zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron — I wish to acknowledge the impact Prem Rawat has had on my thinking during the course of this lockdown ]
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A sequence of headlines says it all:

The Question:

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Ouch:

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To be Specific:

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The Opportunity:

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The Answer:

Science gives a patina of the factual, the tested, the proven, the real, and fiction allows both the extrapolation of strict science to future possibilities (Larry Niven, Ringworld, if I remember correctly), but also the intrusion of the magical (RA Lafferty, Narrow Valley).

The question is both obvious and pressing, but of all those writing about it, and the essays above are a decent sample, Kim Stanley Robinson is the one with heart and mind most attuned to possible futures — so of all the above essays, hers is the one I’d trust, and would offer you for your consideration. Her thesis, in the small italic print above:

What felt impossible has become thinkable. The spring of 2020 is suggestive of how much, and how quickly, we can change as a civilization.

Chew on that for a while.

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I suspect this is likely to become a series: I’ve accordingly labelled it #1. This is just setting the scene.

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A hint from Maa Ganga, the goddess of India’s most sacred river Ganges:

Deccan Chronicle, Coronavirus caused lockdown is healing the holy Ganga

 
The ganga, which flows through five states and is most polluted in Varanasi — Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s constituency — is now regaining all its lost glory, slowly. Pollution in the sacred river has come down by over 40 per cent and is likely to increase as the lock down continues across the country. Though successive governments including the present Modi government spent thousands of crores in cleaning the ganga and still failed miserably, looks like nature always finds its own way of healing.

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Sources:

Offered here so you can read in detail according to your interests and time
availability:

Adam Gopnik, Will the Coronavirus Pandemic Really Change the Way We Think?

John Cassidy, Will the Coronavirus Create a More Progressive Society or a More Dystopian One?

Rama Mohana R. Turaga, Will COVID-19 Lockdowns Generate Public Support for Climate Change Mitigation?

Siddharth Goel, Public Awareness of the Pandemic Is Our Chance to Enforce Better Climate Plans

Kim Stanley RobinsonThe Coronavirus Is Rewriting Our Imaginations

[ by Charles Cameron — a miscellany of must read articles in must read times — with just a taste of each of them ]
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Be at peace, take up your courage, fight the good fight, be at peace: happy Easter

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George Monbiot, Covid-19 is nature’s wake-up call to complacent civilisation

I hope we never have to witness fights over food. But it’s becoming difficult to see how we will avoid them.

A large body of evidence is beginning to accumulate showing how climate breakdown is likely to affect our food supply. Already farming in some parts of the world is being hammered by drought, floods, fire and locusts (whose resurgence in the past few weeks appears to be the result of anomalous tropical cyclones).

Locusts?

While we’re worrying over COVID-19, Africa has its own natural calamity, threatening countless lives with death by starvation:

Newsweek, Locust Swarms as Big as Cities are causing a Crisis in Africa as experts warn they could get 400 times bigger

And in case that title is hard for you to read in red, here it is in black and white, in bold and in italics:

Locust Swarms as Big as Cities are causing a Crisis in Africa as experts warn they could get 400 times bigger

“The herders will have a real challenge of pasture, and this may also cause movement from one place to another in search of pasture, with inherent risk of communal conflict over pasture or grazing land or passing territories,” the UN Ambassador for Kenya, Lazarus O. Amayo, said in a statement.

Others will have no choice but to stay put.

“At least for livestock keepers in northern Kenya, south and eastern Ethiopia and north and central Somalia, they have an option of moving with their livestock to areas not affected by the locust swarms, but for smallholder agricultural farmers, they are left with no option but to consider their hard labor and food source gone,” said Emoru.

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Locusts? Coronavirus? When what’s barreling down the tunnel of future high likelihoods is nothing less than an uninhabitable climate, uninhabitable planet?

David Wallace, The Coronavirus Is a Preview of Our Climate-Change Future

if the disease and our utter inability to respond to it terrifies you about our future staring down climate change, it should, not just as a “fire drill” for climate change generally but as a test run for all the diseases that will be unleashed in the decades ahead by warming. The virus is a terrifying harbinger of future pandemics that will be brought about if climate change continues to so deeply destabilize the natural world: scrambling ecosystems, collapsing habitats, rewiring wildlife, and rewriting the rules that have governed all life on this planet for all of human history

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For the warfighter, all this means war:

Kahl & Berengaut, Aftershocks: The Coronavirus Pandemic and the New World Disorder

if we want to understand the even darker direction in which the world may be headed, leaders and policymakers ought to pay more attention to the two decades after the influenza pandemic swept the globe. This period, often referred to as the interwar years, was characterized by rising nationalism and xenophobia, the grinding halt of globalization in favor of beggar-thy-neighbor policies, and the collapse of the world economy in the Great Depression. Revolution, civil war, and political instability rocked important nations. The world’s reigning liberal hegemon — Great Britain — struggled and other democracies buckled while rising authoritarian states sought to aggressively reshape the international order in accordance with their interests and values. Arms races, imperial competition, and territorial aggression ensued, culminating in World War II — the greatest calamity in modern times.

And that war was a nuclear war, Hiroshima, Nagasaki remember all too well.. a coupld of small holocausts — burnt offerings, fire sacrifices — at 10,830 °F if you were close to ground zero..

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For the United States, “Democracy may be dying”:

Paul Krugman, American Democracy May Be Dying

the scariest news of the past week didn’t involve either epidemiology or economics; it was the travesty of an election in Wisconsin, where the Supreme Court required that in-person voting proceed despite the health risks and the fact that many who requested absentee ballots never got them. ..

Authoritarian rule may be just around the corner.

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And right now, in our hospital ERs and ICUs, the medical profession lices — an dies — as it saves lives..

Nicholas Kristof, Life and Death in the ‘Hot Zone’

Ms. Gifford recalled a patient who had come from an assisted-living center. “I’m really scared,” he told her. “I don’t want to have Covid. I’m in a facility and there are people dying there.”

I’ve chosen that snippet because it cuts so close to home (my own nursing facility) for me..

But more generally:

For health workers, intubation is nerve-racking because it causes the virus to spray out from the lungs into the air. In this case, the procedure was performed in a room on the edge of the hot zone with negative air pressure, so that the virus would remain in the room. A plastic box was placed over the patient’s head, and the nurse-anesthetist put her arms through holes in the box to perform the intubation.

And the doctors and nurses perform this nightmare procedure perhaps eight or more times in a day.. What an unimaginable, multiple proof of the strength of the Hippocratic Oath!! If you yearn for miracles, look no farther.

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Be at peace, have courage, fight the good fight, be in peace, : have compassion..ight the good fight, be at peace: have compassion..

[ by Charles Cameron — read these in sequence and tremble — with a brief note on impeachment ]
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Here:

New Yorker, Citing climate change, BlackRock will start moving away from fossil fuels

New Yorker, Will Big Business Finally reckon with the Climate Crisis?

World Economic Forum, The Global Risks Report 2020

BlackRock, A Fundamental Reshaping of Finance

Guardian, European Investment Bank to phase out fossil fuel financing

IEEFA, The terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year for oil and gas

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Climate scientists caught on first, then the military, and now financial risk analysts. Meanwile, Mitt Romney spoke his conscience to the Senate on impeachment. Things are shifting: if BlackRock and IEEFA were the jurors, with a dime of every dollar in the world at stake, President trump might not like their verdict.

[ by Charles Cameron — finally approaching a core understanding that has been accumulating across many posts here ]
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Briefly put: I’ve been thinking about the arising of the many from the one for quite a while, and think that in a lake or mirror with varying images reflected, arising and departing, I have a decent metaphor or analogy for that arising and it’s corresponding departing. Here I want to tie that highly abstract, poetic or philosophical understanding to a variety of more concrete dualities with which we need to come to terms:

the abstract and the concrete

the ideal and the practical

the individual and society

simplicity and complexity

top down and bottom up

divine breath (ruach, pneuma) and creation

and perhaps most important of all, as I hope to explain below,

global warming and the many lesser issues we need to tackle

Okay, onwards to the specific pairings.

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First, I’d like to observe that it’s extremely interesting, and perhaps unexpected, that the abstract and the concrete (and for that matter, the ideal and the practical) should turn out to be analogs of the individual and society — the latter pair is central to political philosophy, but it’s provocative to think that an understanding of the other two — or at a more abstract level of the abstract and the concrete — might be able to shed some light on the (ideal) relation between the individual and society..

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The abstract and the concrete

The abstract and the concrete is a thinker’s issue. How shall the abstract clarities that thought provides us with be brought into a balanced relation with the perceived, brute facts of the world we inhabit?

From a philosophical point of view, as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy tells us:

Objects are Concrete; Properties are Abstract

or at least that’s one view — philosophers vary: objects are things, qualities are, well, the qualities or attributes of things. And yet the qualities turn out to be, in moral an aesthetic terms, more significant than the things themselves — which the senses take very seriously, and which Samuel Johnson famously used in what came to be called his “argumentum ad lapidem” against the idealist Bishop Berkeley, telling the good Bishop to kick a stone, and see if he still felt the world was ideal and not concrete..

Argument to the stone is now recognized as a class of logical fallacy, btw, dismissing an opponent’s argument without any real proof, just by saying it’s ridiculous.

One of the finest balancing of opposites I’ve found is SI Hayakawa’s ladder of abstractions, which climbs from the concrete — a cow, Bessie — to the abstract — livestock, and eventually wealth. I’ve written more about it in A woman, a ladder, four goats, and a cow named Bessie

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The ideal and the practical:

The ideal and the practical bits anyone who possesses a conscience: The ideal is clean, pure sometimes morally in the sense in which the religious mind may say virginity is pure, but also in the non moral way in which we we can say higher mathematics is pure.

What needs to be reconciled here can be presented in the form of a DoubleQuote from two of the greatest scientific minds of the last century: Richard Feynman said, in a Cornell lecture, 1964:

It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science.

to which we may respond, in the words of Paul Dirac — hey, both of them in turn were great contributors to quantum mechanics and electrodynamics —:

I think that there is a moral to this story, namely that it is more important to have beauty in one’s equations that to have them fit experiment.

Jiggling the idea of beauty with that of experimental verification until the two of them come into alignment is quite a challenge.

Dirac himself came close to formulating the one-many duality in a manner antithetical to poetry:

The aim of science is to make difficult things understandable in a simpler way; the aim of poetry is to state simple things in an incomprehensible way. The two are incompatible.

to which we may respond that Einstein formulated Dirac himself thus:

This balancing on the dizzying path between genius and madness is awful.

Oh dear, what can I say?

The dualism of lhe ideal and the practical is often in play when you see that phrase “that’s where the rubber meets the road”. In this case, the road is the practical, and the rubber, for reasons I have yet to fathom, is the ideal. Is that an aircraft landing metaphor?

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I don’t want to extend this post any further, but I still have several dualities to compare and contrast — and consider. I’ll be with you shortly, insh’Allah and the creek don’t rise..

[ by Charles Cameron — note, incidentally, that Scientists have gotten predictions of global warming right since the 1970s ]
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Well, first let’s note that the UN a few days agoissued its Emissions Gap Report 2019 which is variously described as “bleak” (Washington Post) and “bleak (NY Times) — so it’s presumably bleak. The UN also issued:

UN, 10 things to know about the Emissions Gap 2019

UN, Visual feature: The Emissions Gap Report 2019

Still bleak.

But at least we have simple forms in which to absorb the message.

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Meanwhile, Yale has very helpfully packaged 24 recent reports on climate change, and there’s still one missing.

Let’s see:

Yale Climate Connections, 12 major climate change reports from 2019

Yale Climate Connections, 12 reports on carbon pricing, climate security, and more

And look, they cover everything from Interventions to Increase the Persistence and Resilience of Coral Reefs to Canada’s Changing Climate, lessons on action against tobacco and fossil fuels to the State of Climate Adaptation in Public Health of 16 U.S. States, and Malaria eradication within a generation to FEMA on Community Resilience and so Are the public ready for net zero?.

Tet last two come closest to what I think is missing. They consider human response to climate change in light of the climate change crisis — but they’re still exterior to the humans they consider — they’re from the realm of sociology, and I’m interested in the corresponding interior states, the psychology of human response. And in particular our capacity for denial and indifference, our stickiness / stuckness.

What’s the sludge through which we must make our way to awareness? Why does this feel so very much like trench warfare in World War I, re-enacted in mind?