It’s all bad, you hear me?! Just listen to these people…
“It’s all basically going down the drain”
“I don’t know what to do any more”
“My job’s gone, my car has gone, my life’s finished”
Which makes it ever so subversive of me to suggest that the economic “crisis” is not a crisis at all: never has been, never will be. My reason for saying so is based on the relative scale of one “crisis” over another: let’s say, for instance, that you are about to go out and the heel has come off your favourite pair of shoes – a fashion crisis perhaps, or if you are already late, then a temporal crisis could be the outcome, especially if are going on a really hot date.
While you are out, someone in your street has suffered from a heart attack; you have no idea this has happened until you get back home — having turned up a bit late and endured a rash comment about your choice of shoes — and see the slowly flashing lights of the ambulance.
In economic terms, the collapse of Lehman’s, the takeover of HBOS and Merrill Lynch, and the gravity-obeying drop of AIG could be considered a crisis. Certainly no such series of events has been recorded in the financial world for a great deal of time, if ever — although perhaps those working on the trading floors of the great financial centres in October 1987 might have something to say about that. Nevertheless, if you are an amphibian (or a bird, or an aquatic mammal, or a human, for that matter), then why the hell would a fall in the value of a few corporations be comparable to the fact that half of Europe’s frog species could have been wiped out by 2050?!
On the other hand, maybe the collapse of a chunk of the economic system could be the difference between life and death for the aforementioned amphibians; or could slow down the accelerating loss of the Amazon rainforest; or could reduce the shrinking of the Arctic ice sheets…for it is economic growth and the concurrent, uncontrollable growth in energy and resource consumption, that is driving the global environmental breakdown.
And that is a crisis: perhaps the only one that matters.
It is, indeed, the only crisis that matters. I think the deepest question is what makes people act the way they do. If we don’t have a clear idea about that, any chance of changing their behaviors is minimal.
Oh, I have a very clear idea, Dennis. It’s in Chapter 13 of A Matter Of Scale (http://www.amatterofscale.com).
dennis –
humans have been studying sociology/psychology/anthropology/archaeology for long enough to poo-poo that statement. however the chances of changing human behaviour are, indeed, minimal, because the majority do not want to change.
Humans ‘studied’ physics and chemistry for centuries before the Enlightenment. Great tracts were written on Alchemy and possession of souls. But, from our scientific POV now, looking back, those pre-scientific efforts to understand the world, sincere though they may have been, look misguided now.
E.O. Wilson points out something similar in his book, “Consilience”. He says, and I agree, that many of our so-called sciences today are free floating mostly self-consistent assemblages of information and opinion written in a very scholarly manner but all of it traceable back to unsupported initial a-priori assumptions. Psychology and Sociology would be two good examples.
Of course, I realize (especially for Sociologists and Psychologists with vested interests in their careers) that these are heretical ideas. But, these ideas are finding a wider and wider audience among those who practice science.
The power of the physical sciences is that they can all trace their assertions down through a series of cause and effect decompositions right back to the deepest understandings of physics. This is a consilience of knowledge.
If you go into the Social Sciences like Psychology and Sociology, you cannot work your way back to the deepest understandings of physics and these ‘sciences’ therefore stand outside the consilience. And in fact, they began originally from free-floating a-priori assumptions.
So, if anyone is going to ‘poo poo’ things, they are going to have to convince me that the theory they advocate is cognizant of the need for consilience and consistent with it.
To take this full circle, I think that usable explanations of human behaviors and misbehaviors vis-a-vis the environment arise naturally from Evolutionary Psychology and Biology. Rather than belabor any of this further, I’d ask you to go to Samadhisoft.com and read the piece there entitled, “Transcending our Biological Imperatives”.
Cheers!