I generally try to avoid succumbing to the temptations to catastrophize
that I am prone to these days, but the United Nations recently reported that
the earth is "well outside the safe operating space for
humanity." As reported in the Guardian "The assessment, which
was published in the journal Science Advances and was based on
2,000 studies, indicated that several planetary boundaries were passed long
ago." These boundaries include categories like biosphere integrity, land
use, climate change, fresh water, nitrogen and phosphorus flows, synthetic pollution,
and ocean acidification. The scientists suggest that 6 of 9 major boundaries
have already been surpassed and the others soon will be.
(https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/sep/13/earth-well-outside-safe-operating-space-for-humanity-scientists-find and https://youtu.be/X-FJvzgrM00?si=JDCyILh3YhvcRx0L)
And of course our society continues to struggle with growing social
crises such as the opioid epidemic, which according
to the Lancet has killed over 30,000 Canadians since 2016, the Covid-19
pandemic, mental health crises of various sorts, such as anxiety, loneliness
and depression, all amidst a declining health system. There is also the housing
crisis, increasing family debt, stagnant family incomes for over 4 decades, the
ongoing impacts of automation leading to deindustrialization, not to mention
the nebulous oncoming threats of "AI."
(Klaas Van Egmond, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/289977166_Sustainable_Civilization)
And yet in the face of such crises we also find our society increasingly
politically polarized and riven by "divisiveness" (https://youtu.be/vRV_6XQrMoI?si=DFHGerT7NLkjtZGk), which undercuts our ability
to respond effectively through democratic institutions. My talk today is a speculation
about the root causes of this divisiveness, which concludes with some political
recommendations for addressing it that goes against the grain of the
suggestions made by many contemporary commentators.
Steven Levitsky, Daniel Ziblatt and their recent New York Times
bestselling book Tyranny of the Minority have garnered some
prominence and can serve as an example of one mainstream view. They blame
American political institutions, which they see as skewed by the founding
fathers too heavily against preventing tyrannies of the majority and too little
against the obstructive powers of minorities. But as Zack Beauchamp argues in a
review of their book, there are other countries with “crises with root causes
strikingly similar to America’s, such as Israel and Hungary," not to
mention other global examples such as the Philippines, Brazil Argentina,
Bolivia, Slovakia and Poland, which work against an American exceptionalist
explanation. But then again, Beauchamp proceeds to argue for his own
explanation of growing extremism as based in “entrenched racial hierarchies”
and their weakening place in American society. It is unclear how this
hypothesis applies to Israel and Hungary and other global examples.
(https://www.vox.com/23873476/america-democracy-authoritarianism-tyranny-minority-levitsky-ziblatt)
My alternate hypothesis about the root causes of polarization grows out
of the work of anthropologist Joseph Tainter and his theory of civilizational collapse and
the elaboration of that theory by political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon.
According to Tainter, societies collapse when they reach a point of
cultural/technological development where the energy available to the system is
no longer sufficient to respond to the major social and environmental problems
thrown up by that system. (https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190218-are-we-on-the-road-to-civilisation-collapse)
In other words, as Homer Dixon describes the process, major problems arise
as by-products of the current technological system taken as a whole, which that
system is fundamentally energy deficient to address. Of course, major new sources
of energy or efficiencies can allow for such problems to be addressed. But if
the ingenuity required to open up such sources or to provide the needed
efficiencies is unavailable or practically out of reach then a
society will be unable to respond with new levels of complexity and will face
what he calls an "ingenuity gap." He is doubtful that
currently proposed new sources of energy and proposed efficiencies will be able
to provide the new levels of required energy.
The inevitable result is some kind of contraction of the civilization in
terms of complexity (i.e. its level of progress). Dixon argues that such
contraction need not be catastrophic. There can be strategic walk-back of
certain aspects of the technological system that can set the stage for future
growth, but often civilizational collapse results where the unravelling of
complexity takes the form of a cascading collapse of interconnected aspects of
complexity triggered by "energy overshoot." The system needs to
rise to new levels of complexity in response to consequences of its current
operation but can't.
As such failure unfolds major derivative crises occur (environmental and
social) that are the more obvious manifestation of the more fundamental lack of
energy. Such crises as symptoms of collapse are identifiable by their
intransigence. They are obvious, but the solutions are not, because there
is fundamentally a lack of extra energy.
So, they will go unaddressed. Lip service might be able to be paid
to solving them, overblown panaceas can be floated, promises can be made, but
in real situations of civilizational collapse nothing substantial will be able
to be done because the society has maxed-out its energy budget supporting its existing
level of technological complexity.
For Tainter and Homer-Dixon energy is the "master resource"
because it cannot simply be skirted around by way of technological development
in general, only developments that expand access to energy sources will address
the crises. In other words, technology itself is not an energy source. It is only a facilitator of access to energy
resources in nature. It is those resources that determine all technological
possibilities, including those of accessing new energy resources. This
aspect of the dynamic is known as the concept of EROI or Energy Return on
Investment. It is ultimately this ratio that determines the amount of progress
possible for society. In brief, all civilizational collapses are just
energy crises masquerading as an array of more manifest crises.
In situations of energy overshoot, one would expect that democratic
leaders would have an especially hard time of it. In times of excess energy,
which has been our experience for the last 200 years, societies can always simply
add new forms of complexity, typically in the form of new public services, if
new problems arise. Politicians can
simply propose these new forms of complexity to get elected because there is unused
energy available to the system. They might still lie for selfish or strategic
reasons and make promises they know they can't keep, but this will not be a necessity.
But once overshoot begins to take hold (I think of this as us
collectively riding down right side of "Hubbert's Peak" (aka the "Peak
Oil" curve represented as a giant roller coaster) and if ingenuity gaps
manifest themselves, it will become increasingly tempting for politicians to
become mendacious. Barring some kind of major energy revolution providing
new high EROI sources of energy to replace the high EROI oil and coal that have
fueled progress for the last 200 years, solutions will be limited to strategic
compromises of existing aspects of progress, which will inevitably alienate some
existing constituency. Since easy solutions that simply involve adding
complexity will be increasingly less available, there will be an acute increase
in the level of leadership skill needed to fashion political consensuses.
Whether from necessity or fecklessness or both, the temptation will be for
leaders to oversell panaceas, reach for desperate and extreme solutions, focus
on issues where non-energy intensive moral victories can be achieved (possibly
as a kind of distraction), or use nefarious rhetorical tricks to maintain
themselves in power.
As choices for addressing problems diminish, voters will become
increasingly disenchanted and political apathy will increase. Also, since
little substantive difference in terms of addressing problems will manifest
itself, the act of voting will increasingly become an exercise in random
selection. If choosing one way or another makes little practical difference,
there can be no actual rationale for choosing in one direction over another.
Non-rational, essentially random features of human psychology, personality and
circumstance aggregated across vast populations will become the deciding
factors for how people select political parties. Political life will
increasingly become an arbitrary exercise of "team picking", even as
voters become splintered into ever finer and increasingly less-rational
factions. In democracies, which must ultimately always filter choices
through majority parties or coalitions, the teams will tend towards the mean
(50% going this way, 50% going that way). Such a process will likely involve
much scapegoating, blame-laying and intensifying vilification and demonizing of
the other team as a psychological relief-valve for the persistent failure of their
growing concerns to be addressed.
In short, political polarization in democratic societies would likely be
an effect of, and sign of, those societies being in a process of collapse. Could such a process be happening to us? Certainly not if we take the perspective of
many commentators on polarization, who often suggest that polarization itself is
a cause of potential social breakdown. For example, Morgan Kelly, an
author at the High Meadows Environmental Institute observes:
As social interactions and
individual decisions isolate people into only a few intractable camps, the
political system becomes incapable of addressing the range of issues — or
formulating the variety of solutions — necessary for government to function and
provide the services critical for society.
In short, it is people's personal dispositions that create polarization,
not wider forces affecting society that influence those dispositions.
However, in subsequent remarks Kelly points to other factors based in
the new media as potential culprit for these negative personal dispositions.
His comments, and those of many other popular commentators on the issue, raise
the possibility of what Marshall McLuhan called, in the regrettable culturally
insensitive terminology of his time, the "tribalizing" effects of new media or
what theorists drawing on his work now call "narrowcast" media, such as the social media
platforms with their tendency to create "echo chambering" in public discourse.
McLuhan would also add that such media also, paradoxically, embody
possibilities for increasing exposure to negative and critical viewpoints,
which he described as "the global village" effect, which can lead to
a disruption of the development of a sense of personal identity. He
observes that situations of the loss of identity either individually or in
societies almost always result in violent responses. Such complex effects are
real, but I would argue that they might only feed off and accentuate a process
of polarization like that described above.
My reason for questioning the suggestion that the echo chambering effect is the primary cause of polarization is because this suggestion only explains increasing insensitivity and decreasing tolerance of public discourse, not the increasing sense deadlock and decreasing confidence in political life. As reported by the Carnegie institute, several trends developing in democracies seem to characterize polarization in Both North America and Europe, such as:
- popular confidence in political institutions has plummeted
- U.S. and European voters are disenchanted with mainstream political parties
- High levels of partisan polarization, especially in the US (https://carnegieendowment.org/2018/06/21/comparing-democratic-distress-in-united-states-and-europe-pub-76646)
The last
point's connection to the prior two is somewhat baffling. Why, if confidence is
so low in institutions and parties, would substantial numbers of voters be
inclined to cling more ardently to parties? Why would others choose
to move to extreme groups rather than simply, as has always been the tendency
in democracies, nudge dominant parties to take up new policies and transform
them into mainstream policies? Instead, we find societies increasingly
split. For example, in the last Canadian election the victorious Liberals won
32.6 percent of the popular vote, whereas the Conservatives actually won the
popular vote with 33.7 percent (https://www.sfu.ca/~aheard/elections/1867-present.html). It seems
increasingly that elections hang on knife edges. In the U.S, Trump only pushed
over the top because of the archaic state-elector system and recent elections
in Israel required new levels of coalition building. There seems to be an
increasing tendency in democracies for a lack of clear mandates. Instead,
slim minorities often determine major shifts in political direction, such as in
Brexit. What can explain this phenomenon of oscillation around the middle?
If the effect of echo chambering was main cause of polarization, the
effect would be to coarsen debate between existing party constituencies as they
increasingly lose contact with each other. But this hypothesis alone does not
explain the growing sense of gridlock. Indeed, if new media and their echo
chambering effect decrease the awareness of other groups, we should expect that
the effect would be to simply to solidify existing groups at the numbers that
existed before their effects took hold. But what we seem to find instead is
societies gravitating towards equally balanced fundamentally opposed
pluralities.
Such a tendency for oscillation around the middle of the political
spectrum might be what causes the sudden major flips on issues with only the narrowest
of margins, as in Brexit, or the paradoxical victories parties who lack popular
support, but who eke out victories due the arcane minutiae of electoral
systems. This split at the middle of the spectrum does not seem widely
discussed by commentators on polarization. Rather, the focus is on the vitriol
and extremity of groupings making up the coalitions of left and right (https://youtu.be/x_Q9ynm2Rfg?si=j6_z83RbH2NJzby8).
As Kelly's comment exemplifies, commentators frequently point at
personal tendencies of thought and communication as the main causes of polarization.
In a TEDx talk titled "That Open Secret About
Political Polarization" Jake Teeny points out, for example that
surveys indicate there is an increasing tendency for people to report feeling
reluctant to engage in discussions with political opponents because of an
"expectation of being unheard." In response he presents some
practical suggestions for overcoming and managing such feelings.
Tainter and Homer-Dixon's analysis suggests a different explanation for
why people might be having feelings of being unheard. They suggest that it
could be the inherent intransigence of the problems in situations of energy
overshoot and the encouragement such a situation creates for exploring
desperate measures. Such desperation and the inevitable fruitlessness of
addressing side-effects could be the cause of an increasing sense of
frustration with political discourse, at least in democratic societies.
In contrast, as Homer-Dixon and the historian Ronald Wright explore in
some detail, in authoritarian societies one might simply find increasing
inequality between marginalized groups and elites as elites leverage their
power and privilege to preserve and even expand their interests in the lead up
to collapse. Wright in his Short History of Progress discuss actual empirical
evidence of this, such as can be found in surveys of the bone density of
skeletons of different classes in societies that have experienced collapse,
such in meso-American societies like the Maya. Such inequality will undoubtedly
also manifest in democratic societies, but conceivably to a lesser extent.
Instead, polarization might be the primary political effect.
If Tainter, Homer-Dixon and Wright’s portrayal of civilizational
collapse is accurate, societies experiencing it will need to focus their
leadership expertise on addressing the root causes of this kind of situation.
Priority must be put on seeking radically new energy sources, major new
efficiencies in current usage and possibilities for walking-back non-essential
aspects of so-called "progress," to allow for controlled forms of
"collapse" in the meantime.
Attributing blame to who is being most intransigent will not be
helpful. Nor will seeking ways for ameliorating polarization directly,
such as suggestions like that of Henry E. Brady of UC Berkeley's Goldman School
of Public Policy who recommends better "civics courses." If polarization is largely a symptom of a
largely unrecognized dynamics of collapse, viewing civics as a "giant
killer" of the phenomenon might be a mere panacea, no matter the intrinsic
value of such educational activity. Instead, what will be critical will
be civic activism focused on the fundamental energy and technological systems dynamics
feeding collapse. Think of the case of the recent American government shutdown,
where an ultra-conservative minority held a slim balance of power that allowed
it to hold the operation of the entire U.S. government hostage. Many in both
the right and left news media were happy to portray that minority as mere
ignorant attention seekers. Far too few were inclined to look for deeper
causes for why conservative people were increasingly behaving like political
nihilists and anarchists.
So instead of seeking to lay blame we must unrelentingly demand of our
political leaders to explain what they are doing to find new forms of energy, and
energy efficiency and what existing technological system they think are not as
vital as most believe. As a catch phase we would need "innovation and
discrimination about innovation." Political leaders and our own political
discourse must be judged in terms of these priorities, until civilizational
collapse has been managed or fundamentally averted, if collapse is indeed
occurring.
