The Long View

Recently, a friend challenged me to avoid hiding away from the current state of affairs through taking the long view, which is my default setting. Better, she said, to look for ways to act. And yes, I can see some ways to do that, in the necessary circumstances. But the long view can really be very long. Things have been happening since the dawn of time and will happen for even longer. So, yes, why vex oneself. The comings and goings of our leaders, our nations, our species, will pass into the mists and Earth and life will persist even when we don’t.

Let’s review. The universe has been around for at least 13.7 billion years, with the first galaxies, stars and planets forming just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. Our sun formed 4.6 billion years ago and our planet 100 million years later. Life may have gotten under way not so long afterwards at 4.1-3.5 billion years ago. In all, there’s been plenty of time for all sorts of things to have happened. Civilizations elsewhere may have come and gone many times before.

But let’s stop a moment. One can talk about billions of years as if we could actually understand what that would be like. The physics and the chemistry of our cosmos permit, perhaps require, a process of physical and chemical evolution that populates existence with an ever-increasing degree of complexity, but one that takes immense stretches of time to work out. It took 50,000 years for regular matter particles to emerge from the radiation of energy following the Big Bang. According to the Standard Model, it took the universe 379,000 years to cool enough for electrons and protons to combine into atoms, mostly hydrogen. Even these cosmologically short sums of years are really beyond our comprehension.

The life that began that 4.1-3.5 billion years ago – perhaps at deep sea hydrothermal vents or shoreline tidal pools – manifested as self-reproducing complexes of simple chemical compounds, perhaps primitive RNA-like viruses. It took a very long gestation for these to give birth to single one-celled plants able to photosynthesize, around 1.75 billion years ago. Animal life – simple organisms unable to move but deriving nutrients directly from the water – took another billion years to arrive, some 600 million years ago.

While microbial life may have reached land 2.8 billion years ago, the surface was essentially barren until the first land fungi at 1.3 billion years, followed by plants a few hundred million years latter and, eventually, animals – most likely arthropods – some 530 million years ago. Life took off rather “quickly” after the Cambrian explosion of complex multi-cell life forms in the seas 560 million years ago. (David Attenborough did a wonderful two-part special on this period called First Life.) Again, all this took an unimaginably long, slow time. For millions of years, it would have seemed that nothing had changed, that nothing much was happening. (Although the earth may have gone through a global snowball glaciation along the way.)

For the last 600 million years, the earth and life continued to change. The continents moved around – coming together, splitting apart – and massive events occurred that wiped out most life, clearing the slate for new forms. The last of these extinctions, 66 million years ago, helped the mammals come to the fore. Primates may have first appeared as far back as 90 million years but it took around 70 million to reach the Hominid family – the great apes lineage to which humans belong – around 20 million years ago. Australopithecus apes arose 4 million years ago and it took another two million for Homo Erectus.

The first Neanderthals arose 600 thousand years ago and they lasted until just after meeting Homo Sapiens, around 550 thousand years later. Can we even grasp the reality of this human timescale in which Neanderthals – fully human they were – loved, lived, raised children, dreamed and mourned through thousands of generations in which each was like the last?

As for us, our species, coming along 300,000 years ago, experienced seemingly unchanging lives of hunting and gathering until just 12 thousand years ago and the discovery of agriculture. It took another 7,000 years for the first city, Uruk, to come into existence in Mesopotamia in 5400 BC (around the time the Great Basin bristlecone pines were germinating). Before the Greeks, from the Sumerians, Akkadians, Assyrians, and Babylonians to the Persians, 5000 years of recorded history unfolded dense with human life

So, the past – full of countless moments of change, life and death – is very, very long. And so will be the future. Seems that in 250 million years the continents will again crash into each other forming a new Pangea. The earth itself will endure another five billion years until the sun becomes a red giant and swallows our planet. (I won’t mention how many trillions of years until the heat death of the universe.) I wonder what the earth and its creatures will be like in a million years, in a billion years.

Meanwhile, we have our moment here and now. We are the stuff dreams are made on. Living the good life remains our timeless challenge.

Watching President Trump

In my previous piece, I laid out what another Trump presidency might look like. In short, if he does what he said he would do during the campaign: chaos. But it could also be, if not actual fun, certainly interesting – an experiment, if you will – to watch him do, try to do or, in the end, not do all the things he said. The list is a long one:

• seeking revenge on his opponents, including by weaponizing the Justice Department;

• imposing high tariffs on China and goods not made in America;

• putting Musk in charge of making more government more efficient (apparently by stopping all $2 trillion of USG discretionary funding);

• letting RFK Jr. “go wild” on health issues such as vaccines and fluoride;

• rounding up and deporting 20 million “illegals” using police and the National Guard;

• preventing by various measures “illegal migration” and finally building that wall;

• supporting a wide open field for crypto including Bitcoin;

Now, it may be that the Trump will not take any of these actions. The Republican leadership – and JD – may focus instead on using control of all three branches of government to do the things the party has always sought to do, provide tax cuts for corporations and the rich, dismantling “troublesome” regulations on business as well as consumer protections and ending efforts to combat climate change. There are also positive elements among the many other promises Trump made during the campaign, such as ending taxation on Social Security or providing payments for IVF. This approach would make the new Trump Administration a “normal” one in which the ruling party carries out its own ideological platform (with or with out elements of Project 2025).

But what if Trump does try to take action against political opponents and “illegal migrants” using the justice system, law enforcement and the military? This could result in considerable activity in the courts. If the military is asked to undertake actions forbidden under the Constitution – such as domestic law enforcement – relations between the Commander-in-Chief and the military leadership could become very tense.

Discretionary spending ($1.7 trillion in the 2023 budget) includes the military ($806 billion, where surely there must be considerable waste) and everything else the government does including education, social services, health, transportation, science and technology, justice and local development. Leaving aside the military (?), allowing Musk to dismantle the social safety net and backbone of our economy built up over the last several decades would have a serious social and economic impact. Raising tariffs – and therefore prices – of everything we now import – also causing shortages of needed goods that we cannot yet produce in quantity – could plunge the economy further into a downward spiral. Rounding up “illegals” and stopping the flow of migration into the US – if even possible – would reduce the supply of labor in the many places in which no one else wishes to work. Allowing an unfettered field for crypto-currency speculation could add financial turmoil to economic disruptions.

Empowering Kennedy to turn the U.S. health system into a haven for anti-vaxers and anti-fluoride, flat-earthers could lead to more pandemics and a legion of new dental patients.

Trump has also said he would settle the Ukraine war even before taking office and has vowed to bring peace to the Middle East. These too will be interesting to watch, especially the process of picking the losing and wining sides. It may also be “fun” to watch our NATO allies try to back fill their ability to go on their own. And the whole world may experience economic and political tremors.

Some of the 71 million majority who voted for Trump could experience a bit of buyers remorse. But he may not have any interest in matching his election campaign performance with real life action. It may also be that his supporters really don’t expect him to do so. In any case, we will all have front row seats.

PS: A friend reminded me of this from H.L Mencken:

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

So what if Trumps wins?

If Donald Trump wins the presidency on November 5, it will be the third time this century that a Republican has won with a minority of the vote. This owes to the anti-democratic elements of our 18th Century Constitution (the Electoral College, Senate and Supreme Court). The Republican Party is a minority party riding on every advantage our outdated system gives it. They win – with help from the Russians and arrogant tech lords like Musk – by converting Trump’s clownish authoritarianism into the false consciousness of whites who feel threatened by the increasing diversity of America despite being themselves among the richest 4% of the global population.

What would Trump’s victory mean? One can consider the U.S. domestic implications and the impact on the world in general.

Domestically, Trump will seek political vengeance while using the justice system to avoid prison. (Avoiding prison is his main reason for running.) His cohort of Project-2025ers will seek to undermine the administrative state while using state power to favor those capitalists that see government as hindrance. Together they will probably throw our economy, politics, courts, health & education systems, social safety nets and society in general, into turmoil. Their efforts to govern through authoritarianism and populism – the essence of MAGA – will test our democratic institutions and wreck havoc.

But we are not Weimar Germany. Our institutions will hold, although any Trump effort to use the military for domestic actions – such as dealing with “illegal migration” – could lead to a real crisis. It may well be that in the midterm elections of 2026, the upheaval would be enough to lead to a Democratic resurgence. (It will be interesting to watch a Vice President Vance. He could call the policy shots from the background. As an opportunist par excellence, he may be sensitive to the popular reaction to the various outrages pushed by the P-2025ers and tack accordingly.)

A Trump regime’s impact on the world stage is another matter. He will favor isolationism, economic nationalism, unilateralism, pro-Russian approaches in Ukraine and Eastern Europe, disengagement from the Mideast and who knows what with North Korea. This will fundamentally weaken the global position of the U.S. But let’s consider this from the 35,000 foot level.

The U.S. has held center stage in the world since the end of World War II. The various political and economic institutions of the global order – including the UN, IMF, World Bank, NATO etc – were ours by design. We established the contours of the Cold War that divided the world into good guys and bad guys and led to many distortions of the domestic affairs of other countries. After the fall of the USSR, we found other ways to define bad actors by choosing – often unwisely – which regional states to offer favored status and protection. As we began to lose our industrial advantage – with other economies coming online – globalism became our religion and we used the available levers to impose austerity and free trade everywhere we could.

We Americans have always been pretty self-centered, focused on our own navels. We governed the world – to the extent we did – for our own purposes, assuming that what was good for America was good for everyone. Trump’s obsession on making America “great again” is simply a dysfunctional flavor of this.

Our record as the predominant global hegemon has been mixed, to say the least. The world today can be legitimately described as a mess, with violent conflicts of various kinds and sources, terrorism, mass migration, political polarization, continued poverty and inequality, nuclear proliferation, the emerging technological singularity, and widespread and worsening climate disruptions. The U.S. did not cause any of these – at least not by ourselves – but they all happened on our watch. Meanwhile, the world has increasingly begun to just ignore us. (Watch China, India and the other BRICS cozy up to Putin despite his assault on world order.) Our inability to anything about the Mideast has not surprised anyone but ourselves. Maybe it’s better that we do withdraw somewhat from world affairs and let folks get on with finding their own way? If Trump wins in November, however messy it will be, maybe it’ll be what the world needs?  Like a heart attack that scares you into changing your bad habits? 

(Maybe we Americans will finally upgrade our Constitution.)

The Next 80 Years

Just finished the first two books of William Gibson’s latest planned trilogy: The Peripheral and Agency. Both are typically well written with plots and characters that briskly move a complicated story forward. Gibson has been ahead of his time since his 1984 sci-fi novel, Neuromancer launched the cyberpunk world of computer hacking anti-heroes. The new “jackpot” books are built around figures in the future (just prior and after 2100) using quantum entanglement to exchange information with people living earlier in this century. (Wikiquote describes the jackpot as “an ‘androgenic, systemic, multiplex’ cluster of environmental, medical and economic crises that begins to emerge in the present day and eventually reduces world population by 80 percent over the second half of the 21st century.”) The future period is in the aftermath of the jackpot, where whats left of humanity, after it was far too late, took climate change seriously. The earlier times (in the first book, 2032 and in the second 2017) take place when it was already far too late but we hadn’t yet changed how we live.

Gibson nailed it. To expand in my own words, these are the next 80 years.

It’s hard to know where to draw the line of when humans began degrading the world with the way we live. Was it with language, a bigger brain, fire and tools allowing homo sapiens to raise above mere animal abilities of tooth and claw? Or with the emergence of agriculture, where we began consuming our environment and changing the very face of the earth? Certainly with the industrial revolution and the utilization of hundreds of millions of years of buried sunlight in the form of hydrocarbons. Finally, with post-industrial, global capitalism, our consumption of the environment, and resultant waste dumped into it, increased exponentially.

This year, 2023, we have seen what must be – to anyone not totally fuddled by the paid climate change deniers – the many faces of climate change. Going well beyond mere weather extremes, it includes pandemics, drought, desertification, death of pollinators, failed crops and food shortages, unquenchable mega-fires, soot-filled air, regular “once-in-a-century” floods, climate-fueled illnesses (from hotter temperatures, swifter passage of pathogens and toxins), spreading invasive destructive and disease-causing pests, disappearing habitats, mass extinctions, ocean temperatures rising, over-fishing, death of reefs, melting ice and glaciers, garbage filled oceans and even whales attacking boats. Along with these are related violence and conflicts over mass migration, diminished water supplies, precious metals and growing domestic and global inequalities. Our own version of the Four Horses are saddling up.

Calling the tune is the oligarchy that benefit from the current form of global capitalism. They have been doing everything possible since big oil hid awareness of the implications of hydrocarbon use for the climate in order to maintain profits. They and their fellow mega-profit-maximizers have funded political elements resisting all efforts to challenge their power and seek even modest change in the dynamics of increased inequality and degradation of the environment. These political elements seek to divert attention away from the possibilities of real change by pushing backward-looking nationalism, racism, and fabricated cultural divisions meant to magnify the otherwise rational discontent with the world in which most of us now live into fear and rage directed at anyone but the rich and powerful. Thus many of those who might most benefit from change have nevertheless been convinced to accept outrageous lies and authoritarianism in its various guises.

There are few good guys among the world’s mega-corporations. The media platforms promulgate hate and directed misinformation. The new tech industries offering their magic are actually plunging us ever further into the technological singularity where fundamental change in our made-world runs ahead of our ability to understand and control it (AI and energy-intensive black crypto are certainly examples). And my iPhone, I must admit, is another opiate assuring us that we are up-to-date and in control of something (at the cost of far away miners dying in deep pits of rare earths.)

But we humans are likely to simply get used to the new normal exemplified by 2023. As long as it doesn’t happen to us it’ll remain just those things briefly floating into the media highlights. And so it is likely to go for the next 10, 15, 20 years until the cumulative changes chaotically coalesce into the widespread collapse of food chains (and not just for us), emptied aquifers, mass starvation, whole areas made unlivable by pervasive wet-bulb temperatures beyond 95o and the wars and domestic violence fueled when those who have nothing to loose try to get what remains from others. Then we descend into 40-60 years of continued catastrophe. Gibson called this the jackpot, I suppose somewhat ironically as everything comes due at once. He seems somewhat optimistic that, at some point, the economic and political elites will come to feel threatened enough – if only from the wholesale lost of customers – to look to the science and technology of green energy, carbon capture and revitalization of what’s left of the natural environment to reverse the effects of climate change. Surely, even now, such technology exists and is getting better all the time, but just not “economic” in the judgement of those who still make lots of money from hydrocarbons and those they have enlisted in their “anti-woke” crusades. So we will suck every last bit of hydrocarbons out of the earth before we change our approach enough to make a difference.

One can hope. Those living in the places where climate change is already threatening their lives, especially in the tropics, are trying to adapt and, if that is not possible, leave. We in the West have the biggest cushion. But we are too heading into bad times.

The Human Conditon

Yin: We are the stuff that dreams are made of. Puffs of air buffeted by the wind, fading into night.

Yang: We orbit along the event horizon of the black hole for some time, getting a little closer to crossing it each second. We eventually do cross it and it’s always there. And sometimes we can’t help but stare.

The Virtual Crowd

 

Social media and the Internet enable the formation of virtual crowds. Crowds may always be, or become, dangerous.

A friend recently asked me to explain why such large numbers of people – in this case Americans – have come to accept the same body of extreme beliefs. In my mind, this meant the extreme white nationalist and anti-government sentiments that erupted on January 6, 2021. I immediately thought of Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. For Freud, society rests on the coercive agency of the Superego (das Uberich) implanted as the child faces its dependency on the world beyond it. This explained for him the peculiarities of crowd psychology – the ready response to Leaders, the need for authority and the eagerness to use or accept repression.

For Freud, the Leader defines the crowd (Masse), taking the place of the internal agent of outside authority (the Superego) left behind by childhood. A crowd is a collection of people mobilized not around a common interest or purpose per se but around a stand-in for the father, be it a collective Superego (ideology or belief/faith instrumentality), a Leader, a hero or a personalized god. This state of dependence is based upon shared feelings of fear and guilt that give outlet to the ambivalence the child directs at the father. Erotic ties (Eros) bind together individuals to each other and to the Leader, around whom all revolves.* The Leader serves as the object for this longing and defines, as father-surrogate, the relation in which all are united as "brothers" in submission to him.

The erotic tie between Leader and follower takes the form of an identification that brings the former into the psyche via the Superego, repeating the process that established it through identification with the first parental authority. Individuals in a crowd thereby come to share the same Superego, submitting to it, in like manner, their individual selves. Crowds, says Freud, are made up of "a number of individuals who have one and the same object in the place of their ideal self and have consequently identified themselves with one another sharing the same [surrendered] self (das Ich)." This bond through identification denies the crowd any critical faculties the individuals, as individuals, may possess and leaves them vulnerable to control by "suggestion."

The crowd represents a return to the primitive horde; in both we find "an individual of superior strength among a troop of equal companions." Freud suggests that fear and anxiety are always at the edge of crowd behavior, tending to increase, not decrease, in the face of challenges to the ties that bind individuals together. The individual in a crowd feels a need for authority that manifests in the submission of his self to the Leader. The Leader has this role because in "...the mass of mankind there is a powerful need for an authority who can be admired, before whom one bows down, by whom one is led and perhaps even ill treated."

For Freud, the principle phenomenon of mass psychology is the individual's "lack of freedom." Civilized man has exchanged a portion of his liberty for a portion of security. Submerged in a crowd, people behave like a collective neurotic. Freud saw such behavior as symptomatic of society, with its origin in the repression of desire and the consequent implantation within each individual of a Superego serving as the internal agent of that repression. The individual is directed toward submission to a Leader or to the over zealousness of compulsive morality continuing the infantile relationship to authority. Over a lifetime, the individual's character and identity are built, largely unconsciously, around that ready submission. The exercise of consciousness is never fully developed and the self is never free to author its rational being.

Culture's reliance on repression (and the other forms of psychic defense) and its extraction of surplus control subjects the individual to an ever increasing burden of guilt even as actual control of desire diminishes. As culture – especially in its Western, capitalist guise – affords humanity more and “better” ways of gaining satisfaction, it creates a larger and larger realm of potential satisfaction it must control. Control inevitably weakens and results in a situation where the erotic drives are only weakly held in check. The aggressive drives, always hard to restrain, become ever more difficult to control as they are increasingly deployed to master the erotic drives. The individual, trapped in this escalating conflict and spiral of anxiety, suffers increasing existential unease (Unbehagen). For we Americans – with a shallow history, a consumer-oriented culture and relatively vast riches unequally distributed – many are ready to "break loose" at any time.

I’ve taken this dive into Freud to get to my further point. In the age of mass social media, crowds may now form virtually. Without direct face-to-face contact, people can come to share a collective consciousness built around submission to some shared beliefs personified by a Leader. The social media niches where such virtual crowds mingle can intensify these beliefs into extreme forms. When the members of these groups actually do come together, they are vulnerable to the Leader’s suggestion and to the apparent dictates of their shared belief system, rational or mostly not. Then all hell can break loose.

* For Freud, Eros is more than sexuality, it’s a longing for something we do not have, for completeness, for other, for beauty, for the good.

The Cosmic Designer

Having written The Cosmic Design and the Designer to explore what modern science can say about the nature of our universe and reality, I’ve been wondering what it might be possible to tell about the Designer: did it have an origin, where did it come from, what is it like? The first two questions seem, on the face of it anyway, truly unknowable. They eventually reach the point of whether it’s turtles all the way down. But the question of what the Designer might be like, how it might be described, is perhaps open to some exploration.

Considering the nature of the Designer depends on the questions we ask. We might start by asking if, from our perspective, the Designer did a good job or a bad one? Given the state of the world we live in at the dawn of the 21^st Century, you could go either way.

Or we might begin by considering whether humans are in the Designer’s image. (Humans have long imagined their gods in their own image, but somehow greater.) At our best, we are conscious, rational individuals with free will and the capacity to act with the moral sense of right and wrong, good and bad. At our worst, we are killers who shit in our our nest and do not always even eat what we kill. In between, we are weak souls often unable to perceive and understand our own self-interest. The cosmic design allows our best form, so perhaps the Designer is also a rational agent with free will, one that defines, by its own nature, the good. I’ll go with that.

Freud’s work on the healthy soul and Alastair McIntyre on individual practical reasoners can help us describe the rational agent. According to Freud, the psychically healthy individual is one where our I (das Ich) has absorbed the It (das Es) and the Over-I (das Uberich). The I holds the soul's facility of intellect and reason. In Freud's conception, psychic health is attaining the proper internal order, one where the I overcomes and absorbs the Over-I (the imposed internal agent of outside authority) and the It (the drives and desires of our animal and infantile self). Thus freed, the individual becomes capable of choosing and acting in a rational and practical manner, following our own defined ends and goals, within the confines of what reality presents. McIntyre looks to moral virtue (aretḗ) as elaborated by Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. Human beings are animals, they begin as such and remain as such with the bodily desires and needs of all animals. We possess the intelligence common to other animals such as the dolphins and our fellow great apes. But with language we can move beyond this to become independent practical reasoners (Freud’s healthy soul) following the necessary reciprocal obligations of giving and receiving (the virtues) that allow us as social animals to collectively live the good life.

Free will manifests as choice. Choice – the ability to choose and the act of choosing (as confined only by the laws of nature) – expresses free will. How does choice get made? Through individual consciousness. Consciousness allows choice and is a property of an individual agency, a being. Free will is an expression of an individual consciousness operating in a universe that permits the ability to choose between different achievable outcomes. Consciousness powers the will.

Consciousness – in the human at least – rides a wave generated by individual, biologically-based processes running through and on our “wetware” of neurons and neural networks with inputs from our bodily organs, processes and senses. These processes produce what might be termed native intelligence (as opposed to artificial intelligence) one that comes about through the biological equivalent of “machine learning” and probably includes quantum computing elements and entangled states. When the brain and neural networks of higher animals – great apes, dolphins and others – became complex enough to support quantum processing, that may have been the point at which consciousness is kickstarted into self-consciousness.

Humans are self-conscious creatures capable of reasoning and choice and, thus, also of acting morally. If we are in the image of the Designer, it must be also. The Designer included free will in the design because it enjoys free will and values it. Of course, who really knows and how could we tell? One might suppose our apparently designed universe was a random creation out of nothing, simply an accident (one of an infinite variety of random big bangs). Or perhaps it’s some form of “simulation” (as a higher dimensional form of entertainment?). But as I have argued before, these beg the questions of how and why there should be anything rather than nothing. If there was a design – and following St. Thomas’ finger – the Designer had to be an individual, conscious being.