Edd Doer on The Importance of This Year’s Elections for Secularists

Edd's column from the current (April/May) issue of Free Inquiry, “The Importance of This Year’s Elections,”  is featured on the British web site Churchandstate.org.uk.

Climate change, reproductive choice, and saving public education may be the most crucial issues in this election season

This year’s elections may be the most crucial since 1860. Foreign policy, the economy, social justice, tax policy, the appointment of Supreme Court justices, and the stagnation/retrogression of the middle and lower classes are just some of the many issues that our under-informed, distracted electorate will be asked to consider when choosing among the candidates. But in this column let me just highlight three of the most important ones.

Climate change

While the Paris agreements of late fall 2015 are a small step forward, it is fair to say that most American voters have yet to wrap their heads around the climate-change problem in all its depth and complexity. In addition to the global-warming effects of atmospheric carbon-dioxide buildup caused by burning fossil fuels and consequent sea-level rise, which poses threats to the 40 percent of the world’s population living in coastal areas, there are at least these other serious concomitants: environmental degradation; resource depletion; soil erosion and nutrient loss; deforestation; desertification; biodiversity shrinkage; toxic waste accumulation; growing freshwater shortages; decreasing access to rare minerals essential to modern manufacturing; rising consumer demand and consumption; and increasing sociopolitical instability and violence. Much of this was detailed in Michael Klare’s 2001 book, Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict, and many other books.

Though too rarely mentioned, all of this is fueled by human population growth, tripled since World War II to well over seven billion. Scientists have been warning that this would happen since the 1950s. In 1974, the U.S. government produced the National Security Study Memorandum 200 (NSSM 200) report, signed by President Gerald Ford and National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, which spelled out the problem and recommended universal access to contraception and abortion. Mysteriously, however, the NSSM 200 report was “classified”  and buried until shortly before the 1994 United Nations population conference in  Cairo. When the report was finally published in 1996 in The Life and Death of NSSM 200: How the Destruction of Political Will Doomed a U.S. Population Policy by Stephen Mumford, I was one of the very few writers who published reviews of it, in several forums. Meanwhile, reactionary Senator Jesse Helms and Representative Henry Hyde succeeded in getting Congress to pass legislation designed to interfere with broad domestic and foreign access to reproductive health aid. As I pointed out a year ago in the National Catholic Reporter, were it not for the 1.5 billion  abortions performed worldwide since 1974 (far too many of them illegal and dangerous), world population today would exceed a mind-boggling, unsustainable nine billion!

This brings us to the conservative religious and political leaders who have gone all-out to deny the dangers posed by overpopulation and to obstruct efforts to deal with the problem. Pope Francis may be commended for his good words on  climate change and social justice, but if he fails to reverse the Vatican’s absurd ban on contraception, ignored by most Catholics but all too influential with politicians, those good words will fall well short. Opponents of  universal access to contraception and safe, legal abortion must be seen as inimical to our species’ surviving, much less thriving.

Reproductive choice

Who by now is not aware of the massive Republican effort, in Congress and state legislatures, to defund Planned Parenthood on the phony charge of selling fetal tissue? Only about 3 percent of Planned Parenthood’s budget is devoted to abortions, while the rest is used for a variety of women’s health issues, particularly those of women of more limited means. Then there is in recent years the massive Republican flood of  state laws clamping down on clinics that perform abortions, thus denying an increasing number of women—mostly poor women—access to various forms of health care.

Religion is inserted into the issue by conservative religious leaders and politicians who insist that the Bible is on their side, a claim that is clearly phony. The Bible does not really deal with abortion. Anyone who bothers to look into it would see that the Bible actually supports the science side of the argument. Here is how: Genesis 1:27 and 2:7 state that “God created man in his own image” and humans became persons at their first breath. To cut to the chase, if “God” is not flesh and blood and DNA, then the Bible authors must be referring to some other qualities, such as consciousness and will, which modern science shows are not possible until sometime after the fetal brain is sufficiently wired to permit consciousness, after twenty-eight to thirty-two weeks of gestation. About 90 percent of abortions are performed by thirteen weeks and over 99 percent by twenty weeks. The small percentage that occur after “viability” at twenty-three to twenty-four weeks are due only to serious medical problems, such as threat to the woman’s life or severe fetal abnormality. This point was made in an amicus curiae brief to the Supreme Court in the 1988 case of Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, signed by 165 distinguished scientists including twelve Nobel laureates, one of whom was DNA codiscoverer Francis Crick. (Note: I engineered the brief, which grew out of an Americans for Religious Liberty conference of scientists, lawyers, and theologians on “Abortion Rights and Fetal ‘Personhood.’”) Judaism, we might note, has always generally regarded personhood as beginning at birth.

Of course, readers of this column may well be indifferent to what the Bible says on this matter, but it is useful to know that one of the main arguments against women’s rights of conscience and religious freedom on this issue is essentially groundless. Opposition to abortion rights, if not based on what the Bible actually says, must be based on something else. That something else is the misogyny found throughout the Bible (and the Qur’an) and deeply rooted in most societies today. Official Catholic opposition to women priests and assorted evangelical forms of misogyny, not to mention Orthodox Jewish and Muslim forms of it, are among the many manifestations of that worldwide ailment.

NY Times Sept 21 editorial “The Pope and the Birth Control Ban”

Edd Doerr

The NY Times Sept 21 editorial “The Pope and the Birth Control Ban” is one of the best ever.

 It made all the right points and could not be condensed. Actually, it made exactly the same points that I have long been making in various venues. It needs to be read and circulated far and wide.

The only thing that could be added to it is that Pope Francis’s good words about action on climate change and social justice will fall well short if the Vatican does not reverse its perverse, damaging, misogynist bans on birth control and abortion. I made this point in a short piece published in the National Catholic Reporter in February. Overpopulation will thwart nearly all efforts to deal with climate change and its concomitants – atmospheric CO2 build-up, fossil fuel overuse, environmental degradation, toxic waste accumulation, deforestation, desertification, soil erosion and nutrient loss, rising sea levels, increasing sociopolitical instability and violence.

BTW, I recently  noticed that Bertrand Russell brought up the overpopulation problem in his 1929 book Marriage and Morals, when world population was about ¼ of what it is today.

Pope Francis, The Ban on Contraception and Climate Change

Edd Doerr continues to provide commentary on the Pope in this case linking climate change and over population.

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This letter was published in the July/August 2015 issue of The Atlantic in response to Ross Douthat’s essay “Will Pope Francis Break the Church?”  ---

Ross Douthat’s essay contained not one word  about Pope’s Francis’s position on climate change, a most important threat to our planet that Francis could help solve by the simple expedient of reversing the Vatican’s 1968 condemnation of contraception.

That mistaken ban has contributed enormously to the overpopulation that is driving climate change. Removing the ban would reduce the abortion rate, save the lives and health of countless women, and improve life for millions of children.

Inconvenient Models of our Likely Future

by Gary Berg-Cross

 At a recent WASH MDC meeting on Peace Issues main panelist Edd Doerr

noted how the hope of advancing the world peace agenda will be challenged by a number of destabilizing forces as detailed in Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. As Edd noted Diamond discussed collapses of once-powerful societies including the Mayans with the most advanced culture in the Americas, the Anasazi who built six-story skyscrapers at Chaco, the Norse who occupied Greenland for 500 years. He also features the iconic Easter Island collapse as inhabitants destroyed their environment 

“where a society that could build 80-ton statues 33 feet high and drag them 12 miles, and who could navigate the Pacific Ocean to and from the most remote islands in the world, could also cut down their rich rain forest and doom themselves utterly. With no trees left for fishing canoes, the Easter Islanders turned to devouring each other. The appropriate insult to madden a member of a rival clan was, “The flesh of your mother sticks between my teeth!” The population fell by 90% in a few years, and neither the society nor the island ecology have recovered in the 300 years since.”  From the Long Now Foundation

All of current society might face similar collapse.

Along with climate change and environmental degradation there is the pressure of population growth.

These were time observations and Edd and Jared are not alone in their concern. Recently the Guardian newspaper had an article by researchers Graham Turner and Cathy Alexander which looked back at earlier predictions about what the earth of 2100 might be like.  Their focus was a study commissioned by a think tank called the Club of Rome in the 1970s. I've blogged on this before.  The club’s research developed a model using of key factors including population but also - industrialization, food, use of resources, and environmental pollution. Their data base was modest by today’s standards but they had 20^th century data up to 1970.  To look forward they developed a range of scenarios (optimistic, pessimistic, likely etc.) out to 2100. An optimistic view was that human societies and institutions would take the problem seriously and take substantial action on environmental and resource issues. Well we know that these along with carbon abatement didn’t happen. The club’s central warning that “the earth is finite” and the quest for unlimited growth in population, material goods etc. would eventually lead to a crash was, much criticized and shouted down by the establishment and its operatives such as the Club for Growth. After all business as usual and its growth was threatened as it is by a serious response to climate change. Indeed even in the “business-as-usual” scenario rather than the pessimistic view the club’s model predicted “overshoot and collapse” within the economy (yes Club for Growth think of 2007-8), environment and population before 2070.  As the population grows resources are used up and get more expensive, we metaphorically cut down our trees like the Easter islanders and impoverish our environment.

So where are we now as we are half way from the 1970s to 2070?  Right on schedule for overshoot and collapse it seems as the Guardian reports the models are on track.

“The results show that the world is tracking pretty closely to the Limits to Growth “business-as-usual” scenario. The data doesn’t match up with other scenarios.

These graphs show real-world data (first from the MIT work, then from our research), plotted in a solid line. The dotted line shows the Limits to Growth “business-as-usual” scenario out to 2100. Up to 2010, the data is strikingly similar to the book’s forecasts.”

To be clear the Club’s models developed by MIT are not as good as we have now but their crustal ball has been better than the business as usual folks. As Turner and Alexander say their research like the earlier work is not a definitive prediction of worldwide economic, environmental and population collapse. They aren’t here to say the future will unfold exactly in the pattern described in the “Limits to Growth” scenarios. We don’t know enough to predict things like resources wars or large panic migrations or as they say the emergence of “genuine environmental leadership” that could dramatically affect what happens.

Turner and Alexander end their article by quoting a paragraph from the conclusion of “Limits to Growth” which still seems like good advice even if we are 40 years closer to 2100:

If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity. (from Current Trends Follow Book Predicting Global Collapse)

Discussing Joseph Tainter ideas about the “Collapse of Complex Societies”

by Gary Berg-Cross

Our October meeting of the WASH MDC chapter discussed the topic of the collapse of complex societies, inspired by a book of that title by Joseph Tainter.  This wasn't quite the planned topic of "Energy and the Evolution of Culture" but anthropologist Nancie Gonzalez could not make it, so a related topic was used as a general discussion and it seemed topical with a government shutdown and a looming debt limit crisis possible.

Tainter, also an anthropologist (Head of the Department of Environment and Society at Utah State University), builds on 2 key ideas reflected in the title of his book - complexity and collapse. You can see a nice summary on a youtube video. 

The idea of social complexity is generally understood to refer to such things as the size of a society, the number and distinctiveness of its parts, the variety of specialized social roles that it incorporates, the number of distinct social personalities present, and the variety of mechanisms for organizing these into a coherent, functioning whole. 

A society is said to have collapsed, Tainter argues, when it "displays a rapid, significant loss of an established level of sociopolitical complexity." This collapse then is "not a fall to some primordial chaos, but a return to the normal human condition of lower complexity."

Why do societies collapse?  Well in his first chapter Tainter does a swift, historical (but still academic 7 archeological) survey of 18 collapsed societies around the world, from the Harappans to the Hohokams with the Western Roman empire a more detailed example. Societies collapse, he argues, because to solve problems they invest in complexity  for such things as agriculture, government bureaucracy, militarism, monetary and market systems, infrastructure, etc.

Complexity initially provides a net benefit to society and high return on investment (ROI) means that society flourishes as shown in the diagram above. But as also shown, complex growth has problems which in turn means that ROI falls & turns negative. As returns turn negative, and problems and stresses (energy/resource limits, environmental degradation, competing societies, human competence etc.) continue or emerge, the society is no longer able to cope and eventually succumbs to a collapse - return to a "simpler" state, less differentiated and heterogeneous, and characterized by fewer specialized parts.

It's an appealing theory and the idea can be applied more and more it seems to the American situation.  There was a general sense by the discussion group that America is in a decline and that some notion of complexity breakdown could be applied. 

As was said in Chris Hayes' 'Twilight of the Elites':

Institutional failure across the board has landed us in modern America, where wages are falling, fraud and corruption in the banking industry are flourishing, jobs are lost, and everyone—correctly, cynically—believes the game is rigged against the little guy.

The problems of a wealth gap may be a harbinger of coming breakdown and some type of event in the protest- reform-rebellion-revolution axis.  Since the gap if growing and the bottom is sinking rather than rising, the problems are expanding.

Among the discussion points the group noted:

This idea of breakdown is reminiscent of Marx's view of conflict and tensions driving change, although Tainter does not focus on social groups.

America has had revolutions before, staring in the 18th century, but our civil war and one might view changes during the Depression as a form of radical governmental change. The idea of change during times of crisis such as discussed by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine was raised. In the past conservative movements have exploited these as opportunities to get policies in place that were not acceptable by normal democratic processes.

America has a range of problem-solving organisations, but we have a proliferation of problems such as the previously noted redistribution issues and the wealth gap, overpopulating, resource depletion etc. This fits the abstract Tainter model, but a wealth of details need to be added to make this a predictive model, although we clearly have difficulty managing the increased costs per capita of society, such as the basic for food, shelter, education and the like.

We have been unable to decide on and execute the difficult political choices to assign resources.  There are many reasons including the democratic challenge of citizen understanding of the many details of how things operate.  Good examples of this can be found in David Cay Johnston's The Fine Print. 

"No other modern country gives corporations the unfettered power found in America to gouge cus­tomers, shortchange workers, and erect barriers to fair play. A big reason is that so little of the news ... addresses the private, government-approved mechanisms by which price gouging is employed to redistribute income upward."

Competing ideas of fairness, greed and freedom were mentioned as well as rule by powerful elites. The role of greed in things like the housing crisis was debated.  Were greedy home owners at fault or was it largely the lenders who manipulated the system for their own gain and took advantage of people trying to achieve a reasonable version of the American Dream? The decline of the middle class and sucking up their wealth was pointed. Efforts to privatize their social security retirement was one example of where greedy efforts to tap others resources was beaten back.

The ability to fool a relatively ignorant, ill-attending populace was discussed - see my earlier blog on Misinformation, Lies and Ignorance. Some personal cases were discussed where knowing the details of tax law could be used by individuals and not just large organizations who bend law to their interests.

The ideas of meritocracy (rule by the best) vs oligarchy in America were discussed.  Chris Hayes' Twilight of the Elites was cited as a good discussion of the issues.

Our techno-society requires high energy use and we may be reaching its safe use limits or depletion with no tech solutions yet available. We seem to be declining in some tech area. According to David Cay Johnston we pay high prices for poor quality Internet speeds — speeds that are now slower than in other countries like Lithuania, Ukraine and Moldavia. 

"If you buy one of these triple-play packages that are heavily advertised — where you get Internet, telephone and cable TV together — typically you'll pay what I pay, about $160 a month including fees. The same service in France is $38 a month."

                              from Johnston's book, 
The Fine Print: How Big Companies Use "Plain English" to Rob You Blind.

That hurts the American Exceptionalism myth.