Aeon: We are nature

For decades, Lovelock has warned of the global heating that will permanently alter human and nonhuman ways of life. His recent publications reveal an understanding, shared with Spinoza, that these natural transformations are profoundly amoral. Gaia strives to preserve itself, to preserve life as such: Gaia, God or nature doesn’t have any interest in preserving this or that species, or any particular configuration of the Earth. Lovelock also shares with Spinoza the understanding that human transformations of the Earth are part of nature, however much we might think of certain actions as harming or destroying nature. By seeking our own advantage and transforming our environment, human beings don’t destroy nature: we are nature, transforming itself. The effects of these activities are, from nature’s point of view, neither good nor bad. [...]

And this is to say nothing of our inability to rejoice in the loss or diminishment of species of insects, plants, animals and places that sustain our lives and give us joy. The Anthropocene produces in us feelings of sadness, longing, guilt, anger and resentment. These feelings are all the more strongly felt because we understand the climate crisis to be anthropogenic: we believe that we caused it through a series of choices, and that we might have chosen otherwise. As Spinoza says, we feel most keenly those emotions that are caused by beings we believe to be free. [...]

All sad passions, for Spinoza, are experienced as diminished power. When we fear our own power, we might feel this disempowerment to be what our power consists in. Disempowerment becomes our basis for striving, acting and thinking, generating what Friedrich Nietzsche in 1887 called ressentiment. Spinoza calls this humility, which is not virtuous self-effacement but an ‘evil and useless’ passion closely aligned to self-regard and envy. Because we naturally rejoice in our own power to act, we perversely celebrate our own weakness. Our fears and resentments become the basis of misplaced pride and arrogance. As we know, those feelings can be put to political uses: our climate fears have loomed behind campaigns for Brexit, Donald Trump and populist and neo-fascist leaders, all making strategic use of fear and resentment, and taking pride in lack of knowledge. When we fear our own power and its effects on the ground we stand on, we are easily swayed by those who promise the imagined stabilities of the land and borders of the past. [...]

We should strive to support the flourishing of other animals and natural things not out of pity or guilt or fondness, but because their flourishing is essential for our flourishing. Recall that for Spinoza, ‘good’ is what we certainly know to be useful to us: we certainly know the utility of the ice caps remaining frozen, of the Amazon remaining intact, and of bees and butterflies continuing to thrive. According to Spinoza, this certain knowledge should determine us to strive for those ends. Given that we know that the flourishing of other beings on Earth is instrumental to our own, what prevents us from striving for it? Spinoza argues that passions and inadequate ideas can derail us from affirming and acting on what we know to be good. In these cases, we need laws to make us act well: laws that are determined by a state that agrees on shared goals. Laws tell us how to act when we don’t know, or can’t remember, what is good for us.

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Five Books: The Best Books on the Politics of Information

Political science, because it is interested in politics, has to be concerned with what is happening in the broader world. However, I’m afraid to say that, by and large, it tends to be a lagging rather than a leading indicator. It aspires towards being a science—in the sense of having some predictive capacities—but in practice, we political scientists tend to be much better at explaining what has happened than at predicting what is likely to happen in the future. Hence we are always trying to catch up with what is happening in the world at the moment. [...]

On the one hand, we have people in Communist China, like Jack Ma, suggesting that we may not need markets anymore; we may be at the point where planning is actually going to work because we’ve got machine learning. Machine learning is going to provide us with the sophisticated means to achieve what the planners were trying to achieve and where they failed. On the other hand, we’ve got the Silicon Valley model, which is trying to figure out ways to use machine learning techniques to turn raw information into patterned data that can then be turned towards a variety of commercial purposes, with the same kind of enthusiasm that the people like Kantorovich had. This sudden, ‘Oh my God, we have the mathematics to turn all of these complicated miseries of human life into a set of engineering problems that can be optimised, isn’t that wonderful?’ sounds very familiar if you’ve read Spufford’s book. [...]

What commentators like Harari don’t get is the ways in which these systems are not only incapable of grasping the messiness of actual human social systems, but also able to actually exacerbate the flaws of central planning. For authoritarian countries, China in particular, you have these feedback loops between the categories that people are using to try and understand the world in the central committees, and the actual world they are trying to explain. We know how politics work in these systems. Very often, if you’re not implementing the thought of the beloved chairman, your superiors will decide that there’s something wrong with you and you’re obviously a problematic political element who needs to be eliminated. So the categories you use are likely to reflect the ideas of your superiors, even if you know that they’re wrong. [...]

If you look at economics textbooks, they typically assume that we have complete information, understand everything about the environment that we are in, that we can map out ad infinitum what strategies other actors are going to play against us, and that we do not have any bandwidth limits on our ability to process information. Simon says this is nonsense. We know human beings simply can’t do that. We are flawed. Our individual capacity to understand the world is limited and so what we tend to do in ordinary life, he says, is go for good seeming solutions that are obvious to us rather than for optimal ones. This means that a lot of the actual processes of cognition, or computation that we do, have to be offloaded onto other social systems rather than our individual brains. If we want to think about markets, in Simon’s sense, we should think about how they work and don’t work as massive systems of distributed computation.

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Aeon: It didn’t have to be this way

The document provoked an uproar. The media feasted on it, spreading the panic. The situation in Italy was certainly exceptional due to the sheer number of cases presenting themselves each day. It’s likely the first time that many of these doctors, especially the younger ones, were being faced with such harrowing choices. Yet, from an ethical point of view, the document was neither unprecedented nor revolutionary. In another context of scarce resources – organ donation – patients are routinely ranked on waiting lists using an algorithm. Standard criteria match donor organs to recipients using a calculation of the chances of the transplant’s success and the patient’s survival. More controversial criteria can apply too. For example, if someone has cirrhosis of the liver caused by drinking, their personal responsibility in causing the condition will, in some circumstances, be a factor that weighs against their receiving a transplant. [...]

There’s no such thing as a value-free model. Self-isolation and quarantine are much heavier physical and mental burdens for those who live alone. John Ioannidis, the professor of medicine at Stanford University who exposed the ‘replication crisis’ in social psychology and beyond, has argued since the beginning of the pandemic that the economic, social and mental health implications of lockdowns must be accounted for in cost-benefit public health calculations – including the deaths caused by disruption to the social fabric. We might end up looking back on coronavirus, Ioannidis said, as a ‘a once-in-a-century evidence fiasco’. There’s currently little evidence that the most aggressive measures work, and if they continue, they could end up causing more harm in the long term than riding an acute epidemic wave. However, discounting the future is a typically human bias – as health economists know well from studies of how people think about the consequences of smoking, drinking or failing to exercise. [...]

Younger generations have been asked to make huge sacrifices for older generations, with the expectation of only very limited benefits for their own health – and some big repercussions for their own physical and mental wellbeing, including the closure of universities and loss of opportunities to work. This is also the generation that will have to pay off the bulk of debts we’re now accruing to pay for government assistance packages. Beyond family ties, the moral basis for this request isn’t obvious. On the one hand, we’ve asked a lot from younger people, without really making the case for those policies. On the other hand, when younger generations make demands of older generations – for example, about climate change and the future health of the planet – older people in power seem to have a hard time accepting them. After asking younger people to do so much for the elderly during this crisis, perhaps we ought to give them something in return.

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Aeon: Imagine alien signals are detected. Here’s what happens next

Planets aren’t rare. Life is surprisingly durable. The more we’ve learned about the Universe, the more the search for extraterrestrial life has shifted from science fiction to serious scientific undertaking. So it’s worth considering how humanity would react if we learned, through some distant but unmistakable signal, that lifeforms elsewhere in the Universe were communicating with us. In this interview, Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the Center for SETI Research in California, discusses how first contact is more likely to be perspective-shifting than Earth-shattering.

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PolyMatter: How Singapore Solved Housing

Salon: Evangelical fundamentalists who openly defied social distancing guidelines are dying of COVID-19

Countless non-fundamentalist churches in the United States, from Catholic to Lutheran and Episcopalian, have embraced social distancing during the coronavirus pandemic and temporarily moved their activities online. But many Christian fundamentalists and evangelicals have been irresponsibly downplaying the dangers of COVID-19 and doing so with deadly results: journalist Alex Woodward, in the U.K.-based Independent, reports that the pandemic has claimed the lives of more than 30 pastors in the Bible Belt.

"Dozens of pastors across the Bible Belt have succumbed to coronavirus after churches and televangelists played down the pandemic and actively encouraged churchgoers to flout self-distancing guidelines," Woodward reports. "As many as 30 church leaders from the nation's largest African-American Pentecostal denomination have now been confirmed to have died in the outbreak, as members defied public health warnings to avoid large gatherings to prevent transmitting the virus." [...]

"The virus has had a wildly disproportionate impact among black congregations, many of which have relied on group worship," Woodward explains. "Yet despite the climbing death toll, many US church leaders throughout the Bible Belt have not only continued to hold services, but have urged worshippers to continue paying tithes — including recent stimulus checks — to support their mission."

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