The Forecaster's Eyeglasses

A major focus of this blog has been to try to guess the outlines of the future, and to outline possible strategies for preparing for that future.  People who try to guess the outlines of the future need a certain mindset if they intend to safely engage in the guessing game without making fools of themselves.  One essential characteristic of the required mindset is humility - the kind of humility which keeps the guessers from taking themselves and their guesses so seriously that they are unwilling to take on emerging information which may contradict the original guesses.  Another essential characteristic is curiosity - the kind of curiosity which dedicates itself to observing and tracking emerging trends.  Lastly, what is needed is precision - a rigorous logical precision in evaluating both one's guesses and one's observations, as well as logical rigor in evaluating whether one's observations confirm one's original guesses.  The scientific method is an example of this kind of rigorous precision.  

A large body of guesses about the future has to do with the effects of resource depletion and environmental degradation on modern industrial society.  As an example we can consider the many books written on the subject during the first decade of the 21st century.  Spokespersons such as Julian Darley, Richard Heinberg, James Howard Kunstler, Dmitry Orlov, Nicole Foss, and Raul Ilargi Meijer promoted the view that the world's supplies of petroleum were on the verge of entering a phase of declining output, and that this irreversible decline in output would trigger catastrophic changes in the world's industrial societies, or to put it more starkly, the sudden catastrophic collapse of industrial society.  Some of the predictions of these people seemed to leave the realm of fact-based analysis entirely and became instead the embodiment of the subconscious night terror of white Anglo-European society over the possible loss of their own dominance and control of the earth.

So how did the predictions of these people fare in the face of events?  The answer is decidedly mixed.  Many of these predictors were able to draw the correct linkage between the impending decline of global petroleum output and U.S. foreign policy under the presidency of George W. Bush.  And according to the analysis of the German Energy Watch Group, the world has indeed long since passed the peak of global conventional oil production.  However, the predictions of the "collapsitarians" failed to account for the technological innovations which allowed the petroleum industry to temporarily boost output of petroleum liquids by means of fracking, ultra-deep drilling, horizontal drilling and other unconventional means.  (Of course, the use of these techniques also led to widespread groundwater contamination as well.)  These predictions also failed to account for the innovations in solar pv cell production, electricity storage technology, and electric vehicle design which have occurred from 2010 onward.  (However, these predictors of collapse did manage to breathe new life into a genre of literature which had gone dormant after the threat of nuclear war seemed to recede from the 1980's onward - namely the genre of post-apocalyptic fiction!  Move over, John Wyndham, Brian Aldiss, Pat Frank, Stephen King, and Walter M. Miller - you've got new neighbors...)

In other words, while resource shortages have begun to appear, they have been partially mitigated by technological advances.  Thus, society in general has most definitely not collapsed.  Yet ordinary people - especially those who are not among the privileged - have found that the number of potential threats in their environment has multiplied.  We who are not among the world's privileged therefore must learn to navigate that threat environment.  This navigation will require us to identify both emergent trends and potential risks.  So I'd like to lay out a few of these trends and risks in the remaining space in this post.  Let's consider the following:

• Energy.  The global energy situation is a mixed bag at present.  As mentioned above, global oil production is definitely past peak right now, and I'd like to suggest that this includes not only conventional oil, but all petroleum liquids.  This is why oil prices had begun to rise in 2021 even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine.  What is more, global production of coal may already have peaked.  According to the Energy Watch Group, global production of uranium has also already peaked.  Therefore the outlook is not good for those societies and industries which rely primarily on fossil fuel.  However, the outlook for renewables - especially solar photovoltaics - is quite sunny.  (Pardon the pun.)  As mentioned previously on this blog, analyses conducted by the German Energy Watch Group show that the transformation of global industrial societies entirely to renewable energy conveyed by electricity is well within the capabilities of these societies.  That transformation was already in progress before the start of this year, and has only accelerated as nations have come to realize that they cannot allow themselves to become dependent on the resources of thug regimes with imperial ambitions such as Russia.

One wild card in the energy mix is the potential contribution from nuclear fusion energy.  Two weeks ago the United States achieved ignition for the first time in a laser-triggered inertial confinement fusion experiment.  What this means is that by using laser light to implode a fusion target, the experimenters were able to produce more energy than the lasers used to initiate the fusion reaction.  However, this does not mean that a practical commercial fusion reactor is just around the corner.  So far, most fusion experiments have focused on the deuterium-tritium reaction, which produces most of its energy in a form that is very hard to harness for electricity generation.  The reaction also produces a very high neutron flux, which tends to destroy reactor materials over time in addition to producing lots of radioactive waste.  The disadvantages of the deuterium-tritium reaction represent a serious engineering challenge.  It remains to be seen whether that challenge can be overcome.

• Material Resources. I don't have time today to do an exhaustive analysis of resource bottlenecks, but I can definitely say that shortages of key materials have begun to appear in a number of industries.  Taking the construction industry as an example, from 2020 onward there have been shortages of lumber and steel.  In addition, there have been increasing shortages and delays in obtaining finished construction assemblies such as electrical switchboards, switchgear and transformers.  The appearance of shortages need not be a catastrophic thing, but shortages will force the world's economies to shift to a more circular model.  This will force a shift in the ideologies of many right-leaning people in the United States, for instance.  The good news is that a number of heavy industrial corporations have begun to move toward embracing the circular economy.  However, the existence and increasing severity of material shortages may prove to be more of an economic constraint than the shortage of energy was supposed to be.

• Climate and Environment.  The events of the past three or four years have provided blatant proof of the accelerating pace of global warming and its resulting environmental degradation.  From the spectacular Russian wildfires (most of which were caused by humans) which took place every year during the last ten years to the massive wildfires and smoke events which occurred in the western United States in 2020 to the horrible extreme temperatures which were seen in the U.S. Pacific Northwest in 2021, we have begun to witness weather events which have not been seen on the earth for millions of years.  Moreover, recent studies show that the melting of the earth's permanent ice is happening as much as 100 times faster than scientific models have predicted.  Many have predicted that increasing alteration of the earth's climate will result in large-scale migration of "climate refugees" from more chaotic or inhospitable regions to more habitable regions of the earth.  The assumption has been that these refugees will be from among the world's poorest people.  But it seems to me - especially given the random distribution of extreme weather events over the last few years - that many of these refugees may come from the world's most affluent populations.  Think of rich retired snowbirds fleeing from Arizona or jet-setters fleeing coastal resort properties in Florida.  Perhaps the best prospects will belong to those people who are wise and savvy enough to make a habitable space wherever they may find themselves - even if it means making one's bed in Sheol.

• Social Justice and Human Rights.  It is in this area that the greatest threats have arisen over the last decade.  The poor and oppressed populations of the earth won a number of significant victories during the 20th century.  Those victories led to such things as the end of the British Empire, the liberation of formerly colonized nations in the Global South, and the establishment of polities of liberated people who were able to begin to build their own collective power in order to fulfill their own human potential.  A number of observers including both social scientists and science fiction writers predicted that this trend would only continue until the entire earth had become an egalitarian society in which each human being was valued equally and in which each human being could flourish.  However, such idealistic thinking failed to recognize the latent power and personality-disordered nature of the oppressors, nor did it take into account the fact that the oppressors began to organize themselves to take back their lost glory.  Thus many of us failed to notice the efforts - at first subtle, then more blatant - which began from 1980 onward in the United States to attempt to reverse all the civil rights gains achieved by the nonwhite in the United States from 1865 onward.  We failed to recognize the emergence of revanchists both domestically and globally.

Now we stand at a crossroads - especially those of us who are people of color in the United States.  Our strategy to date for dealing with the re-emergent threats we face has been inadequate, to say the least.  That strategy has consisted of joining ourselves to a "progressive" agenda which does not place our unique concerns first and foremost, because it was not set by us.  Those who push this agenda on us have instructed us to engage in a "strategy" which largely consists of begging the oppressor to be nice.  This hasn't worked.  We have allowed our struggle to be hijacked by people whose priorities are not our priorities.  And we who are people of color in the United States have allowed ourselves to be turned into the foot soldiers of someone else's agenda, in the hopes that we might be able to receive some of the crumbs which fall from the table of that someone else when they have accomplished their agenda.

We need to start constructing our own agenda.  That agenda must start with us coming together to create our own structures of self-reliance just as Gandhi did in India at the beginning of his struggle against British imperialism.  This will involve struggle and hard work.  We need to stop being afraid of struggle and hard work.  To quote from a certain book on strategic nonviolent resistance, we need to realize that "the guilt of falling into the predatory hands of [oppressors] lay in the oppressed society and, thus, the solution and liberation need to come from that society transformed through its work, education, and civility."  Or, to put it another way, if I get out of bed and go into the bathroom to brush my teeth and I find a wolf there, it is 100 percent the wolf's fault if I get eaten by the wolf, since most reasonable people would never have any reason to expect a wolf in their houses.  (That nasty wolf must have sneaked in!)  But if I live in a place where wolves are commonplace and are very vicious, and I know this to be true, and yet I take no precautions when I leave my house, it is still 100 percent the wolf's fault if I get eaten, because the wolf is an evil, predatory beast whose evil nature moved him to start chewing on me.  But in this case, it is also 100 percent my fault, because I knew that there were wolves near my house, and I knew what sort of creatures wolves are, and yet I did nothing to protect myself.  Chew on that for a while.

Note that this list is not exhaustive.  In particular, I ran out of time to discuss the emergence of potential pandemic threats and the threats to public health which have resulted from the spread of disinformation and denialism by the Global Far Right.  Nor did I discuss the geopolitical threat posed by national revanchism, although this naturally follows from a consideration of threats to human rights and social justice.  While Russia is a blatant example of a revanchist threat, it is by no means the only example.  And there is the question of how the emergence of artificial machine intelligence will evolve and how much of an impact it will make on our daily lives.   But I must leave these considerations for another day.

Random Sunday Ramblings

I owe longtime readers a series of concluding posts on Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy.  I will try to write another post in the series within the next week or so.  But today I'm feeling a bit lazy and I have the challenge of trying to rein in a schedule that has recently become less manageable than it ought to be.  So I'm chillin' in my backyard right now.  (My cat Koshka is chillin' also next to my right foot.)

I normally shop for groceries twice a week, although I hope to cut that down to once a week as soon as the veggies in my garden start producing.  However, last Thursday I forgot to catch up on some items that had run out, so this morning I made a run to a supermarket.  Along the way I passed three churches and noted the cars in the parking lots.  Those parking lots have had Sunday cars for the last few months, and whenever I've thought of people going to church during a pandemic like that caused by COVID-19, I have wondered at the craziness of some humans.  I haven't been to church (or coffee shops, libraries,  restaurants, etc.) for over a year.

The percentage of people who have received at least one vaccine shot in my state is high enough that a few days ago, the governor's office removed the requirement for people to wear masks in most public places.  That means that one of my biggest excuses for not attending church may go away.  Yet I still feel a curious reluctance to resume my churchgoing.  Part of the reason is that I have become used to taking what I consider to be lifesaving precautions.  In this I am not alone.  Today, for instance, I noticed that perhaps a majority of people in the supermarket I visited were still wearing masks, including store staff.  I feel a bit like the Willie Keith character in The Caine Mutiny after WWII has ended and he's steaming back to the United States - still observing personal blackout practices at night aboard his ship and unable to get used to steaming with the sonar turned off or having his ship's lights brightly blazing.

But another part of my reluctance stems from the fact that the pastors and members of many churches in the United States have shown themselves to be thoroughly, nauseatingly disgusting during the Trump era and especially during the last year and a half.  That stinking disgust burst into my consciousness again just a few minutes ago, as I was reading the Gospel of Luke, particularly Luke 3:15-17:

Now while the people were in a state of expectation 

and all were wondering in their hearts about John, as to whether he might be the Christ,

John answered and said to them all, "As for me, I baptize you with water; 

but One is coming who is mightier than I, and I am not fit to untie the thong of His sandals; 

He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.  

And His winnowing fork is in His hand to thoroughly clear His threshing floor, 

and to gather the wheat into His barn; 

but He will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.

This passage struck me precisely because John describes Christ as a coming Judge.  It must be noted that Christ, when He came, did not refute or alter anything that John had said about him.  Nor did Christ alter any of John's exhortations to people to prepare for the coming of Christ by repenting - and by bringing forth fruit in keeping with repentance.  This is seen clearly in Luke 19:1-10, when after meeting Zaccheus the tax collector, Zaccheus announces to the Lord that he is giving back to people everything he stole or cheated out of them.  The Lord responds by saying, "Today salvation has come to this house, because he [Zaccheus] too, is a son of Abraham."  In other words, if a person has really repented, it will show in the way they treat others - especially in the way they treat the powerless, the poor and the oppressed.

Now the white American evangelical/Protestant church (and those Stockholm Syndrome-affected pastors of certain nonwhite churches) will enthusiastically preach Christ as a coming Judge - especially as a Judge who is coming to destroy all dark-skinned infidels.  Thus the white American evangelical/Protestant church continues to insist that "Blue lives matter!" and that we need to pray for our men in uniform who continue to use State-sanctioned violence in order to maintain both white privilege and white supremacy.  And their pastors continue to try to validate both themselves and the politicians who are backed by them by appealing to a "culture war" which is being waged to "purify" our society from deviant elements.  Never mind that these "culture warriors" continually prove themselves to be as deviant as the sins they condemn, or that the appeal to "culture warfare" is itself simply a ploy to garner more political and economic power for a privileged minority.

A funny thing happens, however, when anyone dares hold up a truth-telling mirror to the eyes of these people.  When they are forced to look at their own sins, they are suddenly all, "Well Jesus is full of grace!  The wonderful thing about Christ is that He died for our sins!  You're being judgmental for pointing my sins out to me!"  It gets even better if you dare to point out to them the Biblical mandate for social justice and the practical love of one's neighbor.  In Luke 16, for instance, the story of the rich man and Lazarus is routinely misinterpreted by these evangelicals to mean that the rich man went to hell simply because he refused to accept a 90-second catechism from a "Gospel tract."  (Somebody forgot to give that rich dude a leaflet explaining the Four Spiritual Laws!  After all, we're justified by faith apart from works of the Law, aren't we?!)  Many of these evangelical/Protestant types now going so far as to say that anyone who says that Christians are mandated by the Gospel to practice social justice is guilty of "legalism."  (See this, this, this, and this for instance.  And when you say "legalism", say it with the same sinister hiss that you would use when you say the word ssssocialissssmmmm...)

But the best of all whoppers I have ever heard were the assertions by evangelicals during the Trump years that Trump was somehow a Christian.  In order to say such a thing, these evangelicals had to deny almost all of the Biblical teaching on Christian character.  And when it was pointed out that Trump was not even a good example of sexual purity (almost the only purity that evangelicals seem to care about), we heard drivel like "Well, Trump is just a baby Christian" and "If God could use a wicked king like Nebuchadnezzar or Cyrus to accomplish His will, we can be sure that God is using Trump!  So we must support him!"

But what if Christ, when He returns, turns out to be what many evangelicals would call "legalistic"?  What if, moreover, many evangelicals wind up getting incinerated by unquenchable fire?  What if, when the Judge comes, He's coming for you?  Lemme tell ya, it makes me a bit uncomfortable to write this, knowing that for every finger I point outward, there are three pointing back at me!

A Matter of Alliances

After Donald Trump captured the U.S. presidency in a highly questionable election, a number of resistance movements sprang up in the United States.  One of those movements is called Indivisible, and it is representative of those movements whose strategy is to try to oppose the Trump agenda through established institutional political channels.   That's not my particular style of fighting just now, so, while I wished them well, I never really felt compelled to join them.  However, over the last few weeks, I ran into someone who is involved in a local chapter of Indivisible, and this person told me some of the things that this local chapter is trying to do.  The person also commented to me that "it seemed to be hard to get people of color involved in Indivisible...they just didn't seem to be interested..."  At the end of our conversation, we exchanged email addresses, and later, this person sent me a couple of links to Indivisible "weekly action checklists."

One of those checklists contained the following language: "After the election…
Like many Americans, I grew concerned for my rights—like the right to free speech, the right to be married to my wife, to dissent, and to privacy.  Even more, I grew worried for my Latino friends, my Muslim friends, my Black friends, and my gay sisters and brothers—especially as acts of violence and harassment increase..."

These words were written by a blond-haired, blue-eyed Caucasian woman who had married another woman.  And her statement of concern for "equity" and "equal rights" were led first and foremost by her concern for the freedom to pursue her own lifestyle.

Reading those words and looking at her picture on the Indivisible website spurred me to think about how the Civil Rights movement has morphed and mutated from its origins in abolitionist movement in the early-to-mid 19th century to the present, and especially how the movement's focus and agenda (along with the focus and agenda of the American Democratic Party) was changed from the 1960's to now.  I was also compelled to revisit the way I view nonviolent resistance on its most basic level.  I am aware that in their excellent book Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict, Chenoweth and Stephan emphasize the importance of building a large coalition of diverse actors in order to insure the success of a nonviolent movement.  However, I believe that alliances must be chosen very carefully and not indiscriminately.

And as I consider the practice of radical nonviolent resistance, I see a some very important characteristics, the first of which is that this kind of resistance consists of speaking truth to power in the full knowledge that the power to whom you speak truth may respond by trying to kill you.  Second, radical nonviolent resistance requires that you cannot respond to your oppressor with violence even when he is trying to kill you, even as St. Peter wrote: "Servants, be submissive to your masters with all respect, not only to those who are good and gentle, but also to those who are crooked..."  Note also that even though Peter wrote of the need for submission, yet he and all of the apostles wound up as jailbirds at various times in their lives because they spoke truth to power by living radically in the truth.  (Indeed, Peter eventually was crucified upside-down.)

To me then, to be a nonviolent resister is synonymous with being a Christian.  And being a Christian means that I have confessed the Lordship of the Boss I work for.  Since He has called me to a dangerous work in which I might lose my life, I believe the success of that work hinges very closely on my willingness to do exactly what my Boss says.  And my Boss (as revealed especially by the New Testament) has specifically condemned homosexuality as a lifestyle.  Therefore, I cannot join with those who seek to legitimize homosexuality as a lifestyle.  Otherwise, I run the risk of failing in the task which my Boss has given me.

Yet there is another element of obedience to my Boss which I ought to mention.  According to His orders, I am forbidden to try to use secular, earthly political power to punish other people for their private sins.  Paul's letter to the Galatians clearly lays out the futility of trying to get people to act like Christians by trying to force "Christian" laws on a fallen nation.  The entire Old Testament history of Israel illustrates this futility.  And the history of Prohibition in the United States is another clear example.  Also, in the story of the Lord's encounter with the adulterous woman in John 8, when the Pharisees were pressing Jesus to agree with stoning the woman to death, Jesus responded by saying, "He who is without sin among you, let him be the first to throw a stone at her."  Those who read the story to the end will notice that at the end, the woman was still alive.

There is one other thing to notice from the story in John 8, and that is the motive behind the Pharisees' efforts to force the Lord to condone stoning this woman to death.  He said, "He who is without sin among you, let him be the first to throw a stone..." and this stopped them from throwing stones - so...I guess that means that they themselves had sinned, doesn't it?  And I think it is quite likely that some (perhaps many) of them had sinned in exactly the same way that this woman had.  Their motives in trying to put this woman to death had nothing to do with zeal for Biblical morality, but were rather a ploy to eliminate a threat to their secular, earthly political power and social status.  And Jesus knew it.  And they knew (from seeing and hearing about some of His miracles) that if they tried to continue their rush to judgment after hearing His warning to them, He would most likely have publicly declared some of their secret sins in the ears of the crowd standing around Him.

Which brings up a point, namely, the use which political actors in the United States have made of private sexual sin in order to advance their own political and economic power.  I am thinking particularly of homosexuality and how the response to homosexuality has been used both by the ostensible "Left" and by the Right as a proof of their "righteousness."  The Right, for instance, has largely succeeded in reducing Biblical morality to the question of how we should respond to a very small handful of issues related to sex.  This has been convenient for them because they have been able to say in threatening tones that God's "blessing" on this nation by which this "great nation" (meaning rich white folks) has been made "great" is under threat because "we have abandoned Biblical morality."  Therefore, the great issue of our time is the need to fight against departure from Biblical sexual morality.  We need a renewed "Focus on the Family!"  There are no other issues more important than this.

Such language conveniently ignores two things.  The first is that, according to the Scriptures, my Boss (whom they claim to be their Boss also, even though they don't know Him at all) is concerned about many issues beside sexual sin - and His concern for them is just as great as His concern about sexual sin.  One such issue (which they don't address because it would cost them money) is the issue of predatory behavior by one group of people against another.  Indeed, in Ezekiel 22, God promises to tear Israel apart, to destroy it economically and politically, and to send its residents into captivity.  When one reads Ezekiel 22 and counts the reasons why God promised to do this, homosexuality is not mentioned once.  However, economic oppression (and accompanying violence against the powerless) is mentioned fourteen times.  While sexual sin is mentioned four times, in two of those cases, God condemns men for forcing themselves on women.  (The word "humbled" can also be rendered "raped"!)

The Religious Right has condoned every sin listed in Ezekiel 22.  Indeed, their darling, Donald Trump, has been guilty of every sin listed in Ezekiel 22.  If we limit our focus solely to sexual sin, the list of Republicans and supremacists who have fallen is quite long, including Newt Gingrich, who was fooling around behind his wife's back during the Republican-led impeachment of Bill Clinton.  It also includes Bob Livingstone, who led the impeachment proceedings after Gingrich was outed, as well as Dennis Hastert who replaced Livingstone after he was outed for cheating on his wife.  It also includes Kenneth Starr, the special prosecutor who investigated Bill Clinton.  Starr later became the president of Baylor University, where he helped to cover up a massive sexual assault scandal involving the Baylor football team.  And as far as homosexuality, Dennis Hastert was later found guilty of paying public money to hush up his sexual assaults of high school wrestlers while he was a wrestling coach.  And the current Republican regime in Washington is trying hard to remove every legal protection from women who are victims of sexual assault, harassment, or domestic violence.

("Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!...You serpents, you brood of vipers, how shall you escape the damnation of Gehenna?")

So we can see how the Right has pushed zeal against sexual sin as a convenient gauge of zeal for righteousness, because such a gauge does not threaten existing economic or political disparities in power, nor does it threaten existing patterns of oppression which enrich the few at the expense of the many.  But what about the "Left"?  For it seems to me lately that the Left has largely succeeded in reducing concerns about equity and diversity and equal rights solely to the push to legitimize certain sexual lifestyles.  Indeed, I remember reading a few years back (although I am sorry that I can't find the source now) that during one of the "general assemblies" of the Occupy protests, a group of gay rights activists stood up and proclaimed that the struggle for civil rights for people of color had largely succeeded, and that now the main focus of struggle should be on promoting the acceptance of "sexual minorities."  I also remember reading that the people who said this were shouted down by several people of color who knew differently.  Indeed, there are people of color within the LGBTQ movement who themselves have pointed out the racism and overall whiteness of the movement, and how it has largely ignored the voices of the people of color in its ranks.  (See this, this, and this, for instance.)  Note also what one source has said about the alignment of some elements of the gay community with the global far right.

To an increasing number of us from communities of color, the gay rights movement seems to have hijacked the efforts in this country to fight for social justice.  The last year, for instance, has seen many well-funded "rights" organizations fighting for things like public "transgender restrooms" even as corrupt white police officers get away with murdering unarmed African-Americans.  What is also telling is that there is so little outrage within the broader American society over the murders.  To us, the LGBTQ agenda has no relevance to us; rather, the insistence on making this agenda so prominent is one of the factors which makes us increasingly distrustful of the so-called "Left", and unwilling to engage with them in their agenda.  This is one reason why we are not rallying behind the Democratic Party - a party which is home to a Governor who derailed the indictment of Darren Wilson, the police officer who murdered Michael Brown.  This is the same party who has as a member a man named Rahm Emanuel, Bill Clinton's former chief of staff.  Rahm Emanuel went on later to become the mayor of Chicago, where he helped the Chicago police department cover up police murders of unarmed African-American teens.  So as the Left extends its hand to us once again, we don't trust it.  To me, it seems that we must chart our own course.  And some of us are gaining the skills and tools to do just that.  For the Left as it is currently constituted is also no threat to existing economic or political disparities in power, nor does it threaten existing patterns of oppression which enrich the few at the expense of the many.