In the birthplace of democracy

“The mortgage-stones that covered her, by me Removed, — the land that was a slave is free;
that some who had been seized for their debts he had brought back from other countries, where
— so far their lot to roam, They had forgot the language of their home;
and some he had set at liberty, — Who here in shameful servitude were held.”

                                                                                                                      Solon, Plutarch’s Lives

When the history of the conflict between the market and democracy is someday written, the events in Greece this Sunday will almost certainly be seen as a major victory for market forces. There, the Greek parliament, under enormous pressure from the financial markets along with Germany and France committed what may amount to political suicide in the upcoming Greek elections. Members of the Greek parliament are willfully taking the country into what is in effect a deflationary induced depression in order to avoid the default and exit of Greece from the Euro-based economies.

Opposition to the draconian cuts necessary to secure funding support by bond holders, European governments and the ECB quite literally set Greece ablaze.

As in the ancient myth, Greek society is caught between Scylla and Charybdis.  Their only choices seem to be that of the chaos that would likely be the result of  a default, and a self-induced economic depression. The latter might prove preferable if it were likely to work in the long-run to restore, and  therefore secure the long term prosperity of Greece.  Such an outcome, is sadly unlikely.

The democratic process is now dictated by the electric speed of the international markets. Greek politicians were in a race against the clock before markets opened on Monday.

 Despite the German’s ridicule of the Greeks’ spendthrift ways, the Greek social system has its origins in the history of the country, which for decades endured brutal right-wing rule opposed only by a defiant left. The social-rights of Greeks were in effect the price to be paid for the left’s acceptance of the fact that Greece was to be a normal rather than a revolutionary country. Dismantling this system is a denial of history, and on par with the most utopian of top-down social transformations. Here the market is at war not just with democracy, but with history itself.

The German view of “lazy” Greeks also fails to take into account the very structural imbalances between Germany as an export economy and almost everybody else in Europe as playing a major contributing  role in the crisis. German exporters are greatly helped by the weakness of a currency they share with backward countries such as Greece. The Greeks get no such benefit, suffering a much stronger currency than would otherwise be the case. The real gain of Greece sharing a currency with mighty Germany has been Greek access to cheap debt. That is over now, and turned out to be not such a good thing, after all.

Rather than being isolated, the Greek crisis is symptomatic of the current state of capitalism, both globally and in Europe. As Robert D. Kaplan pointed out way back in 2009, as Greek riots were already starting to occur before the Arab Spring or Occupy Wall Street movements had even been imagined:

It’s tempting to dismiss this as a purely Greek affair that carries little significance to the outside world. But the global economic crisis will take different forms in different places in the way that it ignites political unrest. Yes, youth alienation in Greece is influenced by a particular local history that I’ve very briefly outlined here. But it is also influenced by sweeping international trends of uneven development, in which the uncontrolled surges and declines of capitalism have left haves and bitter have-nots, who, in Europe, often tend to be young people. And these young people now have the ability to instantaneously organize themselves through text messages and other new media, without waiting passively to be informed by traditional newspapers and television. Technology has empowered the crowd—or the mob if you will.

Likewise, a European Union that could have served to shelter the European social system from the relentless leveling of market forces has shown itself instead to be the most powerful instrument in the hands of such forces able to bring, despite the resistance of history, whole governments, and the societies upon which they rest to heel.

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Psychobot

It is interesting… how weapons reflect the soul of their maker.

                  Don Delillo,  The Underworld

Singularity, or something far short of it, the very real revolution in artificial intelligence and robotics is already encroaching on the existential nature of aspects of the human condition that have existed for as long as our history.  Robotics is indeed changing the nature of work, and is likely to continue to do so throughout this century and beyond. But, as in most technological revolutions, the impact of change is felt first and foremost in the field of war.

In 2012 IEET Fellow Patrick Lin had a fascinating article in the Atlantic about a discussion he had at the CIA revolving around the implications of the robotics revolution. The use of robots in war results in all kinds of questions in the area of Just-War theory that have yet to even begun to be addressed. An assumption throughout Lin’s article is that robots are likely to make war more not less ethical as robots can be programmed to never target civilians, or to never cross the thin line that separates interrogation from torture.

This idea, that the application of robots to war could ultimately take some of the nastier parts of the human condition out of the calculus of warfare is also touched upon from the same perspective in Peter Singer’s Wired for War.  There, Singer brings up the case of Steven Green, a US soldier charged with the premeditated rape and murder of a 14 year old Iraqi girl.  Singer contrast the young soldier “swirling with hormones” to the calm calculations of a robot lacking such sexual and murderous instincts.

The problem with this interpretation of Green is that it relies on an outdated understanding of how the brain works. As I’ll try to show Green is really more like a robot-soldier than most human beings.

Lin and Singer’s idea of the “good robot” as a replacement for the “bad soldier” is based on a understanding of the nature of moral behavior that can be traced, as most things in Western civilization, back to Plato. In Plato’s conception, the godly part of human nature, it’s reason, was seen as a charioteer tasked with guiding chaotic human passions. People did bad things whenever reason lost control. The idea was updated by Freud with his ID (instincts) Ego (self) and Super-Ego (social conscience). The thing is, this version of why human beings act morally or immorally is most certainly wrong.

The neuroscience writer Jonah Lehrer in his How we Decide has a chapter, The Moral Mind, devoted to this very topic.  Odd thing is the normal soldier does not want to kill anybody- even enemy combatants. He cites a study of thousands of American soldiers after WWII done by  U.S. Army Brigadier General S.L.A Marshall.

His shocking conclusion was that less than 20 percent actually shot at the enemy even when under attack. “It is fear of     killing” Marshall wrote “rather than fear of being killed, that is the most common cause of battle failure of the individual”. When soldiers were forced to directly confront the possibility of directly harming another human being- this is a personal moral decision- they were literally incapacitated by their emotions. “At the most vital point of battle”, Marshall wrote, “the soldier becomes a conscientious objector”.

After this study was published, the Army redesigned it’s training to reduce this natural moral impediment to battlefield effectiveness. “What was being taught in this environment is the ability to shoot reflexively and instantly… Soldiers are de-sensitized to the act of killing until it becomes an automatic response. pp. 179-180

Lehrer, of course, has been discredited as a result of plagiarism scandals, so we should accept his ideas with caution, yet, they do suggest what already know that the existential condition of war is that it is difficult for human beings to kill one another, and well it should be. If modern training methods are meant to remove this obstruction in the name of combat effective they also remove the soldier from the actual moral reality of war. This moral reality is the reason why wars should be fought infrequently and only under the most extreme of circumstances. We should only be willing to kill other human beings under the most threatening and limited of conditions.

The designers of  robots warriors are unlikely to program this moral struggle with killing into their machines. Such machines will kill or not kill a fellow sentient beings as they are programmed to do. They were truly be amoral in nature, or to use a loaded and antiquated term, without a soul.

We could certainly program robots with ethical rules of war, as Singer and Lin suggest. These robots would be less likely to kill the innocent in the fear and haste of the fog of war. It is impossible to imagine that robots would commit the horrible crime of rape, which is far too common in war. All these things are good things. The question for the farther future is, how would a machine with a human or supra-human level of intelligence experience war? What would be their moral/existential reality of war compared to how the most highly sentient creatures today, human beings, experience combat.

Singer’s use of Steven Green as a flawed human being whose “hormones” have overwhelmed his reason, as ethically inferior to the cold reason of artificial intelligence which have no such passions to control is telling, and again is based on the flawed Plato/Freud model of the conscience of human beings.  A clear way to see this is by looking inside the mind of the rapist/murderer Green who, before he had committed his crime had been quoted in the Washington Post as saying:

I came over here because I wanted to kill people…

I shot a guy here when we were out at a traffic checkpoint, and it was like nothing. Over here killing people is like squashing an ant. I mean you kill somebody and it’s like ‘All right, let’s go get some pizza’.

In other words, Green is a psychopath.

Again we can turn to Lehrer who in describing the serial killer John Wayne Gacy:

According to the court appointed psychiatrist, Gacy seemed incapable of experiencing regret, sadness, or joy. Instead his inner life consisted entirely of sexual impulses and ruthless rationality. p.169

It is not the presence of out of control emotions that explain the psychopath, but the very absence of emotion. Psychopaths are unmoved by the very sympathy that makes it difficult for normal soldiers to kill. Unlike other human beings they show no emotional response when shown depictions of violence. In fact, they are unmoved by emotions at all.  For them, there are simply “goals” (set by biology or the environment) that they want to achieve. The means to those goals, including murder, are, for them, irrelevant. Lehrer quotes G.K. Chesterson:

The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.

Whatever the timeline, we are in the process of creating sentient beings who will kill other sentient beings, human and machine, without anger, guilt, or fear. I see no easy way out of this dilemma, for the very selective pressures of war, appear to be weighted against programming such moral qualities (as opposed to rules for who and when to kill) into our machines.  Rather than ushering in an era of “humane” warfare, on the existential level, that is in the minds of the beings actually doing the fighting, the moral dimension of war will be relentlessly suppressed. We will have created what is in effect, an army of psychopaths.

Of drones and democracy

P.W. Singer has a fascinating article in last Sunday’s edition of the New York Times about the implications of the current robotics revolution in warfare for democracy.

Singer’s reputation of someone who asks the hard questions (and asks them first) about war was gained in his studies of the rise of privatized warfare  and the increasing use of children in warfare.  On both of those issues, Singer was among the first to correctly identify disturbing trends. His perspective shows little ideological bent, merely the search for truth. On these issues he was almost a lone voice crying in the wilderness, as he is in bringing to our knowledge the troubling questions being brought about as the revolution in computer technology and robotics finds itself increasing applied to war. His goal, as always, appears to be to reveal the obvious trends in front of us to which we are blind, and in doing so start a conversation we should already be having.

I think a short review of Singer’s Wired For War  is in order, so that his N.Y. Times article can be seen in its full context.  In that book Singer takes readers on a wild ride through the current robotics revolution in warfare. He sees our era as akin to WWI when new technologies like the tank and airplane were thrown into the field, but no one new yet how to actually use them. (224)

The military now funds over 80% of American spending on artificial intelligence. Much of this funding flows through the Defense Advanced Research Agency (DARPA).  Joel Garreau of the Washington Post SAYS the mission of DARPA “is to accelerate the future into being”. (78)

Not only the US Army, but also the Navy and Airforce (which wants 45% of its bomber fleet to be composed of unmanned vehicles) are rushing to develop unmanned systems. Some of these systems seem straight out of science-fiction, whether swarming insect sized robots or super-sized planes able to stay aloft for months or even years.  (117-118).

Many of the new robots resemble animals, such as a robotic dog .

What does all of this have to do with democracy?

In his article, he makes the point, that increasingly, the US is relying on its advantage in military technology, the most famous of which, are the use of unmanned drones, to wage, what is in effect a constant war, with out the democratic oversight and control that is supposed to be the job of our elected representatives in the Congress. The biggest cost in war, the lives of citizens, no longer at risk, the American government can wage war on terrorist targets throughout the world with seeming impunity.

As a prime example, he cites the recent US military action in Libya.

Starting on April 23, American unmanned systems were deployed over Libya. For the next six months, they carried out at least 146 strikes on their own. They also identified and pinpointed the targets for most of NATO’s manned strike jets. This unmanned operation lasted well past the 60-day deadline of the War Powers Resolution, extending to the very last airstrike that hit Colonel Qaddafi’s convoy on Oct. 20 and led to his death.

Choosing to make the operation unmanned proved critical to initiating it without Congressional authorization and continuing it with minimal public support. On June 21, when NATO’s air war was lagging, an American Navy helicopter was shot down by pro-Qaddafi forces. This previously would have been a disaster, with the risk of an American aircrew being captured or even killed. But the downed helicopter was an unmanned Fire Scout, and the story didn’t even make the newspapers the next day.

Singer’s conclusion:

We must now accept that technologies that remove humans from the battlefield, fromunmanned systems like the Predator to cyberweapons like the Stuxnet computer worm, are becoming the new normal in war.

And like it or not, the new standard we’ve established for them is that presidents need to seek approval only for operations that send people into harm’s way — not for those that involve waging war by other means.

WITHOUT any actual political debate, we have set an enormous precedent, blurring the civilian and military roles in war and circumventing the Constitution’s mandate for authorizing it. Freeing the executive branch to act as it chooses may be appealing to some now, but many future scenarios will be less clear-cut. And each political party will very likely have a different view, depending on who is in the White House.

America’s founding fathers may not have been able to imagine robotic drones, but they did provide an answer. The Constitution did not leave war, no matter how it is waged, to the executive branch alone.

In a democracy, it is an issue for all of us.

The Dispossessed

The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself. 

(240)

I just finished The Dispossessed, a 1974 novel by Ursula K. Le Guin. This wonderful book tells the story of an “ambiguous” anarchist utopia. Though written during a period much different from our own, The Dispossessed  might have lessons for us today, especially for those in the OWS movement whose political philosophy and hopes represent what might be seen as a triumph of anarchism.

The novel is set on the anarchist colony on the moon of Anarres, founded as a breakaway settlement of a movement called Odonianism- a moral and political philosophy created by Odo a woman who railed against the capitalist system of Urras, the rich and beautiful mother planet.  The two worlds under “The Terms of the Closure of the Settlement of Anarres” have interactions limited to a space freighter that exchanges necessities between them 8 times a year. There is a “wall” between Anarres and Urras, and it is the efforts of the protagonist of The Dispossessed,  a brilliant physicist named Shevek to brake down this wall between worlds that form the essence of the story.

Without doubt, Odonianism has created a moral utopia. The inhabitants of Anarres, constantly subject to a harsh climate and in constant danger of scarcity and famine, are bound together tightly and suffer continuously for one another. The needs of the whole community come before all others, even those of family. As Shevek and his loved partner Takver separate in the name of the needs of the community.  Anarres is an organic community that in the words of Shevek arguing with a Urratzi social Darwinist:

Yes, and the strongest, in the existence of any social species are those who are the most social. In human terms the most ethical. (195)

The people of Anarres have no real government, though it can not really be said that they have politics either. Like Saint-Simon had suggested, without the class war endemic to the state, politics would become the mere “administration of things”.  A series of councils/syndicis make important decisions such as the allocation of work (though an individual is always free to refuse to go where a work syndic requests.  To my ears, these councils sound much like the “working groups” of the OWSM each tasked with a very particular need or goal of the movement. On Anarres they are a place where rotation and openness to debate mask the fact that they can be manipulated for political ends such as the machinations of the scientist Sabul who uses his ability to control the flow of information between Anarres and Urras, and even to control the publication of scientific papers to use the brilliance of Shevek for his own advantage, and take credit for what is mostly Shevek’s work.

It is this ability and desire to control the flow of knowledge and insight (including the insight brought by travelers from other worlds) whether stemming from the flawed human condition of someone like Sabul, or the tyranny of the majority implicit in an egalitarian society, that is the sin of Anarres. For, when combined with an internalized moral code that commands them not to be egoist, the Anarrresti are unable to express their own individual genius. Whether that be in a case like Shevek’s where he is constantly thwarted from constructing a theory that would allow faster- than- light communication, and therefore the enable the strong connection of interstellar peoples to become possible, or the comedy of a non-conformist playwright, such as Tirin, who writes a play about a comic character coming from Urras to Anarres. This suffocation of the spirit of the soul is the primary, and growing, flaw of Odo’s utopia.  As Shevek says:

That the social conscience completely dominates the individual conscience instead of striking a balance with it. We don’t cooperate –we obey. (291)

In an effort to break free from the control of knowledge, Shevek and those around him set up a printing syndicate of their own. This syndicate eventually starts communicating with the outside, with the Urratzi, which ultimately results in the ultimate attempt to breakdown walls- Shevek’s visit to Urras itself.

The capitalist nation of A-Io invites Shevek out of the belief that he is on the verge of discovering a unified theory of time which they will profit from.  Shevek’s journey is a disaster. What he discovers on Urras is a beautiful yet superficial world built on the oppression of the poor by the rich. Not surprising for the time period the novel was written, a Cold War rages between capitalist A-Io and the authoritarian communist nation of Thu. The two-powers fight proxy wars in less developed nations. When the poor rise up to protest the rich in A-Io they are brutally massacred, and Shevek flees to the embassy of the planet Earth. The ambassador of earth shelters Shevek, but expresses her admiration for Urras, with the civilization on earth having almost destroyed itself. Explains the ambassador:

My world, my earth is a ruin.  A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and gobbled and fought until there was nothing left and then we died…

But we destroyed the world first. There are no forest left on my earth. The air is grey, the sky is grey, it is always hot.

She admires Urras for it’s  beauty and material abundance, which has somehow avoided environmental catastrophe. She does not understand the moral criticism of Shevek- a man from a desert world of scarcity, and famine.

Earthlings were ultimately saved by an ancient, sage like people the Hainish. They return Shevek to Anarres, along with a member of the Hainish that wants to see the world anarchist have built. The walls Shevek sought to tear down continue to fall…

What might some of the lessons of this brilliant novel be for our own times? Here are my ideas:

1) For the OWSM itself: that the “administration of things” always has a political aspect. That even groups open to periodic, democratic debate are prone to capture by the politically savvy, and steps make sure they remain democratic need to be constant.

2) One of the flaws of Le Guin’s view of utopia is that it seems to leave no room for democratic politics itself.  Politics, therefore can only be in the form of manipulation (Sabul) or rebellion (Shevek) there is no space, it seems, for consensual decision making as opposed to a mere right to debate and be heard.

3) There is a conflict between the individual (the need for creativity, love of family) and the needs of the community that is existential and cannot be eliminated by any imaginable political system. The key is to strike the right balance between the individual and the community.

4) That the tyranny of the majority is a real danger for any consensus based community and not just a mere bogeyman of conservative forces.

5) The most important thing we can do to preserve the freedom of the individual and health of the community is to keep the lines of communication and connection open. That includes openness to the viewpoints of ideological rivals.

All quotes from: The Dispossessed, An Ambiguous Utopia, Ursula K. Le Guin, Harper and Row, 1974

The Future of Freedom and Tyranny

Cory Doctorow delivered a fascinating talk  at the Chaos Communication Congress . Doctorow is an incredibly engaging speaker, and I suggest you really take sometime to sit down and watch it. My take away on it is this:  In this talk he makes the claim that the current copyright wars are but the opening chapter of a “century- long struggle” regarding the freedom of information, of which SOPA, and PIPA are mere opening skirmishes, that is to be fought out by forces against some element of that freedom trying to do away with general purpose computation machines. What does he mean? As I take it corporate and political interest have what will only be an increasing desire to diminish the “hackability” of the information exchanging devices and software we use. So that a computer company might, for instance, want to create the ability to monitor and erase pirated software on my computer. A government might want to be able to monitor people engaged in criminal activity, a power which, when taken to an extreme, might see a tyranny only allowing software or hardware to be sold with extensive surveillance capabilities in its borders. This is, of course, what is known as “spy-ware” and Doctorow sees corporate and government efforts to control information to increasingly be in the form of “spy-ware”.

Doctorow briefly touches on the extension of this conflict between the freedom and control  to new forms of hacking such as 3D printing or DIY biology. As he admits general purpose computation may result in things that “freak even me out”, but he nevertheless appears to think we should always lean more in the direction of freedom than control.

There are is a question I wish I would have been able to ask  Doctorow directly, so asking it here will have to suffice.  My question relates to what might be called the inevitability of efforts to control information, and the ultimate source of such legislation.

One of his listeners pointed out how regulation of the internet might ultimately resemble the laws of the sea with pockets of control and pockets of freedom. Doctorow responded that the analogy was inaccurate. The internet was an interdependent network in a way that the oceans, where something happening in the middle of the Pacific might have no effect elsewhere, is not.

My question is this: if some attempt (a very likely to fail attempt) at governance of the open information system we now possess is inevitable, wouldn’t it be a good idea to try and see if the very liberating and democratic potential of that system was used to provide that governance rather than fight for a kind of perfect freedom of information and hackability?

As Paddy Ashdown recently pointed out one of the features that make our era unique is the dis-junction between the power of the nation-state and the international nature of our problems, that we have yet to evolve institutions, not of world government, but international governance. Attempts , even failed attempts, at such governance their certainly will be as institutions emerge to fill this power vacuum. As Doctorow points out, this is now beginning to be done by secretive, non-democratically accountable institutions such as The Trans-Pacific Strategic Partnership   and ACTA.

A clear example might help better explain my question. I wish Doctorow would have mentioned his thoughts the recent request by the National Science Advisory Board for Bio-security that scientist not publish recent work on the evolveability of the bird flu to a form that would be pandemic in humans for fear that it might be used by terrorists. No doubt, this is but the first of many cases, and not just involving security, but primarily posing deep ethical questions, such as the crazy planet of the apes scenario that a group of British scientist recently warned about. Certainly, in addition to questions of security and crime, there will be the desire and efforts to control the hackability of life, even our own personal selves, on ethical grounds.

What I really want to know, is if knowledge, and even more importantly technological and genetic practice,  is bound to be regulated, then can we construct democratic mechanisms to do it which avoids the problems of the tyranny of the majority, is not motivated by a hysterical fear of technology, and bridges the gap between expert knowledge and common understanding?  That is the question of the century.

Machines Rule!

Science Fiction writers, who are perhaps the only group of thinkers taking these questions seriously, usually assume that the era when artificial intelligence rules over human-societies will only arrive after AI achieves human level intelligence or greater. But there is perhaps a way in which AIs already rule, long before they have reached such a level.

JP Morgan recently won the prize for ‘Most Cutting Edge IT Initiative’ at the American Financial Technology Awards 2011. It won this award on the basis of taking end of day risk calculations down from eight hours to 238 seconds. According to its backers, the continued use of super-computers for financial trading will allow the company to:

to minimise its risk and respond more effectively than its competitors to rapidly changing marketing conditions, particularly the financial turmoil in Europe,” said John Barr, research director of financial markets and head of EU research at the 451 Group.

JP Morgan is not alone in its quest to use Teraflop performing computers, fiber-optic networks and black box algorithms to seek to master the financial markets. Kevin Slavin, the founder of the gaming company Area/Code, of all things, gave a beautiful TED Talk in which he discusses the power of algorithms in our world (and not just the financial world).  In that talk, Slavin points out how computer based trading, so called black box or algo trading now comprises 70% of the US stock market- in other words 70% of stock market transaction are now decided by not just mediated through computers.

Black box trading puts a premium on speed, and so Slavin points out how this has led to the strange phenomenon of whole buildings in the heart of Manhattan being hollowed out and filled with computer servers for the advantage of a few nano-seconds. By far the biggest existent absurdity is an an 825 mile trench dug over the last several years to house fiber-optic cables linking Chicago and New York. As Slavin points out, a massive project of terraforming in the name of a slice of time unperceivable by human being, which portends other transformations of even greater scale. His argument is hammered home by recent plans to build a trans-Atlantic fiber optic cable that will cost 400 billion and save traders a whopping 5 milliseconds.

David Brin has a great article on what might be called an ecological understanding of such high speed trading. He compares financial algorithms to parasites.

Want the exact parallel in nature for these systems? It is those gut parasites or e-coli or salmonella, or Typhus, who nibble away the gradient of potential profit that the human trader perceives, between the current asking price and what he or she feels the stock may soon be worth.  These programs can now detect people getting ready to buy a stock they like, and pounce to snap it up first, then offering it to you at just a little higher price. You lose a bit of that gradient, because someone – a program – who did none of your research simply pounced faster than you ever, possibly could.

His solution to this problem is the imposition of a very small Tobin-Tax that would slow trading down to be closer to the level of “human-thought”. So far, so good.

The problem begins when Brin, by suggesting that the kind of super-conscious and dangerous AI, which is the persistent bogey-man of Sci-Fi writers, might emerge from such civilian rather than military sources,  looses sight of the brilliant argument he had been making. For super-computed algorithms need never be as smart as us to “gain control”. They might in fact be given control without ever evolving beyond the level of an extremely efficient and rapidly evolving virus. For, if 70% of the market is now controlled by algorithms, and financial markets are increasingly more powerful than democratic politics, then the machines, in some sense already rule. Something which would indeed have come, as Brin points out, as a “surprise”.

Replace the words markets with algorithms in the comments below by historian of democracy Mark Mazower and you should see what I mean.

MAZOWER: Part of this, I think, is because of the timeframe that we are now becoming accustomed to. If we are in an age in which the markets rule and the markets are not the trading and commodities markets, but they are the financial markets, then the politicians feel that they have to respond to everything in seconds and minutes. And so, part of this is a tussle between how important decisions will be made. Will they be made by the market and on the basis of the ribbons dictated by the market, which is to say extraordinarily short-term and fluctuating?

Or will they remain in the hands of the politicians and those people who elected the politicians?

SIEGEL: You mean that the nature of European democracy is actually at stake in this process of trying to deal with the financial crises?

MAZOWER: European democracy is not under threat. I don’t see alternatives of the kind that existed in the early 20th century to democracy. I discount those. But the extent to which politics remains an area for autonomous decision-making, that is very much up for grabs or will politicians simply be driven by their anxiety about the markets and how the markets will respond to this or that measure? And that is where, it seems to me, that the Franco-German axis has its interest. Because, whether or not you see Sarkozy and Merkel acting in a particularly democratic manner, they are acting as politicians in the name of the state to preserve a political enterprise.

The grand struggle, seems to me, markets versus politics. And then how democratic that politics is, well, that’s the question we have to think about.

The, one might say, almost algorithmic logic of it all appears to be this: Our financial markets are evermore dominated by a myriad of machines without self-consciousness or human-level intelligence. This machine-run market is increasingly at odds with our own democratic self-governance, and has, throughout the financial crisis, been proven to be more powerful than our democratic institutions. In other words, the machines, in a sense, already rule.

What Humanity Wants

Kevin Kelly has written a superb book on technology, and our relationship with it.

What Technology Wants is sharply written in a clear easily approachable language that is the legacy of Kelly’s variegated life story of hippie turned tech guru turned born-again Christian. Kelly is perhaps the only person alive who could have Ray Kurzweil, James Wendell Berry, and Pat Robertson over for dinner and not have the evening end in a fistfight. In other words, Kelly transcends our contemporary limitations, and this shines forth in the smooth reasoning of his book, which appears to convince the reader by allowing whatever positions he has come to the work with to remain compatible with what is in fact Kelly’s assumption shattering argument.

Kelly tells an evolutionary story of technology, the emergence over time of the world of human technical, scientific, and cultural invention. What he calls the Technium. He believes that technology is, as it were, baked into the cake of the universe. There is a revolution against the innate trend of matter towards disorder or entropy. Exotropy, is the development of order out of the energy of chaos. Hydrogen atoms form more complex atoms which in turn form molecules, from this molecular stew emerges life, which evolves along complex paths to give birth to language and technology, which take evolution to yet another level of complexity.

Kelly disagrees with biologist, such as the late Stephen Gould, who argue, that evolution has no inherent direction. He sees evolution as constantly searching a limited possibility space for “tricks” that work. Thus, evolution independently evolved sight numerous times, as it did flight, because they are tricks that work in the environment life finds itself in. Exo-biologists are likely to find life similar to earth elsewhere in a universe where the same laws of physics hold sway.

Kelly extends this evolutionary argument to technology. Technologies represent good tricks and are likely to be discovered independently and repeatedly if lost. Technology represents good tricks in the possibility space that “want” to be discovered independent of their human creators. Kelly’s Technium, has a limited (for the moment) mind of its own separate from humanity thank can be observed in this independence.

The question, of course, is this, on balance a good thing? Kelly thinks yes. The more technology there is, the more capable human beings are of expressing their unique talents- think Jimmy Page without the electric guitar. Nevertheless, Kelly acknowledges our need to keep technology from overwhelming our capacities. His example for how we might do this is, strangely enough, the Amish who are the polar opposite of a Luddite madman like the Uni-Bomber. The Amish have found a way to pace the adoption of technology rather than abandon it whole cloth. As a person who has lived in Amish-country for a number of years, his observation of them as ingenious technological hackers is spot-on, but, given that the majority of us are unlikely to become Amish anytime soon, what is our own escape from being overwhelmed by technology?

For Kelly the answer is individualistic. Each of us needs to choose what technologies fit our needs and what we can ignore. I use a computer but avoid TV, etc. The problem with this individualistic idea of how to free ourselves from the seeming tyranny of technology is that it not really analogous at all for how the Amish deal with the challenges of technology. For them the essential question is “what will this do to the community?”.  Kelly gives us no way of answering this question as a collective- he has no sense of technology as a political question.

The word politics barely appears in Kelly’s book, and there only to make the point that despite what overarching economic system we had chosen in the 20th century- communism or capitalism- our current technological world was inevitable. It just would have occurred earlier or later had we chosen a different system. Kelly’s individualism seems like common sense when dealing with the flood of gadgets that enter our lives every year, but is it really a guide for technologies that promise or threaten the very nature of what it means to be human- AI and genetic engineering- to name just two.

Society, it would seem, has the very real moral obligation to take some degree of control over technology and science as a deterministic process, a foretaste of which we may have seen in the recent efforts to control the release of potentially dangerous biological information related to the study of the Avian flu.

Something I would love to see is the test of some kind of democratic forum when it comes to the ability to creating ethical guidelines for technology. Right now academic panels are largely responsible for such pronouncements. What if we created a “citizens panel” that was structured so as it would require knowledge and not just “gut level” opinions on the part of citizens when it comes to new technologies. How would such a forum stack up to the pronouncements of “experts”. Such participatory forums might give average, concerned citizens a say in the biggest existential questions of our time.

Kelly does not think we are capable of controlling the evolution of technology. This is less an issue of proof than one of faith. For in the end, he sees technology as part of the unfolding of God itself, the playing of an infinite game. It is such faith, despite Kelly’s tone of reasonableness, that should give us pause for it denies us the very freedom which God, (if such a thing exists) or nature has granted us in reference to our creations.

God vs the Big Brain: A Christmas Story

It’s Christmas time again. Along with the excitement of getting and decorating the tree, and anticipating the girls opening their presents, there is a kind of longing for a long-lost faith. Of all the aspects of Christianity that are hardest to let go of, Christmas is by far the hardest. It’s not just the secular aspects of the holiday, but the fact that during Christmas one confronts the beautiful meaning of the story of Christ. I know that Easter is supposed to be the penultimate Christian holiday, and therefore should be the holiday most pregnant with significance, but I am not all that interested in immortality. I am, however, interested in the meaning of life, the wonder of love and the relationship of a silent and distant God (if there is one) to humanity.

The beauty of the Christmas story is that God, the most perfect being imaginable, becomes a mere human being. He makes his appearance in a stable usually reserved for farm animals. This human being then spends his time, not with the big-wigs of human society, but with the rabble and the outcasts. In fact, his non-conformist ways eventually get him killed. The very torture and indignity of his murder forever flips the table of oppressed and oppressor. It is the oppressed who now share in the dignity of God.

What could be more beautiful than that?

What the Christmas story did was to re-imagine the 1st century nationalist sky God of the Jewish people, and the Unmoved Mover of the philosophers as, well, a person. A person who not only related to the high and mighty but focused his attention on you and me.

Today many are again re-imagining God as a process. This is something that must be implicit in the scientific world-view for it occurred to me years before I had ever heard of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, back when I was a young teenager and had first encountered science and begun to let go of my faith. For many process theologians, God is a form of intelligence that creates itself through evolution. Life, humanity, technology are evolutionary stages in the unfolding of God.  The problem I see with this is that it’s almost impossible under this theology to think of God in a supernatural way. God is a simply the biggest brain or the sum of all brains.

The Christmas story is unlikely to survive the victory of this idea of God. As we continue to create ever more intelligent forms of artificial intelligence, as we become capable of genetically engineering new forms of intelligent life, should we ever discover intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, the idea of a unique, appearance of God in history becomes frankly untenable.

A unique thinker who is both a Christian and a technologist would disagree. Kevin Kelly had his modern “Road to Damascus” moment in  which he hit upon a “technological metaphor” for God came in 1986 while  watching Jaron Lanier, one of the pioneers of virtual reality enter the world he had created.

I had this vision of the unbounded God binding himself to his creation. When we make these virtual worlds in the future—worlds whose virtual beings will have autonomy to commit evil, murder, hurt, and destroy options—it’s not unthinkable that the game creator would go in to try to fix the world from the inside. That’s the story of Jesus’ redemption to me. We have an unbounded God who enters this world in the same way that you would go into virtual reality and bind yourself to a limited being and try to redeem the actions of the other beings since they are your creations. So I would begin there. For some technological people, that makes the faith a little more understandable.

The problem for the Incarnation this technological metaphor poses is that it’s unclear why God should have done this only once. Kelly sees God as wanting as many forms of intelligence as possible, so the universe should be teeming with other technological civilizations. He could say with the mystic Giordano Bruno:

I can imagine an infinite number of worlds like the Earth, with a Garden of Eden on each one. In all these Gardens of Eden, half the Adams and Eves will not eat the fruit of knowledge, and half will. But half of infinity is infinity, so an infinite number of worlds will fall from grace and there will be an infinite number of crucifixions.

‘On the Cause, Principle, and Unity’, 5th dialogue

But of course, the same rationale applies on earth. Why should God have appeared only once in human history to Western civilization? After all, the origin of the word avatar is from Hinduism meaning a human incarnation of a God. If God really does need as many versions of intelligence as possible to express his infinite creativity, perhaps we should look at Christmas as a sort of universal birthday- all of our birthday’s in a sense a form of the Nativity. This might be a good way of looking at things, but Kelly and his fellow God as big brain theologians, by postulating that human being are the precursors to much higher forms of intelligence- indeed that the world itself- in Kelly’s term the Technium- is an emergent form of super-intelligence- inadvertently push human beings down the scale of being. Claiming God incarnates himself in such lower order beings as us when there are likely and will be advanced forms of intelligence of which we cannot even imagine is a little like the idea that God would incarnate himself in an ant to get an idea of what an ant’s life is like, and perhaps he does. However, what is clear is that by re-imagining God as a form of corporal intelligence, only vastly, vastly higher than our own, seems to inevitably lead to a sort of pantheism. The uniqueness of the Incarnation is lost and with it the spiritual meaning of Christmas.

All of which does not mean that I won’t love seeing my daughters open up their presents and help me bake Christmas bread once the day comes.

Capitalism vs. the Climate: a rejoinder

Naomi Klein has an interesting and much discussed recent article in The Nation. To grossly oversimplify, her argument goes as follows. Segments of the right are vehemently opposed to any acknowledgement, let alone measures to address the climate crisis, because the way in which climate change would need to be dealt with given its scale would mean the overthrow of the capitalist based order, and the imposition of a truly revolutionary progressive agenda.

So let’s summarize. Responding to climate change requires that we break every rule in the free-market playbook and that we do so with great urgency. We will need to rebuild the public sphere, reverse privatizations, relocalize large parts of economies, scale back overconsumption, bring back long-term planning, heavily regulate and tax corporations, maybe even nationalize some of them, cut military spending and recognize our debts to the global South. Of course, none of this has a hope in hell of happening unless it is accompanied by a massive, broad-based effort to radically reduce the influence that corporations have over the political process. That means, at a minimum, publicly funded elections and stripping corporations of their status as “people” under the law. In short, climate change supercharges the pre-existing case for virtually every progressive demand on the books, binding them into a coherent agenda based on a clear scientific imperative.

Everything in the above agenda I fully support, but then Klein makes what I feel is a grave error that could doom any effort to transform society in a way that would address the scale of our environmental predicament. She, is, in effect as blinded by ideology as the right wing she wishes to dethrone.

This can be see is the way that she throws overboard a whole group of scientists and thinkers who are asking themselves one fundamental question: how can we halt or contain climate change and allow technological civilization to survive?

Far from learning from past mistakes, a powerful faction in the environmental movement is pushing to go even further down the same disastrous road, arguing that the way to win on climate is to make the cause more palatable to conservative values. This can be heard from the studiously centrist Breakthrough Institute, which is calling for the movement to embrace industrial agriculture and nuclear power instead of organic farming and decentralized renewables. It can also be heard from several of the researchers studying the rise in climate denial. Some, like Yale’s Kahan, point out that while those who poll as highly “hierarchical” and “individualist” bridle at any mention of regulation, they tend to like big, centralized technologies that confirm their belief that humans can dominate nature. So, he and others argue, environmentalists should start emphasizing responses such as nuclear power and geoengineering (deliberately intervening in the climate system to counteract global warming), as well as playing up concerns about national security.

She has articulated the essence of our dilemma, but fails to see it as a dilemma, that we are trapped between the devil and the deep blue sea. By characterizing the crisis of Anthropcene as a issue of progressives vs capitalist, Klein misses the ugly truth of the matter. We may have little choice but to “double down” on the very need for technology that got us into this crisis. Like her, I pray that we can create some alternative decentralized and sustainable economic and political system, and think the search for such a path should begin immediately. Like her, I admire the poet-farmer Wendell Barry, unlike Klein and Barry, I realize we do not have 50 years to figure out whether sustainable poly-culture can supplant our massive reliance on mono-culture. 9 billion mouths to feed, the product of technological civilization’s success, is doubtless going to require a huge amount of genetic engineering in the name of increased yields (and hopefully lowered environmental impact). This is the case whether or not I like or embrace that fact. In the same vein coming up with some ideas as to how a massive geo-engineering is a necessary form of insurance give our desperate situation.

Nuclear energy, is much less a PR device to win over “hierarchical” and “individualist” opponents to the policies necessary to stem global warming, than the only solution we have at our fingertips that would allow us to contain on the our impact on the planet without abandoning the majority of human beings that would be imperiled were our technological civilization to be abruptly unplugged. This is the conclusion not of technological junkies, but of deep environmentalist such as the revered James Lovelock.

Klein thinks the right will be unmoved by the kind of environmental genocide unleashed by allowing climate change to run its course.

As the world warms, the reigning ideology that tells us it’s everyone for themselves, that victims deserve their fate, that we can master nature, will take us to a very cold place indeed. And it will only get colder, as theories of racial superiority, barely under the surface in parts of the denial movement, make a raging comeback. These theories are not optional: they are necessary to justify the hardening of hearts to the largely blameless victims of climate change in the global South, and in predominately African-American cities like New Orleans.

Oddly enough, this critique exactly mirrors what some on the right (with a good deal of justification) see as the callousness of radical environmentalism which recognizes the potential human cost of jettisoning technological civilization in the midst of 9 billion people alive on earth. To quote perhaps the most famous radical environmentalist- Ted Kaczynski- better know as the “Unibomber”.

For those who realize the need to do away with the techno-industrial system, if you work for its collapse, in effect you are killing a lot of people. If it collapses, there is going to be mass starvation, there aren’t going to be any more spare parts or fuel for farm equipment, there won’t be any more pesticide or fertilizer on which modern agriculture is dependent. So there isn’t going to be enough food to go around, so then what happens. This is something, that as far as I’ve read, I haven’t seen any radicals facing up to.

Far from abandoning the world’s poor to the ravages of climate on the basis of an atavistic racism, the spread of Christianity, perhaps detrimental in any other ways, may make such coldness less not more likely from the right than from the left. This, after all, is what happened in the best (perhaps only) example of a localized, Third World climate crisis that we know- in Darfur- where developed world Christians were the loudest voice is bringing an end to the slaughter.  The world is a complicated place, and any ideology- left or right- blinds us to the opportunities and dangers in its complexity.

Given the scale of the change in human living that will be required to mitigate the impact of not just global warming, but the Anthopocence more generally, Klein misses the fact that the most necessary allies for such a change, are exactly the ones that the left will find so difficult to deal with (and for many good reasons) that is the religious. After all, from both a humanist and a religious perspective what is required is nothing less than a spiritual revolution in how humanity relates to nature, even if we have to take the fight politically for those who can not, or refuse to see, the dangers we face.

Another chance for European democracy?

Heather Horn had an interesting blog post   in The Atlantic Online that was at last asking some fundamental questions, or at least gave some insight into the fundamental questions being asked by European intellectuals, at a time when the whole EU project has been thrown into doubt. Indeed, it is in the realm of possibility, not dystopian fiction, that if the Europeans don’t create a clear path forward that is trusted by the markets- the whole thing could go bust.

It’s that “trusted by the markets” part that puts into relief the whole democratic nature of Europe’s future. Horn writes:

“In the democracy-versus-capitalism debate, what seems to worry European spectators is the way in which the markets, as expressed through bond prices and ratings agencies, have overtaken the political process. Some European see the exit Greek prime minister George Papandreou — welcome though it was after his surprise call for a referendum on a bailout package for his country — as deeply troubling, particularly when put together with similar political exits of the past year.”

It is the markets, or rather, the pace and scale of market gyrations, that have brought governments to their knees in a way simultaneous riots by the alienated have not. The markets appear to be demanding that the currency union become a real federation. What is the response of European intellectuals to this? Why, to call for a federal Europe, for only an entity of such a scale could push back on the forces of the market.  Again Horn:

“When famed sociologist Jürgen Habermas was asked if the European leaders feared democracy, he responded, “They are afraid of not obtaining a majority or of losing power.’ He added that, due to the debt crisis, “fears about the future of Europe have become the number one theme of discussion. Perhaps the time of the European public sphere has finally come. The political leadership must show itself capable of an open mind about the reorganization of Europe — and have the courage to swim, as needed, against the current, rather than follow polls in search of a majority.'”

The problem with this, of course, is that the push to further integrate Europe appears to have little democratic legitimacy. While it makes sense to no longer allow European policy to be held hostage by national referendum, it is also pretty clear that nothing like a truly European political community (except among elites) exists.

Political communities exist where there has been a common history, shared myths, and tragically, almost always, the unifying experience of war. Europe is indeed a civilization, but it is not a political community in the sense that the United States is a political community. Here in the US we share the historic bonds of our Constitution, the founding act of our revolution, and unifying experience of our Civil War. Europe had three real chances since the late 18th century to move from a civilization to a political community. The first was under Napoleon, which would have been tragic. The second was under Hitler, which would have had tragic, and horrifying consequences for the world. The third, and only truly democratic, opportunity for political unity stemmed from the European resistance movements that fought against the Nazis.

Contrast the views of someone clinging to national sovereignty quoted by Horn:

“This isn’t a lone opinion, either. An op-ed in the German Süddeutsche Zeitung made a similar point back in October. ‘Critics hold that democracy is not suitable to bring Europe through the crisis,’ wrote Heribert Prantl, but, he contended, ‘what’s necessary is a debt cut, not a democracy cut … Germany cannot let its parliamentary democracy be castrated because of Greece.'”

With the views of a member of the Dutch Underground at the close of the Second World War quoted by Hannah Arendt in her Approaches to the German Problem:

We are experiencing at present… a crisis of state sovereignty. One of the central problems of the coming peace will be: how can we, while preserving cultural autonomy, achieve the formation of larger units in the political and economic field.?… A good peace is now inconceivable unless the States surrender parts of their sovereignty to a higher European authority: we leave open the question whether a European Council,or Federation, a United States of Europe or whatever type of unit will be formed”. ( 113)

The problem is that this historic opportunity to create a united, democratic Europe was missed at the end of the War. The project of European unity was not a political project, but a technocratic one. Given political time (a generation) Europeans might yet create it, but if it is the markets that dictate for Europe to decide its future now, European democracy will define itself in resistance to rather than the creation of a united Europe.

Rick Searle

December, 6, 2011