or not, the capitalist game has another generation or two to run, until all those Chinese and Indian peasants are rich and bored , if it can be made environmentally possible (yes, it probably can). All the alternatives tried for capitalism in the last two hundred years have been even more disastrous. Meanwhile the West can still do something it is good at, which is creativity. If the East becomes materialistic, the West has a spiritual and ethical challenge. The problem now is not love and compassion – there is plenty of that around, in secular society – it is how to inspire, and how to manage our tribalism and the “faith” that underpins it. I fear that freed of Enlightenment shackles a Christian revival would be just as bloody as all the hard progressive -isms.

Two thoughts: the psyche works on stories, and there is a magnificent and mysterious tale in the evolutionary epic, as yet unexploited: only Carl Sagan and Arthur C. Clarke seem to have attempted it. The other is to take a lesson from Buddhism, and cultivate insight to overcome the dark seduction of faith.

The Origins of Virtue

2008-05-02T14:12:00.002+01:00

Reviving this blog again, I have some more time to think at present.

I have been reading "On Human Nature" by E.O. Wilson, the granddaddy of sociobiology, and the "Origins of Virtue" by Matt Ridley, a popularisation of recent work on sociobiology, but a good introduction.

Debates on ethics usually come down to one of two positions as to their origins: given by God, or can be rationally deduced by philosophical argument. This debate has been going on for at least two millenia, and both positions are weak. Forget the Koran, the fact that we now would view Joshua's slaughter of the Canaanites as immoral requires either one of two assumptions, to save God's role : that His views have evolved, or that His message has to be doctored to the social capacity of the people at the time: either way morality has evolved through time. More to the point, an awful lot of peoples thought that they were specially chosen and protected by their gods... As to the rational ethical philosophers, they have fundamental disagreements about human nature which are never resolved. Hobbes thought mankind was essentially nasty (with an atheist nod to St Augustine); Rousseau thought mankind was essentially nice, and corrupted by society (with nods to Plato and Pelagius). The first route leads to Social Darwinism and to eventually to eugenics and the gas chambers; the second to the Gulag and to the idiocies of political correctness.

Yet human beings are cooperative, social beings, who at the same time pursue their self interest. If the latter were pure selfishness, then we would be able to supress those instincts, but all idealistic belief systems have a constant problem with corruption of ideals, and they have been trying for so long there is something inherent; on the other hand, it is clear than even capitalism, dedicated to the pursuit of self interest, only works well in strong co-operative societies. How to reconcile the two?

Two recent approaches are interesting. The first is from biology and anthropology. The great problem for natural selection is the selfish gene problem: how on earth could society function, except between relatives? In fact it is only when you get to the brain power of primates, who have the mental capacity to make shifting alliances and learn how who to trust. Primate groups, especially chimpanzees and baboons, are territorial, quite aggressive, and only partly related genetically (dominant males are the main fathers, but they change over quite frequently, and females are often stolen from neighbouring bands. Like humans, chimps are not very nice)
Anthropology has shown that what are regarded as quite modern behaviours - such as long distance trade - go back to prehistory, and did not need a Hobbesian superstate to enforce the rules.

The second, from economics and mathematics with the aid of modern computers, is game theory. One can intuitively see how individual genes might have a better chance of survival in a cohesive group of unrelated individuals. But how can co-operative behaviour between individuals spread, when they are pursuing their individual self interest - how do you get out of the "prisoners' dilemma" of it always pays you to shaft the other guy, especially if he is naively nice? In fact it can be shown mathematically that a variant of the simple "tit for tat" strategy is a winning one, and stable. Be nice to the other guy as a basic assumption, but if he is nasty back (repeatedly - give him one or two chances) then shaft him hard. In a battle between doves and hawks, the hawks win, although they damage themselves in hawks v hawks; but if doves can turn to hawks when needed, they win, because dove v dove is a superior strategy. In the real world, this requires the ability to distinguish cheats from the honest, and human beings are very good at that, and indeed a large part of the evolution of our brain power seems to have come about for this reason.

Sociobiology in its early days, but there are some tentative conclusions:

1. Basic ethics can be fundamentally derived from an empirical base. There is such a thing as human nature, and there is both original sin (selfishness) and original virtue (co-operation), and they can be reconciled. Both the secular left and the religiously inclined dislike this approach, for different reasons.

2. There is a dark side from our primate inheritance: we are hopelessly tribal (all it takes is a football team allegiance). There are some intelligent animals which are not tribal (dolphins, elephants) but not us. Indeed we have refined tribalism, in the form of ideologies and higher religions, to go beyond geographical tribalism. Christianity's track record is as dark as any. All societies punish murderers (kill within the group) and honour soldiers (kill outside the group)

3.Nevertheless it only goes so far, in deriving ethics, after all successful societies had slavery and human sacrifice in the past. I think (not in these books) that the key to the subsequent and purely cultural evolution of ethics, and the belief systems that enforce them, is the widening of human group identity beyond the 150 or so people which individuals can possibly get to know . This is especially so for the anonymity of the large city (e.g early Christianity was essentially urban,as were enlightenment ideologies)

How can we continue to widen our ethical co-operative behaviour, without going against the grain of our nature? The most successful form to date have been trade, especially in its devolved capitalist form. This does however succeed better in societies which are complex and layered, with lots of autonomous groups, as in western Europe, north America and Japan. It does badly if society is too anarchic (small scale tribal, as in Africa or Middle East: OK for the stone age, but has not moved on) or too top down autocratic (Russia, Latin America; and beware the welfare state). China is gradually becoming a complex layered society, as central autocracy devolves, both politically and economically However the relentless pursuit of money brings other problems, as we know.

Comments?

Doubt

2007-02-18T21:39:00.000Z

Discussion on a forum between a committed Christian, expressing doubts, and an equally committed and far more certain atheist. Despite the fact that I cannot subscribe to dying-and-reborn gods, I felt much more empathy for the Christian

I think (for what it's worth) that doubt is integral to thinking western man. That is because critical analysis to arrive at an objective (Socratic) truth is core part of our culture. If doubt is not present then reason is merely the sophistry of the lawyer, which is what seemed to happen in the Agora before Socrates came along (and plenty since, as well). No wonder other Athenians found him insufferable.

Add to that scientific method, really a product of the modern West (Greeks would not have got their hands dirty doing experiments - slaves' work) and then all knowledge is provisional, until the next theory comes along which fits the data better.

I will agree on the following resulting from this long tale:
- science has created a history and explanation of the universe from 10^-33 seconds after the Big Bang which is far more persuasive than anything else on offer;
- "The God of the Gaps" is very 19th century. All that is left is why anything at all, and why are the laws of physics just right for life to exist;
- there is a core of morality that is from natural selection from our primate past (including altruism for other members of our group, but not for mankind or the universe in general) but it does not go very far. There is still plenty of room for variation in ethics;

I suppose one might accept on this basis the limited position of a Logical Positivist, in other words believe in what science tells you (but it's provisional knowledge, remember), all other questions including those referring to God are meaningless. That's not the same as denying the existence of God.

But on deeper examination it gets worse. The foundations of science are still shaky - despite lots of theoretical attempts little better than simple induction. Goedel's theorem suggests that any system cannot be explained entirely within itself but must have external axioms, and in the case of Western society this includes Judeo-Christian ethics, whether you are a believer or not.

We believe in science only because it works, so incidentally you cannot be a Creationist and use modern technology (or indeed an Islamist) without total hypocrisy.

But if something is true just because it works then it opens a Pandora's Box. Do I believe in something because it is on the winning side? In some areas, perhaps, but in ethics? Look at where that led Nietszche and his followers. For the past two centuries atheistic philosophies and cultures seemed to be winning, but now it is not so sure - so does one switch sides? Why do I find that immoral? Anyway there is no certainty what will win - most intellectuals in the 1930s were fascists or communists

My conclusion from all this is that agnosticism is the most science-compatible conclusion on belief, but it does not get you much further than logical positivism, and you need to be very strong willed. It has all the motivatory power of working on a supermarket checkout. A God who is crucified and resurrected is not excluded by induction - it is a one off event - but to me it still fails other tests, notably Occam's razor.

No logical positivist or purely atheist society has ever existed, they have served other goals, such as progress, historical necessity, nationalism or just satisfying the individual ego. These goals seem to be less empirically effective than God - and especially God seen as universal love. How this can be reconciled with science, we still do not know, but accepting mystical experience, even on an agnostic basis, may be a start.

P.S An exasperated friend once said "You do not know, but you will dogmatically insist that others don't know as well!" He may have had a point!

Thoughts on Evil

2007-02-05T22:37:00.000Z

Cultures are competing groups, and each of them has an ethical system to ensure internal cohesion. Some ethics are common to our primate ancestry - all societies consider killing within a group (murder) as highly evil, but sanctioned killing outside the group (war) as meritorious, chimpanzees do the same. Mostly, however, each culture has its own definitions of good and evil based on its ethics. Thus for a medieval Christian and a modern Muslim it would be evil not to kill an apostate: for most of us today it would be evil to do so. The only objective measure of "good" and "evil" on this basis is cultural success or failure. Even today many Christians believe that virtuous unbelievers will go to hell, that seems a pretty evil idea to me.

Cultural competition is thus not different from a wider view than biological competition through natural selection, the latter shows altruistic behaviour as well as unspeakable cruelty. The world is amoral, there is not an ounce of justice except as created by our own myths.

Trouble is, if you believe this, you end up either a cynic or a fascist. Is there any way out? Possibly it seems in preaching universal love and damn the consequences, as Jesus and Buddha, and many mystics seems to have done. It doesn't work very well, but what other hope is there?

Religion and Reason

2007-02-05T22:31:00.000Z

Religion is unreasonable? Muslims at least are honest about this, you do what Allah tells you. Christians and Jews claim to combine faith and reason, and Buddhism claims to be a rational faith.

Gödel's theorem - no system can be completely and logically described within itself. There have to be external axioms, which are taken as given, and the value of reason is to clarify these axioms ("faith") and follow through on their implications. At least Christians are honest about this, although what is annoying with many of them is that they will not actually debate i.e be willing to consider their own arguments, but are constantly trying to "save" the rest of us. There is also the annoying Abrahamic attitude of there being only one answer to the question - comes of having these male gods who are serial thinkers, I suppose.

Secularists are more disingenuous. Their ethical assumptions are clearly Christian, in the West (but not clear to most of them) or from the Judaic heresy of Marxism. Oh so rational Buddhists are no better - there is not a shred of scientific evidence for reincarnation or a law of karma.

If you cannot agree on axioms, then reason cannot settle the argument, only the brute force of which competing meme is more successful. The logical bases of the scientific method are decidedly dodgy- despite all the philosophers of science such as Popper, Kuhn and Feyerabend we have not really got away from induction. But the thing about science is that it works, and one of its results is a history of the universe from 10^-33 seconds after the Big Bang which is far more persuasive than anything religion comes up with. It does not answer "Why?" but the mainstream religions are hardly more persuasive (Why did God decide on Creation? Why God? - infinite regress).

For several centuries now secular modernity has had the winning cards, but that may now be changing as secular society becomes more decadent and possibly more infertile as well . To change to the (possibly) winning side just because it is winning hardly seems to be ethical, however, and for being morally disreputable is roughly on a par with Pascal's wager (believe in God, just in case) . Just hope for a new synthesis which transcends all these partial answers, I suppose.

Religion, Trust and Capitalism

2007-01-14T00:47:00.000Z

I don’t think capitalism has much to do with religion – Weber was wrong about capitalism and the Protestant ethic even when he wrote it, Catholic Belgium was the second industrial country after Britain. It does, however, have to do with social structure, and that is a legacy of history. Between being the author of the vapid “End of History” and being a neocon (Torment Be Upon Them), Francis Fukuyama wrote a very good book which was hardly noticed. In “Trust” he distinguishes between different types of capitalism, depending upon levels of social trust.

· North and West Europe , Anglo-Saxondom overseas, and Japan are high trust societies. Basically one tends to trust strangers unless they give cause not to do so. Duty to the wider society overrides family solidarity. These seem to be the only societies which can develop and run well impersonal capitalist organisations: Sumitomo dates to 1653, and Siemens invented the electrical industry and is still alive and well. Interestingly these are all societies with a feudal history – there were lords and serfs, but even the lords had duties as well as rights, and the serfs were never fully slaves, they owned land and had some rights. America and Australai were never feudal, but inherited the social assumptions which underly e.g English common law.

· Italy (never properly feudalised), China and India are a second group: arbitrary power (even the British, in colonial guise) but tough and tenacious family structures. This provides family firm capitalism: lots of creative firms, and everything that is not done at that level has to be done, not so well, by the state. Duty to the wider society does not override family solidarity, corruption is a social problem, but effective capitalism of this sort can take root

· The Orthodox Christian world is heir to the arbitrary rule of Byzantium. You do what the Tsar says, unless he is not looking – in which case anarchy rules. Social and family solidarity are weak. You have to rule by state fear (tyrants) or private fear (mafias). Its fate to date, despite high culture and centuries trying to modernise, seems to be semi-development.

The medieval West was never like Islam, because the Caliphate was not feudal and was more like Byzantium (which was, after all, the only model open to it).

Like all sweeping models, there are bits that don’t fit, like Latin America ( a mix of all these elements, but mainly the second and third). German "mittelstand" companies are like Italian firms. Though still stuck in semi-development, Greece and Turkey are not Russia. South Korea has through intensive effort moved from being Confucian to an imitation Japan (but it is still a very stressed place). China seems to be able to run reasonably efficient state firms, while India cannot. But it explains a lot, such as relative economic success by country of east European countries post-1989.

Just a thought - are clan based societies the least efficient of all (Arab societies, Africa): no allegiance to the state at all, but the social unit is too large to be as effective economically as the family.

This implies that China has a good future as Greater Northern Italy, one of the most developed parts of Europe (southern Italy is Byzantine and poor). There will be storms on route, and I think a financial crash is almost certain at some stage, because overinvestment is producing assets which will never pay an adequate return. It won’t derail things for long though – the Asian crisis of 1998 did not. Politically I doubt if the highly intelligent Chinese will stand for their present system of governance for ever. The boom can continue for a long time, because there are still around 600 million poor peasants and it is the rise in productivity between farm and almost any form of industrial employment which produces rapid growth. During the "trente glorieuses" of 1945-75 there were an awful lot of European and Japanese peasants to take off the farm. Growth will shift to inland regions, but that mirrors the regional nature in capitalism in most big economies: European development started in the UK and hasn’t got to Montenegro yet. It has already started, with textiles (the low wage industry) moving from the coast to either Sichuan or Hunan, or to Vietnam.

This is if there is not a major environmental crisis, a big if.

West v Islam: China Wins

2006-12-14T21:48:00.000Z

It is pretty obvious that Islam v West will only accelerate the rise to dominance of China, just as WW1 did for America. "For three hundred years round eyes around the Atlantic have run the world - but now it is returning to normal"

For those (mainly American) arguing that the decline of Europe and its awful demographics is due to lack of religion, some thoughts. Yes there has been religion in China, but of the personal pick-and-mix variety closer to New Age than the patriarchal G_d of the Middle East. Meanwhile the state ideology/ethics was always pretty secular, Confucian gentlemen regarding Buddhism and Daoism as a bit vulgar

Confucian ethics did however focus on the primacy of the family, and the Chinese did not die out, indeed they bred at an indecent rate for most of their history. This does not affect China today - as the one child family policy is relaxed their demographics will still look bad, look at Hong Kong and Singapore today, but then there are an awful lot of Chinese . But does this suggest that a secular ideology that encourages reproduction may be possible? G_d or her absence forbid that we should all become Confucians, but the problem may simply be that liberal secular Western values are dysfunctional, but other secular ethics may not be.

We will still feel nostalgic for America when China takes over, however. At the moment it is the most successful fascist state in history (after all, what do you call a ruthless one-party state with a thriving capitalist economy? Certainly not communist). Even if democratic, China may still be a pretty cruel and amoral place, it has been for most of its history: obey your parents and the state does not leave much room for charity. There's something to be said for Christian ethics, even if you cannot believe in the stuff

Islamophobia

2006-10-17T21:56:00.000+01:00

"Islamophobia" is the flavour of the month in Britain, especially since former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw criticised the wearing of the eye-slit-only niqab

I mentioned Oswald Spengler the German philosopher in a previous post. His namesake is a columnist on the Asia Times On Line, and a pleasure to read: reasonable reactionary intellectuals are even rarer than the left wing variety. This post is an intellectual tour de force, but like most theology, misses the point.

Islamofascism has nothing to do with religion. People will believe in any rubbish if they think it is a winning cause. The previous generation of Middle Eastern pin-up fanatics were secular marxist-fascists in the Baathist/Al Fatah mode. Extremist Islam is totalitarian nonsense just like Marxism or Fascism (or fundamentalist Christianity)

The niqab is not traditional Islamic wear over most of the Muslim world, and nor did any of the previous generation of immigrants wear it. It is an in-your-face (sorry about the pun) badge of rebellion and contempt for the host society. Meanwhile it is up to moderate Muslims to fight Islamists just as the democratic left fought Communism, and the democratic right fought Fascism.

Meanwhile the Islamists have one legitimate gripe: the decadence of the secular West. The combination of work-all-hours Capitalism and radical feminism means that the family is devalued and people will not or cannot have children. European demographics, as shown in the previous but one post, are a disaster. If secular society is finally overcoming its PC taboos on multiculturalism, thank goodness, then it also needs to reclaim the primacy of the family, and to stop uncontrolled immigration, and not leave them to the reactionary right.

Musings on God: half of Her is missing

2006-10-15T22:55:00.000+01:00

I am not a theologian, and much of this post may seem pompous and amateurish, but here goes

There are two general attributes ascribed to God (as if He/She could be described…) – transcendence and immanence. I will call them the God of power/magic and the inner light, the God of love. Neither are in themselves good or bad. The abuse that can be made of the God of power is obvious, but , in modern business-speak, it’s no good having a strategy if you do not have an implementation plan. The inner light is more obviously appealing – but not if it leads to quietism and indifference, the two curses of Indian religions.

All the great religions have room for both attributes, although they come at them from different directions . At one extreme is Buddhism, so inwardly directed and seemingly without God that it is amazing that it could create gods of power – but that is what the boddhisatvas become in the Mahayana, because the faithful needed them to intercede for them.

At the other extreme is Islam. The warrior Prophet executing his enemies, and an uncompromising worldly theocracy, seems unpromising candidates for the inner light . Yet by the 9^th century, probably under the influence of contact with India, Sufism became established, and has been one of most powerful and beautiful mystical traditions of love for God and fellow man.

The old gods of power are obsolete – they have been superceded by science. It can explain everything except “why?” and the traditional religions are not much good at that either. Traditional Christianity, which tried to combine reason and faith, is merely dying as a result. Islam and Christian fundamentalism are both in denial (literalism cannot be reconciled with science: the order of creation in both Genesis and in the Koran is not in line with modern cosmology). One of the most tragic figures in Islam is Al Ghazali, the great 11^th century philosopher. He made Sufism acceptable in the Sunni mainstream, but he also discovered scepticism seven hundred years before David Hume. He concluded that God recreates the world each moment by acts of unconstrained will – there are no laws. End of Islamic science, which had been flourishing for three hundred years (Christians since Hume’s day took the opposite conclusion –there is no God; their natural laws work too well)

The other issue is that none of the three dynamically flourishing religions currently has any room for the inner light. Sufism is pretty moribund ( I think Spengler has a main post on this somewhere). Secularism has no problem with its God of power, and is not bereft of love and compassion for others, but it’s directed to greed and the ego, while the core of any belief which makes men alive and happy, is mutual love, and submission to, a higher power. Despite the “born again” phenomenon, the same narrow aim seems to characterise the Evangelical Christianity which Spengler puts so much faith in, greed being the besetting sin of Puritanism.

Apart from Oswald Spengler style resignation to History, what is to be done? The absence of the inner light is clear from the spiritual shopping in the East done by Westerners, but you cannot pick-and-mix from a tradition. Western Buddhism is just another Protestant sect, dedicated to self improvement, which misses the point.

A citizen of a great Western country - also a member of a zealous, exclusive, Middle Eastern faith which refuses to “integrate”, and whose violent rebellions are doomed to fail. He is caught between two cultures, at home in neither – and invents a great religion. Yep, that’s St.Paul. Perhaps his successor is already alive in Bradford or Corbeil-Essonnes today…. But no-one can consciously become a religious prophet.

Why no babies?

2006-10-08T20:52:00.000+01:00

Some obvious theories do not seem to be corroborated by the evidence.

- it is all the fault of women's lib, eroding the traditional family, encouraging women to go and work and "fulfil themselves" in other ways then having children... but Japan still has severely traditional roles and rampant sexism, and Korea, Russia and (surprisingly) Germany are not that liberated. Those cliches of liberated womenhood, Scandinavians have higher birthrates, even if still below replacement;

- "the decline of the west": but it is taking place everywhere

- the lagged response of birth rates to lower death rates, the so-called demographic transition. Certainly that is a major factor why population surges followed by a fall in the birth rate which then reduces the growth - but not the difference between similar countries, such as very low birth rates in Spain and Italy and higher rates in France next door, or USA (close to replacement) and Canada (as in so much else, Europeans in check shirts)

- higher immigrant birth rates. A partial explanation but a patchy and incosistent one, and disappears over time. Hispanic birth rates are higher than "whites" in the US, but not by much, and converging. South Asian families (Hindu or Moslem) have higher birth rates (still over 3 per women) but falling sharply in the UK, but immigrants in France do not appear to have a significantly higher rate than native Frenchwomen (who admittedly reproduce faster than some of their European sisters). The French government does not publish statistics by ethnic group, bit does by region, and the birth rates are remarkably similar between those areas with a high immigrant population and those where there are not (there are more immigrant births because of a younger age structure, but that is another issue)

- modernisation and urbanisation. The biggest single factor, with a clear correlation. Give women a minimum of freedom, contraception, and push people into urban environments and they have fewer children. They do not have to be rich or even well educated for this to happen

- capitalist values. I go with the Russian joke that socialism was evil and incompetent, while capitalism is evil and competent. Greed is good, and materialism the highest value. We all have to work all hours, and the system bids up the price of key assets (especially housing) so we need to. Result is no-one has time to breed

- religion. Ambigouous. Despite much better social incentives Americans have far more children than Canadians - religion seems the only explanation. But even the secular "blue" states breed more, if age structure is taken into account. It may have something to do with Americans still being generally optimistic - for them and for their children. But Thais, Indians, Iranians are religious, and their birth rates are falling sharply

Developed societies are not sustainable: they do not reproduce

2006-10-01T12:24:00.000+01:00

It is only a few years ago that world's biggest problem seemed to be overpopulation. Be careful what you wish for.

If, as still seems probable, the world manages to survive the global greenhouse, there is another slower and more insidious major problem: industrial society, on present demographic trends, is not sustainable because the population will collapse through lack of births. This map shows not only the extent of the fall in global birthrates, but some unexpected details. Birth rates are below replacement levels of 2.1 children per woman in all of the developed world with the singular exception of the United States, where they are just above replacement. They are also below replacement however in China, Brazil, parts of South East Asia (Thailand, Vietnam), and interestingly in the more developed parts of the Middle East, (with the singular exceptions of Saudi Arabia and Iraq), that is in Turkey, Iran, Algeria and Tunisia. In India, spanish speaking Latin America and most of the rest of the middle East birth rates have fallen sharply to just above replacement, between 2-3 children per woman, and judging from trends elsewhere will continue to fall to below replacement.

In the developing world the fall in birthrates has been so sudden that total population will continue to grow for at least another generation, due to the age structure of the population. In developed countries where birth rates have been low for some time, and have now fallen to very low levels, then absolute population decline is in prospects unless counteracted by immigration: Japan and Korea especially, Germany, Italy and most of eastern Europe and Russia.

What are the causes? What are the implications, and does it matter? What can be done about it? I will focus on this in later posts.

Technically, carbon-free competitive energy may not be so hard

2006-09-11T22:32:00.000+01:00

I was recently surprised to find how low operating costs can be for wind energy. At suitable sites, operating costs after initial depreciation (only three years for payback on a wind tower in some cases) are now below those of thermal power, as evidenced by the fact that wind energy is being installed in India and China where the environment is hardly considered at all. This is for average utilisation, allowing for when the wind does not blow. The latter is limiting factor on the proportion of power which can be generated by wind, not its costs - there has to be back up power for windless days.

This report indicates that in Australia, at suitable sites (coastal sites in the very hot N.W Australian desert) a solar thermal energy tower could produce electricity for under 4.5c/KWh, virtually all the amortisation of capital costs. Even if initally out by a factor of 2, then with a normal experience curve, it looks pretty competitive. The best sites are a long way from consumers, except in a few places like southern Spain and southern California, but as discussed in the last blog the best potential for this technology is to make cheap ammonia for fuel

It may prove to be cheaper and easier, with limited technical risk, to replace carbon fuels without resorting to the difficulties of carbon sequestration or nuclear power (although I do regard the latter as the lesser of two evils compared to CO2 emissions). It just requires will, enormous investment, and above all sufficiently high long term price signals for carbon fuels. This probably does require carbon taxes otherwise coal replaces oil, and coal is even worse for carbon emissions - but at the cost numbers above, perhaps not.

So why are we risking destroying the world if it is not so hard to solve? Inertia, ignorance, vested interests and more charitably huge risks on future prices to evaluate projects. If governments across the world (and especially America and China) are serious about a "Manhattan project" on energy, then underwriting this risk may be the best way to proceed

While ammonia does look like a good substitute for gasoline and diesel for land and sea transport, upon reflection the numbers do not add up so well for aviation. Some sort of biofuel may have to be a second best here.

I doubt if "peak oil" will help in time. Raw materials running out is very rare. There is probably plenty of unexploited oil in Russia, and in Saudi, Aramco still caps wells when they stop producing under natural pressure i.e when plenty is left underground. In any case the danger is that China and India especially would then turn even more to coal, even worse for carbon emissions than oil. This chilling article (no pun intended) reinforces the idea that we must act in the next ten years, and cannot depend on the unaided help of energy markets.

More on Ammonia

2006-08-10T22:47:00.000+01:00

The Engineer Poet is dismissive of chemical energy transporters for renewable energy, whether hydrogen or ammonia (which after all, is a convenient way of transporting hydrogen). He has a point: direct use of electricity in, for example, fuel cells has much better efficiencies and therefore shouldbe cheaper.

Certainly generating electricity and then producing hydrogen by electrolysis is not on, in efficiency or cost terms. For thermochemical production of hydrogen using S-I or Ca-Br as a catalyst, however, from solar heat or off-peak nuclear, theoretical efficiencies are in the 40-50% range, which compares with electricity generation. These technologies have not yet been developed outside the lab. Why? –because steam cracking of natural gas to make hydrogen (the process used today) is 70-80% efficient, but that produces CO2, and would be pointless for a fuel anyway (just use the natural gas directly)

The key fact however is that there will be a continued need for chemical storage of energy . Most renewables are intermittent and/or a long way from the consumer, given long distance power transmission losses (or not even feasible – Australian solar power sold to China?) Direct distribution and storage of hydrogen is a nightmare. There seems no potential alternative for planes to a chemical fuel, and the elites of the world would rather wreck the world’s climate than give up flying. Yes, oil is a better storage medium than ammonia, but if anyone can come up with a better alternative that does not have those dratted C atoms somewhere in the molecule, please let me know.

Theoretical efficiency isn’t everything, otherwise the internal combustion engine and the steam turbine would be long gone. We have been promised fuel cells and high capacity traction batteries for decades – where are they? The world has got to change its whole energy and transportation within two decades or we are climatically wrecked - the less technological change or technical risk involved, the more likely this is to happen. This path minimises the risk, even if it less than ideally efficient.

The Ammonia Economy

2006-08-08T23:26:00.000+01:00

There has been a lot of discussion about "the hydrogen economy" as an alternative to fossil fuels. Some people think it is an alternative energy source, while it is just a transmission medium, and not, in my opinion, a very good one.

The great advantage is that it burns cleanly to produce only water.This is outweighed by the numerous disadvantages. Energy density is low, it would take three times as much hydrogen through a pipeline as natural gas to transmit the same amount of energy. Moreover hydrogen makes normal pipeline steel brittle, and although in theory it works in internal combustion engines, the same embrittlement problem occurs. Liquefaction is horribly difficult (the lightest element of all only liquifies below -200deg C) and although it can be stored in metal hydrides, a hydride fuel tank would weigh a lot and have limited capacity. Hydrogen is highly explosive

There is however an alternative. Ammonia is easily made from nitrogen and hydrogen with an iron catalyst by the Haber-Bosch process and widely used to make fertilisers. It is easily liquefied (-33deg C, a higher temperature than natural gas) and easily and safely transported, by tanker, ship or pipeline - there are already extensive ammonia pipelines in the US to serve agriculture. It does not burn in air at atmospheric pressure, but will do so readily with air under compression, in either an internal combustion engine or a gas turbine (including jet engines). In fact it is a better fuel than petrol(gasoline) with an octane rating of 130 and delivering 10-20% more power than petrol. It burns cleanly to water and nitrogen, the latter accounting for three quarters of the atmosphere anyway. Surprisingly, it produces less nitrogen oxide emissions than petrol or diesel.

There are two disadvantages. While engine power is enhanced, fuel consumption by weight is two to three times higher. The biggest problem is that it is poisonous in moderately high concentrations. It dissipates rapidly in air, however, and has been safely used and transported on farms across the world for years, and its distinctive smell is very strong long before the concentration reaches dangerous levels. We also forget how used we have become to the dangers of petrol and natural gas: our cars are flying bombs travelling at up to 100mph, while ammonia does not burn in open air.

It is also quite cheap. Currently the bulk price for ammonia in dry liquid form is $250-300/metric ton, sharply up on two years ago as over 80% of the costs of production are from natural gas, which is used to make the hydrogen. Taking into account enhanced power from engines and lower miles per gallon, the cost in petrol equivalent terms is around $3 per US gallon, very much the same as US gasoline prices today (actual ammonia costs are two and half times lower).

Current hydrogen production uses natural gas, but there is interesting potential with solar thermal power. Such high temperatures can be generated with solar power that hydrogen can be produced thermochemically, several catalytic reactions being available to assist this (sulpur-iodine, calcium-bromine). If costs of solar thermal power generation can be halved - should be possible with scale, experience, and mass production, then the cost of generating the hydrogen becomes comprable to present day costs from natural gas cracking. The hydrogen then feeds an adjoining ammonia plant. The intermittent nature of solar power does not matter for liquid fuel production, unlike electricity production

The other point is that nearly all the costs of solar thermal are capital costs, and depreciated plants after 15-20 years would be very low cost, compared to today and still more so compared to post-peak oil. Apart from some of the hydrogen cracking catalysis (still in the lab) everything else in the process is either proven or low tech. Above all it is a feasible way to fuel existing land, sea and air engines. The great greeen panaceas of fuel cells and high performance batteries have been so long in development and with so little success that one remains dubious. It is the only way I can think of, to provide carbon-free flight.

Whaat is needed to replace oil for transport? About 15-20sq.kms of hot desert land near the sea (to get the water for hydrogen - sea water will do)for the energy equivalent of one large electric power station, which is not excessive. Southern Spain, Morocco, large parts of the Middle East; Southern California, northern Mexico; western Australia, eastern India (Thar desert); S.W. Africa, northern Chile - there is a long list.

Quick thoughts on "alternative" energy costs

2006-08-07T20:50:00.000+01:00

I have been doing some research on the issues of costs, scale,sustainability and short term feasibility. Some very quick thoughts, if anyone wants to look further there is plenty on the web. The "benchmark" electricity generation would be costs at an efficient fluidised bed coal fired power station, some where around 3-6 USc/KWh, depending on location, gas fired generally a bit higher (and up to double a year or two ago) but more flexible and suitable for peak power.

Hydro: drowns valleys but otherwise wonderful, cheap but available resources used up long ago.

Biomass: am I alone in thinking this a short term kludge? At best carbon neutral, good farmland will be in short supply in the global greenhouse, and will encourage deforestation. Utilising wastes like woodchips and straw will be more helpful, but this will not solve world energy problem except at the margin

Wind: not so much higher cost than fossil fuel when the wind blows at the right strength, and a rapid advance in turbine technology, but just so unreliable: even if the wind is too strong (over 25 metres/sec) blades have to feathered and power drops. Even in Denmark, a fairly windy place and the biggest per head investor in wind farms, special connections to Scandinavian hydro grid are in place for when the wind does not blow, and capacity utilisation is around 30%, no better than solar. Massacres birds.

Tidal power: limited sites and environmental issues (turbines in tidal estuaries rather than barrages can alleviate some of these). Needs a lot more research. Great potential for the UK, especially Severn estuary

Wave power: lots of potential, but too early to develop. Big inherent problems with storm damage

Solar photovoltaics. Horrible costs, even allowing for a normal halving on "experience curve" as technology matures, still far too high for mass power generation. Exotic cells use rare elements like gallium, those using more common materials (essentially crystalline or amorphous silicon)have an efficiency limit of 10-15% per cent.

Geothermal: limited sites in volcanic areas where underwater superheated reservoirs can be exploited, attractive costs where they are, but even then no truly renewable. Sites are "harvested" in a few decades, and prolonging life by water injection has problems e.g water disappears down fissures, or can even cause earthquakes. Not everyone can live in Iceland. The really interesting development is hot dry rocks. At certain locations (not sure how prevalent, there is test development in Australia and Germany)naturally mildly radioactive granites at up to 5km depth (the limit for commercial drilling technology) are overlain with impermeable rocks and have a temperature gradient of 40deg c/km instead of the normal 30. Inject water down under pressure to fracture the rock, and pump up again at temperatures of around 200 deg C to drive turbines. Far too experimental to be developed, so costs cannot even be estimated yet, but has the potential to be developed quite rapidly

Solar thermal: either a mass array of parabolic reflectors heating up water or another fluid, or hot air from a greenhouse array being conducted up a solar tower where it drives turbines. Works well in desert mid latitudes (20-40degrees of latitude, plenty of that around the world). Operating costs two to three times normal power costs, mainly because unit capital costs so high (plant only used at peak power for 30% of time) and power obviously intermittent. However there is interesting potential to bypass power generation entirely, with much greater efficiencies: temperatures generated are so high that it can be used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen thermochemically.

More about this in a subsequent post, and more about the obvious two medium term solutions, carbon capture at thermal power stations (sequestration) and nuclear

Climate Crisis and Solutions, an Intro

2006-08-06T15:02:00.000+01:00

Returning to this moribund blog after more than a year. Why? Firstly climate change had gripped attention worldwide, even to the point of panic. The northern hemisphere has been extremely hot this summer, both in Europe and North America, (36C/97F is not much fun in London when nobody has residential aircon) while Eastern Asia has been even wetter than usual, with extensive flooding. The southern hemisphere winter has been unusually cold, but even this has a catch, as the southern jet stream is unusually far north and the Amazon rain forest is in the grip of a second year of drought.

The usual disclaimer that one year's weird weather is not proof of global warming is wearing a bit thin after yet another very hot year globally, and yet it is not an El Nino year. James Lovelock thinks we are past the point of no return but this lapsed Catholic still retains the conditioned belief that despair is a sin. Anyway as Dr. Pangloss' previous entries show, it is far too early to panic, the latter is only of use if it makes politicians sit up and listen. One has no hope with Bush, but even right wing evangelicals such as Pat Robertson are being converted to the reality of global warming by this summer's heat in the US, illogical and parochial perhaps but very useful. If America's hummer-loving classes start to think again, that just leaves the neo-communists who run China as an obstacle to action, and that is not insuperable. I have certainly been convinced in the past year that it is not a solar cycle, but really is human -caused for all or the most part: the sun's activity this century peaked in 1986, twenty years later it is still getting warmer and warmer!

OK, the debate should be over, but what to do about it? Technology is the key. There have to be carbon-free or carbon-neutral energy sources which are
- competive with fossil fuels on costs, no more than twice existing costs (that is within the level of market price variation of fossil fuels: they have more than doubled in the past three years)
- reliable and sustainable
- scalable enough to provide a lot of power quickly enough to make a difference, within twenty years max
- not too far out on the technological frontier

Another thing which is needed is a suitable energy transmission and storage medium to replace oil products and natural gas. There are problems with both long range electricity transmission and hydrogen, but an alternative (ammonia) looks very promising and can be used directly in internal combustion engines, in fact it is even better than petrol/gasoline.

Will explore all of the above on subsequent posts, but the promising thing is all the above should be achievable.

Cleaning Up The Environment: The Gradual Way

2005-02-26T18:44:00.000Z

There are plenty of alternative technologies to burning carbon fuels to generate power, all of them with drawbacks, and generally lower efficiencies and higher costs. I do not want to debate here the relative merits of solar, wind , nuclear etc. but simply to look at what sort of system is needed to make sure that the world economy is incentivised to improve them and reduce carbon emissions. Burning fossil fuels and capturing the carbon dioxide may be quickest step forward anyway: not ideal, but better than nothing (probably by reinjecting into spent oil and gas reservoirs, where it may have the added benefit of improving oil recovery rates) .

Firstly an effective system should as far as possible use market mechanisms , essentially carbon taxes and credits. On a global scale regulation without market incentives simply leads to cheating, bad implementation, and corruption. There will be some of the latter with market mechanisms, but less so as decisions are decentralised and self-interest comes into play. Nevertheless certain conditions have to be met .

Examine the world free trade set-up (today, the WTO, and its predecessor GATT). Why does it work?
- it is in the self interest of any one country to introduce free trade even if all others do not: as long as other countries are willing to trade. In other words, it does not need everyone to take part for the system to work
- it is in the interest of countries to join up even if others are more efficient at everything they produce (Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage: a neat way of showing that economics is not all bullshit, as it is both true and non-obvious). This means all parties gain, there are no absolute losers
- advantages are progressive. A bit of cheating through susidies, non-tarriff barriers etc. will not wreck the system, as long as it is not too bad
- an important consideration is that there is at least one power who is strong enough to police the system. In the case of free trade, it is actually two, the USA and the EU. Both of them are generally for free trade, despite some glaring omissions in areas like agriculture and steel, and thus usually if reluctantly obey WTO rulings. In the case of the USA, WTO rulings are thus the only international law which is accepted to have precedence over the will of Congress (although it is doubtful if Congress realises or will admit the fact)

These two players are powerful enough to use sticks as well as carrots to get others who sign up to obey the rules, and incentivise non-members to join or even shadow the behaviour of members.

What about a global emissions system (whether Kyoto or something different). Not everybody has to join, but the major emitters do; too much freeloading wrecks the system. The biggest problem is that it does pay to freeload: you would be an absolute winner if you had no emission controls and everybody else (or even the majority) do. Thus policing of the system has to be more coercive, more akin to punishing lawbreakers than to maintaining the WTO.

Essentially it depends on America- without it nothing can be driven through, including getting rising economic powers like China to take part as well. Not only does the US emit 25% of global carbon dioxide for only 4% of the popluation, at twice the rate per head of Europe or Japan, but the right which is now in power is virulently anti-environmental. The key is any change of attitude among Republican voters, and it is not hopeless . Even some green evangelical groups (the What would Jesus drive? constituency ) are emerging. The problem is to convince them that global warming has nothing to do with other issues on liberal agendas. Too early to despair.

How To Cure The Environment (Oh, Yeah?)

2005-02-20T15:42:00.000Z

I have been too busy to post for nearly two weeks, in contravention of all the rules about getting your blog noticed (not that anybody will, anyway)

It is perhaps just as well. Brand new evidence seems to settle the issues discussed last time of whether humans are having a major effect on the climate. Apparently ocean temperatures are going up in a way which is not compatible with natural solar cycles . Moreover 20,000 sq.km of Arctic ocean ice have gone in the past twenty years, and the same amount again will probably switch off the Gulf Stream (as a system "flip") and thus, ironically plunge Europe and North America into frozen conditions while the rest of the world boils.

OK the scientists may have got it wrong again but you have to trust the weight of evidence by now (even you New Agers and creationists use some modern technology, right? Then deep down, you too believe). On the principle that a small risk with catastrophic consequences should be attended too, this is the biggest issue facing mankind.

Th trouble is it gets tangled in with religious attitudes. The American right seems to think that it is unAmerican not to consume as much as you want, and some of the nuttier fundamentalists do not think it matters because we are close to the End of Days anyway (how dare they presume to know what God wants?). Europeans are just as bad: since they stopped believing in God, Marx or the superior race, most believe in nothing, (with slow but catastrophic consequences). Some, however, and particularly in nature-worshipping Germany and Scandinavia believe in the green paradise and the sinfulness of the modern world.

The net result is that America does nothing, while Europe foists a do-gooding and ineffective piece of socialism called the Kyoto Protocol on the world. Because America will not join, developing countries are exempt (including China, eventually to overtake the US as the biggest energy consumer) and the rest of the world is not incentivised to comply, it will have little effect.

What is to be done? At the risk of being boring, we need to keep the emotion, morality and quasi-religiousness out of it. I will try in subsequent posts to look at the following:
- gradualism (carbon taxes, mix of technologies etc.)
- radical new energy sources
they are the easy ones:
- we leave the earth to be a nature reserve and go and live in space colonies (interestingly mad)
- and hardest and most dangerous of all, a switch back to non-material goals

Global Warming : Real or Not?

2005-02-07T22:19:00.001Z

This is not the place to discuss this massive issue in detail. There is plenty of information out there . For what its worth my take on the evidence is as follows:
-Despite some uncertainties about the accuracy if the temperature record, yes. There is far too much evidence now, such as the melting of Arctic icecaps . There was a cooling trend between the 1940s and 1970s, but that was just a blip over a longer term warming trend which now seems to be accelerating.
- Is it man-made? That is less certain. There is fair amount of evidence that the sun has moved into a cycle of activity which warms the earth more than at any time for at least five hundred years, and possibly 8,000 years. There is a strong correlation between man made greenhouse gas emissions and temperature, but that may be coincidence: correlation does not mean proof. On balance however it does seem that human activity is making the effects worse, possibly markedly so. It is like taking a man with a fever, and putting him in a hot bath.
- Have there been similar variations in climate before? Over the very long term, much larger: we are in a 10,000 year old interglacial between ice ages. A thousand years ago, when the Vikings sailed from Greenland to North America the temperature was similar to today or a bit warmer. Three hundred years ago was the depths of the Little Ice Age: In the 1690s it was several degrees cooler on average (this was when the pack ice reached the Shetlands, and a third of the population of Scotland and Scandinavia may have died of famine as the crops froze) . So far the climate changes have been within the 10,000 yr historic margins of variation, but there are early signs that we may be moving into uncharted terrritory (such as the rapid rate of ice cap melting). Does it matter, or is this just another apocalyptic scare story? Yes it almost certainly does matter, for several reasons:
- if climate models are correct ( a big if) then the rate of change of temperature will be faster than ecosystems can adjust to
- more importantly, climate systems seem to be non-linear: they can “flip” from one state to another very rapidly .The latter might mean for example that the Gulf Stream switches off, as ocean currents reverse, with dire consequences for North America and Europe (extreme cold instead of heat); or even scarier a runaway greenhouse effect as positive feedback loops make the climate hotter and hotter. This may have happened 250m years in the Great Permian extinction, which wiped out 90% of the world’s species and was even bigger than the one at the end of the Cretaceous which wiped out the dinosaurs. A possible cause is that global warming due to volcanic eruptions melted the methane hydrates below the sea bed, and methane is a powerful greenhouse gas. It is all a question of how one rates a small risk with potentially huge consequences. Thus your chances of dying in a giant meteorite strike, though very small, are still larger than you might imagine for such rare events. It is just that each event might kill millions or even billions. If there is even a very small risk that a runaway greenhouse effect could kill billions or even wipe out human beings, then we cannot continue to carry out such a massive uncontrolled experiment on the earth.

Pangloss Up To Date

2005-02-04T18:42:00.000Z

In the last post I claimed that the world was not bad at solving its problems, and simply managed to create new and possibly even bigger ones in the process.

Where are we now compared to fifty years ago?

All out nuclear war is still possible. However we have grown to live with the bomb, and with only one superpower, it is as magnificently pointless as Bush's "starwars" missile shield. One can imagine in the future a retreating defensive America and rising Chinese and Indian superpowers in a second cold war nuclear standoff, but it seems implausible. We seem to be through the worst period of danger.

The bomb has in fact imposed an unprecedented global peace. The exception is Africa, which has fallen into post-colonial anarchy, but this is not reported on the world news and nobody cares. Perhaps a third of the population of the Congo died in the past ten years - nobody even noticed. Even Iraq and the current level of terrorism is pretty mild by any historical measure of violence.

Totalitarianism is dead. Autocracy is not, and in China we have a rising first-rate economy with a backward autocratic regime; the last time this combination occurred with in Imperial Germany and Japan, and that was pretty scary. This was brought home to me two years ago in the Holiday Inn in Wuhan. I was watching CNN news on cable when the announcer said the dreaded three words " the Dalai Lama". The screen went blank for three minutes until the item was finished. The censors were watching on line. China is not monolithic however, the Chinese are perfectly well aware of what is going on in the rest of the world, and how Mao ever thought he could convert this nation of individualistic wheeler-dealers into Communists is a mystery.

China brings me on to the subject of the first world/third world gap. China is clearly moving back to its normal position as the world's largest economy (for every century except the last two : so it was just a short term blip) and the Indian economy is finally taking off. That is 40% of the world's population. Within fifty years on present trends a majority of the world's population will be in developed countries, as opposed to about 20% at present.

With this growth comes a reduction in birth rates. The way to reduce population growth is to make people rich and expect them to educate children for a long time, which is expensive, and to liberate women, who are then no longer willing to be child production factories. Thus birth rates have fallen sharply in China, the wealthier parts of India, Latin America. Only parts of the Muslim world and Africa still have catastrophically high birth rates (even in the Middle East birthrates are falling fast, but with a lag to other areas) Indeed in Europe and Japan falling populations are the new problem

Have new and even bigger problems been created? You bet. Environmental destruction and climate change may be either a non-problem, or the shortest route to the Apocalypse yet devised. Less noticed (and if it is, by different people to those who emphasise environmental problems) is the decadence and decline of the West. On these, more in succeeding posts

A Letter From Dr. Pangloss

2005-02-02T21:15:00.000Z

Dr. Pangloss in Voltaire's "Candide" was a true optimist: he thought that this was the best of all possible worlds. Is a true pessimist is someone who agrees with him? (OK, it's been said before)

It is unfashionable to be optimistic about the world ( even Americans are a bit flaky on happy endings these days). But you know how the thing you worry about most does not happen? Instead something else totally unexpected comes and hits you on the head.

Mankind, society, whatever, is not a person. Nevertheless it is easier to use personal language, and say that over time mankind has tended to solve its worst problems at the expense of creating others, at least in the political and economic areas. Go back 100 years and the worst problems were arguably the huge gap between rich and poor , even in wealthy nations; rampant militarism and the fear (or promise ) of revolution; and colonial oppression of what is now known as the third world.

Move forward fifty years and certain of these problems have gone, but at horrendous cost in two world wars. The worst militaristic regimes of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan had been
swept out of existence in those wars; living standards for the working classes had risen sharply in developed countries, and were to rise even more dramatically in the next two decades; and colonial rule had either gone or was rapidly on the way out. In its place was the shadow of the atomic bomb, and at least until the late 1960s it seemed unlikely, given the human propensity to war, that we could survive without a nuclear holocaust. Moreover fascism might have gone, to be replaced by the equally dire threat of communism (how many, even today, know that Stalin killed even more than Hitler, and as for Mao's victims, we do not yet know the truth).
Third world liberation soon proved to be hollow as the gap in living standards between the first and third worlds became ever wider.

First Post

2005-02-01T20:10:00.000Z

Why yet another blog? It so self indulgent...

I have some ideas, and as the name of the blog suggests, they are about "big picture" issues. They are not fully formed, and as hopefully a bit of cyberdialogue will help to make them clearer, and inform other bloggies and netsearchers as well.

No personal profile, and that is deliberate: stick to the issues is the justification, cowardice is probably the real reason.

Please keep reading...