"a cup of heat to melt the wax that forms where night and morning meet"  

A would be conservative

One of my first statements on this blog (scroll down to the bottom of the page) described a "legitimation crisis" inherent within modern society. That is, on the one hand we believe ourselves to be "free" to pursue our own conception of the good while on the other hand we find that there are constraints set upon this pursuit within the limits of the corporate-capitalist state. We find ourselves committed to freedom but at the same time given employment options which amount to a kind of crippling servitude. In the face of this crisis, we might authentically own up to it or we might reconcile the tension by accepting a political ideology which neatly binds together our religious, capitalist, and political values so that no contradiction is felt. Social conservatism is at the root of so much "Nationalism" whose purpose is to reconcile the crisis in this way. While the taking on of this nationalist conservative identity may temporarily alleviate the symptoms of alienation, it will unravel in the long run on account of its running afoul of reality. The idea that we can all be little British Lords in red petticoats foxhunting on weekends while in the work week we service the machine is ludicrous. The would-be conservative will eventually discover that he is not that person who he thinks he is. He will discover that the divisions still exist only his truncated moral lexicon will not allow him to articulate what the problem is. There should be a robust sense of anomie that intrudes upon his consciousness and keeps his spidey-sense tingling.

What is the root of such anomie? Let's look at some basic facts about American life. We are all immigrants. We are uprooted people who, for the most part, establish our identities through our profession. Other "identities" are therefore bifurcated and multiplied across several domains. We are simultaneously members of churches, universities, citizen groups, political parties, regional affiliations, citizens of states and nation, and of course corporations. A permanent feature of human nature, I would argue, is the identification with family and community as situated in a place. This feature is eroded by global corporate capitalism. Just as Marx observed almost two centuries ago, capital dislocates peoples as it roams across the Earth in search of its profits. Well, this dislocation has played itself out in the American fold in a peculiar fashion. It has compounded the dislocation produced by the mass immigrations of the nineteenth and twentieth century. In the depreciation of, if not wholesale absence of, these values of place, citizenship is easily identifiable by the dislocated masses with the empty promises of Nationalism. This Nationalist ideology, in the absence of a true identity established in a place and with a people, is given over to us as an identity based upon three inconsistent discourses (Christianity, Capitalism, and Liberalism) now reconciled through social conservatism. The social conservatives have reconciled these discourses in their creed, but, we may ask, is social conservatism a stable doctrine? Will it survive? Can it survive?

These discourses which comprise social conservatism are fundamentally incompatible each with one another in the following manner. A true Christianity will never rest content with an idolatrous, fetishistic, rapacious capitalism. A true capitalism will never rest content with the antimaterialism and egalitarian humanism of christianity. A true christianity will never rest content with the religious pluralism of liberalism. And a true liberalism will never accept either the social inequalities in a pure capitalism nor the monological Good of christianity. It is theoretically possible to reconcile these tensions, and it could be argued that, when properly balanced, these values serve as a kind of checks and balances on one another. But we should be particularly wary of certain understandings or misunderstandings of the reconciliation of these. At its worst, an ideology may so debase the value of each of these discourses, so as to make it merely formal and therefore meaningless. Social conservatism's reconcilation does this with Christianity and liberalism. It gets the human side all wrong. Theirs is a Christianity for the supply sider. Theirs is a liberalism for oligarchs.

For them a true liberal (an "old time liberal", i.e., a 'neoconservative') is a "christian" capitalist. By emphasizing certain teachings of Christianity to the exclusion of others, their version of Christianity emphasized by such teachings as "he who will not work, let him not eat" and other teachings about sexual morality that come from the Pauline tradition can serve not the liberal progress of history, but the slide back into medieval authoritarianism. The golden calf of capitalism will not be checked, for social conservatism has established virtually no apparatus to criticize capitalism. Free trade, globalization, and the absolute right of corporations as persons tends to go unchallenged. What does go challenged is the liberal state: judicial activism, multiculturalism, pluralism, Federal rights. Social conservative understandings of Christianity forget the spirit of the law. There was a time not so long ago when the Papal encyclicals (such as Populorum Progressio) talked about workers rights and the natural law. This great teaching has gone neglected by the social conservative movement. Christianity is here a kind of fig leaf used to hide the goods from the beleagured and bewildered masses.

You have heard it said by George Bush that "the American way of life is non-negotiable." It is this social conservative synthesis that he is referring to by the "American way of life". You have heard it said by many critics of social conservatism to the contrary that "the American way of life is unsustainable". But verily, verily, I say to you the American way of life is per impossible. Neither is it non-negotiable, nor is it sustainable, nor is it even possible.

We must prioritize our values relative to the practical contexts in which they arise. A clarification of the choice of discourse, to what purpose it is put, what questions it alone can resolve should be advanced.

A story from Mike

My brother Mike told me a story the other day which I liked very much. While he was an undergraduate in Earth Sciences at UCSC, the department held a colloquium of industry people to talk about their trade. One of the speakers relayed a story that went like this:

A young geologist set out from graduate school to find his fortune in the wastes of Canada. Saddled with student loans and the burden of living off of his parents out of a station wagon, he combed the forests and tundras of Canada, taking samples, drilling for ore. And then, Eureka!, he found gold.

Selling the mineral rights he now collects a daily sum of 200,000 us dollars.

Nice story. Thanks Mike

That High Dismissive Tone

My Father recently sent me a copy of "Oil in troubled waters: A survey of oil April 30th 2005" in The Economist. My Dad had scrawled on the top: "thought you might be interested they don't see oil running out soon." My initial thought was that I was grateful to my Father for his kind gesture. And, indeed, if the article was right--as I came to understand--we will be considerably better off than the "pessimists" and "pipsqueaks" assert. The tone of the articles--and there were five of them in this special survey--had that dismissive but incisive high magisterial tone. The articles were fair in that they gave equal air to the pessimists and the optimists view, however, in more than a few places their analysis of the data tended towards the dismissive and magisterial.

When I hear that dismissive and magisterial tone my ears perk up for I am instantly aware that for some reason that person believes that she is epistemically entitled to that attitude towards her subject. That means usually she knows what she is talking about or, at least, she believes she is . Maybe I too, after having learned what she knows, may be entitled to that attitude about the subject matter. And it sure would be nice to be able to take that attitude with respect to the catastrophe scenarios associated with peak oil.

The anonymous author has written 5 sections. One of them is called curiously, "The bottomless beer mug: Why the world is not running out of oil". The title is a clear reference to Colin Campbell's glass of guinness analogy. In this piece the tone was particularly facile. For instance, the graph of worldwide proven reserves in btrm is titled "Have your cake and eat it". Another shows us "Getting less thirsty". Petro-pessimists are described as those who author that "flood of gloomy books with such titles as "out of gas" and "the end of oil"." But the hubris of this writer does not become fully manifest until she begins making her case that we will sustain the level of output long past the peak by uses of new technology (like 4D seismic imaging and multilateral well drilling technologies). In a subsection devoted to petro-pessimism, the writer maintains that "the underlying assumption that the recoverable reserves are fixed might be wrong itself. A fatter straw could end up producing more oil both now and later."

The idea that reserves can grow is, with respect to a finite resource like oil, a ringing fallacy. There is the idea that abiotic or sequestered oil will refill the pockets of used-up wells and that we can extract that. There is evidence of this, but noone is claiming that that amount even approximates what will be needed. Some have challenged the hypothesis as outright absurd. See: http://fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/100404_abiotic_oil.shtml"Smart" oil fields will not overcome this depletion. Matt Simmons in a recent talk at the Hudson Institute maintained that with newer technologies total percentage of actual extraction under the best case scenarios (new "fatter straws") can yield a marginal jump of about 15 points, bringing the total percentage up by only about 10 or 15 points. But that is with intensive capital investment, investment that is not happening even as The Economist admits.

Ah, here is the rub of the whole issue. Even under the best of foreseeable circumstances--assuming that newer technologies will be able to generate newer oil fields and continue to extract from declining fields--the cost of development of these resources will necessarily be reflected in the costs associated with oil. You can't just gesture in the direction of technology and expect a miracle. Its still going to cost at the pump.

The writer suffers from what Kunstler describes as 'organizational hubris'. And, indeed, it can only rest upon a predisposition latent in Reason itself, namely, to think that the future will always reflect the past. But, we must recall David Hume's discussion on the principle of sufficient reason, viz. that there is no rational reason why the future will resemble the past. See Kunstler's essay on this fallacy of reason: (link). There is a particularly pernicious American form of this that consists in the belief that technology will continue to save us and that we will prevail.

While earlier pieces had appeared in The Economist on peak oil in 2000, the tone was then even more dismissive, calling Campbell and his people, "a cabal of doomsdayers". At least there appears to be here and now a more serious assessment of the issue but it was not at all clear, even from the data that the writer adduced, that serious objections about the feasibility of maintaining cheap oil against the background of diminished discoveries and diminishing wells worlwide were addressed. I wondered what dinner club this gal was off to that she so abruptly ended her piece. Slick, slick, slick.