The Price of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity (24 page)

Addressing the Ecological Overshoot

Throughout human history, ethicists and gurus have appealed to humanity to respect nature as the irreplaceable font of life and indeed to understand human destiny as part of the web of life. When the vast majority of humanity lived as farmers, the vital role of nature was obvious. The harvesting of rainwater, the cleaning of irrigation canals, and the replenishment of soil nutrients all meant the difference between life and death. Natural climatic variations, such as prolonged droughts, often spelled the downfall of vast civilizations.
Cities and entire regions had to be abandoned as life-giving waters dried up.

Our age is fundamentally different in two regards. First, today’s global society is much further removed from nature than in the past. More than half of humanity now lives in cities, cut off from the daily realities of nature. This is especially true of the world’s rich and powerful elites. Second, and even more dangerous, the human impacts on nature are for the first time in human history so great that they threaten the planet’s core biophysical functioning. We have reached, or will soon reach, dangerous thresholds of human activity that fundamentally threaten life on the planet.

Mindfulness of nature, therefore, is not a tree hugger’s plea but a practical imperative for twenty-first-century survival. Our peril is unprecedented, and human knowledge, values, and social institutions are far behind the curve. The global economy has suddenly become so large—$70 trillion a year and doubling in size roughly every twenty years—that the earth’s air, water, land, and climate are all under threat. Our global response to date has been so obtuse, so absurd, so shortsighted that it almost seems that humanity has a death wish. This ignorance and shortsightedness can lead us to disaster. Of course, more than a death wish has been at play; the greed of powerful vested interests has been far more consequential than public confusion and shortsightedness.

The American performance in the face of ecological dangers is especially sobering. Americans impose the highest per capita impact on the planet yet show the least regard for their actions. The UN climate change treaty was signed and ratified by the United States in 1992, but the U.S. Senate has refused to take even one small step since then in limiting America’s impact on climate. Many American senators are notoriously and aggressively ignorant or dismissive about the science, such as Oklahoma senator James Inhofe, who described human-induced climate change as the “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.”
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Politicians may be knowledgeable but still deeply cynical, playing for campaign contributions
rather than the well-being of their grandchildren. They are ready to close their eyes to the looming disaster rather than earn their pay by explaining the tough realities and difficult policy choices to their constituents and to the Big Oil and Coal interests that fund their campaigns.

Unfortunately, the ecological threats continue to multiply, yet America is passive and resistant to action. Market forces, alas, will never solve these threats but only exacerbate them, until society, acting collectively at last, mindfully commits to creating a protective cordon around the threatened planet.

Responsibility Toward the Future

We can’t address any of these problems if we can’t think systematically about the future. And the future extends beyond the next election. The time horizon of public deliberation in America has shrunk to an unimaginably brief scale. When we need to build infrastructure, we aim for “shovel-ready” projects. Yet infrastructure worth building cannot be shovel-ready, a fact that Obama finally acknowledged in late 2010, after championing such projects in the 2009 stimulus package. Similarly, when we go to war, we aim for a short, brief “surge” to do the job. Repeatedly, and predictably, we fall woefully short of our objectives by choosing such short-term measures.

Mindfulness of the future therefore requires a special act of will: to take moral and practical ownership of the long-term consequences of our actions and to trace those consequences as carefully as possible into the far future. One great philosopher, Hans Jonas, has argued that we need a whole new ethic for the future, since never before has a human generation held in its hands the prosperity or ruin of the generations to come.
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We profess our commitment to “sustainability,” that is, to ensuring that the future will be able to meet its needs with the knowledge, capital, and environment that we bequeath it. Yet we really don’t know what sustainability entails
as we continue to plunder the planet for resources and simply hope for the best.

Taking moral responsibility for the future, accepting the reality that our actions today will determine the fates of generations yet to live, is daunting enough. Taking practical responsibility is equally difficult. We are causing enormous disruptions to the planet, but we lack the ability to trace the implications of those disruptions with precision or high scientific confidence. “Futurology” was once mocked as pseudoscience. Yet now we must make it operational, at least within the boundaries of our understanding and capacity.

The sad truth about Washington today is that we lack serious institutions charged with carrying out systematic planning for the future. The Office of Management and Budget prepares federal budget proposals one year at a time. The U.S. Treasury has little capacity or mandate to undertake long-term economic strategy. There is no coordinating agency for public investments by the federal government, nor is there a planning agency, as in many other countries. Each department or agency manages the specific investment projects under its particular jurisdiction. Issues such as energy, climate, water, demographic change, and so forth are either neglected or chopped up into the work of several different parts of the government.

The United States has several important agencies that undertake high-quality analysis of global trends. The National Intelligence Council has prepared important studies about the global challenges that will face the United States to the year 2025, most notably
Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World
, in 2008.
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The findings were stark, suggesting that

• Climate change is likely to exacerbate resource scarcities.
  
• Demand is likely to outstrip easily available supplies (of strategic resources, including energy, food, and water) over the next decade or so.
  
• Lack of access to stable supplies of water is reaching critical proportions.
  
• The above trends suggest major discontinuities, shocks, and surprises.
  

What is most alarming, though, is that the government made such dire forecasts without recognizing the need for substantive policy responses. The alarm bells were sounded, but nobody responded and nobody seems to care.

This is an increasingly common pattern. Careful work is carried out by countless agencies and scientific academies, including the Institute of Medicine, the National Academy of Sciences, and the National Academy of Engineering, as well as leading research universities and think tanks. Yet the studies are ignored as soon as they are issued. Expertise is ignored, and the agenda in Washington remains dominated by what is convenient for politicians and the interest groups that support them. Difficult issues, such as climate change, water scarcity, and the transition of energy from fossil fuels, are kicked down the road to later years.

A new mindfulness of the future would take seriously the responsibility to link expert forecasts with appropriate policy actions. The government would be charged with regular reporting on the main future national challenges, with a time horizon of ten to twenty years. Such reports, by the National Intelligence Council or other agencies, would then be discussed and debated by the president and Congress. The White House would be required to issue a policy paper in response, and Congress would be charged with taking up that policy paper. A cycle of deliberation and policy design would ensue, and the future would be viewed with the moral and political seriousness that it requires.

Politics as Moral Responsibility

Mindfulness of politics is needed to provide an antidote to the dead end of corporatocracy. Americans must regain a proper understanding
of the complementary and balanced roles of government and the marketplace. Though we support the crucial role of private businesses in the market economy, we must also insist that powerful corporations stop their relentless lobbying and propagandizing so that society can address serious problems on the basis of evidence, ethics, and long-term plans.

Our politics will work again when we overcome three crises. The first is ideological, the mistaken belief that free markets alone can solve our economic problems. Only markets and government operating as complementary pillars of the economy can produce the prosperity and fairness that we seek.

The second is institutional, involving the political role of the large corporations. We must maintain a judicious view. Our major corporations are invaluable to society as highly sophisticated organizations that manage large-scale, technologically advanced operations all over the world. Yet they have become a threat to society by using their lobbying power to dictate the terms of legislation and regulations. The license to operate as a company does not include a license to pollute our politics.

The third is moral, concerning the nature of modern democracy itself. In America today, there is little systematic public deliberation, and the public’s views are rarely taken seriously in the political process. One key policy decision after another is adopted behind the backs of the public, often in direct contradiction to public opinion. We need to return to a spirit of true deliberation at all levels of society, one that reconceives politics as honest group problem solving, grounded in mutual respect and shared values.

Toward a Global Ethic

The eighth step toward economic recovery is mindfulness of the world, and most importantly the recognition that today’s world is deeply interconnected economically and socially, albeit with considerable
discord and confusion. No significant economic trend in any part of the world leaves the rest of the world untouched. The 2008 Wall Street crisis quickly percolated to all parts of the world economy. AIDS and the H1N1 flu virus similarly spread quickly around the world. An El Niño fluctuation in the Pacific climate causes weather disturbances worldwide, and these in turn trigger sharp movements in global food prices, such as the surge in grain prices in 2010.

Just as we’ve created a national economy riddled with advertising and propaganda that threaten our well-being, we’ve created a globalized economy that lacks the necessary cooperation to keep it stable and peaceful. The combination of unprecedented economic interconnectedness on the one hand, and the deep distrust across national and regional borders on the other, may be the defining paradox of the world economy today. Many of our major global problems—climate change, global population growth, mass migration, regional conflicts, and financial regulation—will require a much higher level of political cooperation among the world’s major powers than we have so far achieved. Without sufficient trust across national borders, the growing global competition over increasingly scarce resources could easily turn into great power confrontations. Without trust, there is little chance for the coordinated global actions needed to fight poverty, hunger, and disease. Without trust, governments will be at the mercy of footloose global corporations that move their money to tax havens around the planet and pressure governments to lower tax rates, labor standards, environmental controls, and financial regulations. Mindfulness of the world therefore really amounts to a new readiness to adopt global norms of good behavior that aim to protect poor countries as well as the rich, weak countries as well as the powerful.

The great theologian Hans Küng has undertaken a profound effort during the past quarter century to identify a
global economic ethic
based on the world’s leading religions. Küng found that diverse
religious traditions share fundamental ethical standards regarding economic life and behavior, which can enable the world to identify and embrace a truly global economic ethic. According to Küng, the common thread of conviction is the Principle of Humanity: “Being human must be the ethical yardstick for all economic action.”
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The economy should fulfill the basic needs of human beings “so that they can live in dignity.” From this basic humanistic principle, Küng identified several ethical themes with universal standing: the importance of respect and tolerance for others; the right to life and its development; sustainable treatment of the natural environment; the rule of law; distributive justice and solidarity; the essential values of truthfulness, honesty, and reliability; and the core value of mutual esteem.

Küng’s findings, and their recent embrace by many other ethicists, are heartening. They show us the way to harness global diversity yet find common touchstones across what to some appear to be impenetrable divides. They give us the confidence to envision economics not only in technical terms but also as part of a global human framework guided by humane principles. The global market economy must remain guided by humane purposes and not be regarded as an end in itself.

Most important, the Principle of Humanity bids us to respect one another through a renewed and heightened appreciation of our common fate as human beings and our common hope for dignity, solidarity, and sustainability. Küng’s studies of the world’s religious traditions reaffirm the key point that what unites humanity is vastly more important than whatever might divide us. They also remind me of the eloquence of President John F. Kennedy in his remarkable search for peace in the year after the Cuban missile crisis, the final year of his life. Kennedy reminded us that