20
Locating
Dyke
A (Self)Portrait from the (Com)Promised Land
tory. They need us; we need them. In fact, this synergy, and parallel synergies afforded by ancient animosity, dominate the dynamics of world politics at the moment, just as colonialism dominated it for the previous three centuries or so. But while we’re not alone, we’re powerful, and our face to the world is the face of Bush and Cheney. It’s definitely not the face of Glasnost.(10)
equilibrium triggers a process to restore the equilibrium. Living things do have some of these negative feedback loops in their repertoire of stability, but, more characteristically, their stability depends on positive feedbacks to sustain life and growth. Life processes create the conditions for other life processes. Enhanced capacities create the conditions for other capacities to be enhanced. Internal processes turn each other on, not off, and create stability far from equilibrium. Living things depend on that. When the system of positive feedbacks starts to fail, the road to death becomes short. Economies tend to work like that as well. Since in our time economies are national economies, nations too depend on creating positive feedbacks – positive returns ratchets – to promote growth. Growth ratchets literally become a way of life. Success breeds success. Systems chew on their tails, feeding off themselves while, of course, drawing sustenance in from their surrounds. They become habituated to this behavior, and learn to be angry at anything that restricts their feeding.
alition with attitudes and policies they oppose. This is a result of the dynamics of majority formation in the two party democracy that’s evolved to operate on the municipal, state, and local levels. Opponents on any one issue can hold them hostage on the basis of other issues: usually issues at another level. As an illustration, let’s look at population growth. In the old days – the 19th Century US, for example – population growth meant the manpower to exploit the potential of expansion. Now, in the age of consumerism, expanded population means expanded markets, and demand driven growth of manufacturing and trade. Walmart can thrive and spread, etc.. The demand for housing ought also to increase, and the construction trades expand. Investment opportunities ought to appear, fattening the geriatric portfolios. Population growth should also mean growth in the production of infrastructure: new roads to be built; new sewers to be laid, and so forth. However, expanding population generates expanding overhead costs, and, of course, despite the presumed contribution of the expanding population to the geriatric portfolio, the geriatrics don’t want to pay the overhead. They’re electorally powerful, and, in the upper echelons of wealth, are willing to invest in political patronage instead of paying the overhead.(12) The fully expectable result is a shift of the tax burden away from the old and rich: a social entitlement that would have completely confounded the old lefty socialists. In addition, population growth reduces elbow room. This is particularly evident in the context of spreading suburbs; and acute beyond the suburbs into the land of the horsy set. Here, the political tables don’t just turn. They spin. For advocates of housing for an expanded middle class supporting development, a growing economy means new housing tracts, convenient shopping, and all the rest that goes with urban sprawl. At the same time, the geriatric entrenched are keen to restrict land use. The somewhat paradoxical result is that the Green movements find one of the few sites of influence they have among the affluent rural gentry. For, the restriction strategies are carried out within the rhetoric of preservation of open space, preservation of historical heritage, conservation, and so on. Aesthetic distinction has always been the major sign of success, and lives on in the preservation of the quaint and rural,
now swathed in environmental piety. So at the very local scale, the imperative of growth competes with other imperatives felt deeply by the old and rich. This spreads in two directions. The first is the repetition of the competition of values at every scale.(13) The second is that the competition of values faced by the old and rich is exactly mirrored by a competition of values felt by “liberal” supporters of welfare and “social justice”. The expansion of social welfare obviously requires either growth or redistribution.(14) Redistribution has always been one of the main objects of anger. It’s conceptually indistinguishable from theft. Income tax is but barely tolerated, and is arranged so as to minimize redistribution. So the presence of welfare liberalism in US society, from a dynamical point of view, assumes the role of a constant reinforcement of the dominant ethos of growth. Each periodic ascendancy of the welfare movement produces a reaction, ratcheted to new heights, and hardened. So, in the medium run, in the US, it’s always war that pays for welfare. There is no stable longer vision available to sustain the effort for social justice. Here again, the old and rich (joined of course by more recent generations – but we’re not focused on them here) are more willing to pay the enormous overhead of the military and the “criminal justice system” than they are to modify fundamental social circumstances.(15) The upshot of all this is that we as a nation are far worse citizens of the world than a lot of us are as individuals. We’re hostage to our history, and especially the history of our success as a modern economic machine.(16) We don’t dare, in any way that can be stably maintained, to make any of the concessions and compromises that would genuinely facilitate international cooperation in an international society of equals. The thought of scaling back our profligate economy so as to realistically confront the adaptation imperatives of climate change, or to head off the worst, is virtually unthinkable for us. As such matters work their way through our politics, they work their way toward the traditional defaults. Our optimism isn’t the optimism that we can successfully deal with the environmental crisis, but the optimism that we can continue American business as usual. It would be un-American to think otherwise. Of course, my fellow Americans in Moose Jaw, Caracas, Havana, and São Paulo might well not agree. +
Interlude II: When Democracy Doesn’t Add up; and Adam Smith Bites His Own Tail Now, I hope the above sketch is a good enough likeness to be recognizable. But it immediately raises the question of other possible sketches of other possible faces. After all, if I can claim that the face isn’t mine, then my face seems to be offered as a possible alternative. But my claim isn’t just that it isn’t my face, but that the constraints on “American” faces are tight enough so that there really isn’t room for mine. Why, in other words, is the face of war the de facto default face? This is a particularly puzzling question, since the US is a democracy; and, I would say, a real democracy. Shouldn’t that imply a plurality of faces, identities, and meanings? And isn’t the US, in fact, conspicuous for the plurality of its faces, and diversity in nearly every respect? Yes, but remember that you have to become an American: adopt a face. It transpires that even when the face has an ethnic identity, it becomes a face of war. There are strict limits to the spheres of life within which diversity can be expressed; then dominance of the one face takes over. Are we dealing with what old theorists like Madison would have called “the tyranny of the majority?” No. Even in this day and age, it would be impossible to identify such a majority with any accuracy. For any pair of traits you please, there’s always a majority having one rather than the other; but that’s seldom the route to tyranny. In any case, there are lots of pairs of traits, and they’re mixed together thoroughly enough to confound serious broad based solidarities.(11) The reasons for the dominance and persistence of the bellicose face lie elsewhere: in the dynamics of our democracy itself, under its particular set of conditions. I’ll try to make a long story short. A natural way to think of stability is in terms of equilibrium, and equilibrium in terms of self-regulating, negative, feedbacks. Thermostats are always the ready example. A change away from
Back to the Brush Again If we convert the impersonality of the systems talk to the personality of my generation of Americans, what this comes to is a lot of people trying to maintain an investment portfolio sufficient to provide for the comfort of an extended longevity. They understand, at varying levels of sophistication, that succeeding in this requires continued economic growth. Thus anything that impedes economic growth is something to get angry at: something that restricts their feeding. There are lots of things to get angry at these days. Taxes are an old classic, joined these days by outsourcing, free trade agreements, the price of oil, credit crunches, the high cost of health care, terrorism and the instabilities all along the border with Islam, and, suddenly, local radical shortages of water – just to name a few. All become, sooner or later, the subject of legislation, or the object of war. They also become elements in a strange dynamic. The short way to put it is that everyone, no matter what their ideological views might be, ends up with an important stake in maintaining the positive returns ratchet. They very often oppose some element in the process. For example, they may have genuine conservational concerns. Yet, because of their dependency on the ratchet in other dimensions, they find themselves in co-