Hope and courage overcome

So, we've been told that the war in Iraq is "over." While on my way home, I saw veterans, young men and women, in uniform, returning to the US--some maybe permanently, some who will possibly be deployed to Afghanistan (the active war engagement that seems forgotten) after the holidays. The US military presence in the world is overwhelming and unnerving; this year, the defense budget is on the order of $660 billion, a number that does not take into account the costs of active military engagements, and which I have a feeling does not take into account the cost of having around fifteen thousand military contractors still in Iraq in a "support" role.

Having grown up in India, and having been fortunate enough to visit different parts of the world, I have come to realise something very fundamental about the United States. For all of the hard work and kindness of its peoples, the country as a whole seems to be one that is fearful--there is a fear that seems to pervade people's day-to-day lives, a fear that if we do not do our best, that we will be left behind, a fear that there is always someone else to replace us (and given unemployment numbers, this is likely the case), and a fear that we are no longer the sole superpower (or hegemonic state) of the world. I see the same fear in the way the US conducts itself internationally (listen to the wonderful thoughts of Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC, below), one which equates the opposition to or disagreement with US policy as an affront. I see the same fear, fear that has been draped with protection, that is keeping our government from taking bold and decisive steps in a direction towards a more just and ecologically sustainable world. I believe it is this fear that makes people defensive about the ways of life that have been cherished so far in this country--lives of materialism, lives of credit and debt, lives of benefits for us and costs for the rest of the world. And this is the very fear that dictates the lobbying of those on Wall Street, for if people really knew what was going on between the banks and the government, people may, just may figure out that we live in a house of cards and a culture without resiliency. A resilient culture is dynamic yet stable. Ours is one of bubbles bursting every few years with no visionary approaches to the massive problems at our doorsteps.

Indeed, fear can be paralysing. We are unable to present ourselves as whole before the world because we are unable to admit defeat or apologise for our mistakes, mistakes that we can all agree have been made. This fear must be replaced by hope and courage--the hope that living in fear can be something of the past, that we do not need militaries to fight for what we believe in, but rather that our actions, deeds, and words are respectful of this Earth and its cultures, so much so that we cherish differences, rather than burn and obliterate them. We must have the courage to face up to the fact that our individual ways of life, when aggregated, are causing massive amounts of ecological strife in our backyards, close and far.

Fear is paralysing, but hope and courage are liberating; hope and courage are the opposite of fear. Hope and courage allow us to stand up and speak out to changing social norms, to have difficult conversations with friends and family, to protest the cutting down of trees for new "housing developments," to get in the way of the large corporations that will blow the top of a mountain off with the drop of a hat, to be civilly disobedient. Hope and courage allow us to envision fundamentally different worlds for our individuals and collective lives to exist and participate in. The paralysis of holding on to ways of life we have taken for granted when social structures and the biophysical world are shouting for help must be and can be overcome.

Peace and the deficiencies of anthropocentrism

I was struck by this painting by David Ward, a prisoner here in the State of Michigan, whose work Ode to a dying ideal was showcased along with the art and writing of many other prisoners in Michigan at one of the best events that comes through this University. The Prison Creative Arts Project does wonderful things.

 

I was struck so much that I put a bid on it (click on the photo to see the detail of the border), and won, without even thinking once about my "not buying anything" policy...different issue, one that we can talk about later. What I wanted to write about today was exactly what Ward is getting at with his painting. We cannot go a minute now without listening to people being killed, either people in Iraq or Afghanistan (where it is almost certain that more people have been killed than has been reported in the media here), or people that are being killed so that their voices can be silenced, i.e. in places like Yemen and Libya. People are being silenced here, too. 

I have written at length about peace and the environment, initially provoked by a discussion about Just War Theory with Professor Richard Tucker (more here, here, here), and then subsequently by a piece written by Hendrik Hertzberg about Gabrielle Giffords' shooting. I re-read what I wrote a few months ago, and my mind has not changed. 

It is interesting how all ecological degradation has stemmed from our anthropocentric ethical structure, which dictates that we will do whatever it takes in the interest of humans, more likely than not at the expense of the environment. There are a couple of deficiencies of this ethical framework that I can think of off the top of my head, which I want to discuss. Firstly, I find it amazing that we think humans are the greatest thing in the world, but when it comes down to our differences, we will resort to violence to make sure that power stays concentrated with certain people. There is a clear discrepancy, it seems then, between doing all that we can to keep humanity alive (anthropocentrism), and then resorting to violence to kill humans when we don't agree. Of course, someone that has power might say then that it is in the interest of the broader humanity that their power is being used as violence against others, but that is unjustifiable. In this case, we don't act anthropocentrically.

Secondly, although it may be more manageable for us to think that we should act in the best interest of humans, particularly from an "evolutionary" standpoint, we inevitable degrade what it is that sustains us. We want to protect our own, and if that means that we need to blow off the top of a mountain to get coal so that our homes can be heated in winter, so be it. But if we think about the longevity of humanity, certainly blowing off of the top of a mountain and consequently polluting streams and rivers is in no way protecting our ability to further ourselves. Anthropocentrism, in this case, just has the ability to cave in on itself, particularly when it comes down to an ever-burgeoning population and the struggle to keep ourselves alive in the future. The future that we have envisioned for ourselves, full of batteries and gizmos and computers, is no less violent toward nature than our present society.

The very act of war itself is unsustainable in the truest sense of the word, while at the same time flying in the face of anthropocentrism. Peace does seem to be a dying ideal.

When is it right to start criticising our ethics?

Now it is Ireland that has to be bailed out by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. Why does the country of Ireland need to be bailed out? Here's what a BBC article reads:

"Put simply, the seriousness of the situation it finds itself in with regard to the debts of the Irish banks.

As several of the banks have been part-nationalised, most of their massive debt is now actually government debt.

And the great majority of this debt is owed to foreign lenders, which the Irish banks, and therefore the Irish government, simply cannot afford to default on.

This is because the Irish Republic, as a small country, is greatly reliant upon this overseas investment. And to default on their overseas loans would make it very difficult - and far more expensive - for Irish banks to borrow from their foreign counterparts in the future.

More importantly, if Irish banks could not pay back their overseas debt, it would have a knock-on impact on the Republic's overall credit rating.

This would make it more expensive for Dublin to sell government bonds, as it would have to offer a higher rate of interest to more sceptical institutional investors."

.......
House values have fallen by between 50% and 60%, and bad debts - mainly in the form of loans to developers - have built up in the country's main banks. This almost wrecked the institutions, leaving them needing bailing out by the government at a cost of 45bn euros (£39bn; $60.1bn).

This has opened a huge hole in the Irish government's finances - which will see it run a budget deficit equivalent to 32% of GDP this year."

I don't claim to be any sort of expert on banking, international debt and investing and the proportion of GDP that a country's debt is. What I do see, however, is a confluence of events across the world, that although seem disparate to most people, are fundamentally connected through their root cause(s). I think two graphics that are particularly telling are those two below, that I have pulled from here:

 

What the two graphics together tell me is that most Western countries (including the US) live well beyond their means - services are promised to people that the government takes loans out (from other countries or the IMF or the World Bank) to provide, and these loans are used to create vested interests in those services, ones which people will absolutely not do without. Then, when a problem does arise, say that too many people are starting to default on their mortgage payments, or people's pensions are lost because an airline goes bankrupt, we address the problem by band-aiding it, and addressing it with even more complexity than that which caused the problem in the first place.

Let's take the case of the automobile. We realise that we can use high-energy-density fossil fuels to power internal combustion engines that will propel people from place to place. We don't think of the consequences of sprawl, fluctuating gasoline prices, or greenhouse gas emissions. Now the world is in a bind. We have all of these people that live incredibly far from the places they work and shop, and think of an automobile as an expression of freedom. With "growing" environmental and climate change concerns, there are several options proposed - 1) let's cap carbon dioxide emissions and have companies duke it out to not be the ones paying to pollute, 2) let's tax those entities that pollute based on the amount they pollute, 3) let's find a way to continue driving cars and extract resources from the Earth, just this time let's not let it be fossil fuels. Okay, so we will drive....electric cars and have wind turbines. What do electric cars and wind turbines need? They need batteries and magnets. What are batteries and magnets made of? Lithium, lanthanum, neodymium, and other rare earth elements. Well, the largest deposits of lithium lie in Bolivia (but also in Afghanistan, now!), with an indigenous President who threatens vested interests by instituting land reform (read/listen here and here), and says "Either capitalism dies, or Planet Earth dies." At the same time, the largest deposits of rare earth metals lie in China (here's something for the techies). What will a country like the US do to get access to large reserves of lithium or rare earths? Well, maybe they go to war or assassinate those whose views are markedly different than their own. Also, did you hear about more coal miners stuck underground in New Zealand?

It seems to me that the foundational causes of these problems lie not in that the coal is too deep, or the oil is too far away, or that the rare earths are reserved in a country whose Communism we don't like, but rather in our ethics that compel us to want access to these resources so we can continue to live lives on debt and deficit. We are taking debt at the expense of those people, creatures and ecosystems that will come after we are gone, and we live in a world full of moral, ethical and spiritual deficit.