Donald Trump, Infrastructure, and the Human Predicament

Some diehard Democrats, Baruch Ashem, are desperately grasping like drowning sailors for any potential flotsam, perhaps real, perhaps imaginary, taking those last gasps of what is surely a fading hope for a 2016 presidential miracle. Or in the language of our great American sport: it’s the last play of the game, we’re down a score, the clock’s run out, our quarterback is scrambling in her end zone; humongous, confident, testosterone-filled linemen bear down on her, and she throws the ultimate Hail Mary… hoping for a few Electoral College faithless to gift Hillary with a last-minute switcheroo[i]; or perhaps a voter recount in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania will reverse a perfectly distributed 100,000 votes; or some illegal outrage surfaces, most likely in the form of a flagrant breach by the Donald of the “Emoluments Clause”[ii] (that is—as I am reading from the same pocket constitution as I believe Khizr Khan brandished during the Democratic convention—Article I, Section 9, clause 8 of the constitution, which prohibits payments “of any kind, whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign States”—oh, those frumpy 18th century Founding Fathers), or, more incredibly—a combination of these.[iii] Barring such an unlikely election stunner, however, Donald Trump will become the leader of the most powerful military and economy the world has ever seen (gulp)… for some indefinite period of time at least. 

Of his many vague and vagarious vows[iv] (“believe me”), his promise of “America Infrastructure First” actually holds some slight promise for the United States. Promise because, by everyone’s count, excepting those retrograde but affable congressional conservatives, the state of U.S. infrastructure is in actual crisis and is in need of trillions of dollars of repair and modernizing.[v] The American Society of Civil Engineers gives this country’s infrastructure an overall D+ grade. Okay, there be could be a self-serving component to their grading system. But a D+? What the hell is that? What student in memory who wasn’t on heroin or hadn’t just simply quit coming to school ever averaged a D+? Of course, the poster child for this near-failing condition of America’s material foundation was the August 1, 2007 collapse of the I-35W Mississippi River bridge in Minneapolis. Thirteen people were killed and some 145 were injured on that evening when over a hundred vehicles went suddenly plunging some hundred feet into the river below.

AP Photo/Morry Gash

Axiomatic in economic and political circles is the imperative of infrastructure to a vibrant economy. Hunger and poverty in Africa is due not to a global shortage of food and consumer products, but rather to insufficient transportation systems in much of that continent. To get first dibs on their plundering resources, China’s major inducement to poor countries in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia is the promise of infrastructure projects—roads, ports, and dams.[vi] And the problem in the United States is that not only are its 19th and 20th century roads, rail, water mains, and energy grids in desperate need of repair, but that much of the world, including Europe, Japan, and China are investing in 21st century technologies—smart grids, high speed passenger trains, distributed solar and wind energy systems, and small personal vehicles powered by any number of means that do not include fossil fuel.

So, the Prince of Fifth Avenue has correctly highlighted infrastructure as an American priority. However, his vision seems tunneled onto the halcyon days of an America that chugged upon asphalt roads that were lined with gaudy electrical wires and that made an older generation of oligarchs wealthy beyond measure, that have rusty half lives numbering in the decades, and whose carbon emissions have proved disastrous for Civilization. Included on the Trump-Pence website are following bullet points:

• Approve private sector energy infrastructure projects—including pipelines and coal export facilities—to better connect American coal and shale energy production with markets and consumers.

• Incorporate new technologies and innovations into our national transportation system such as state-of-the-art pipelines, advancements in maritime commerce, and the next generation of vehicles.[vii]

Unlike Roosevelt’s New Deal electrification of the countryside and Eisenhower’s national highway system, Trump’s vision is not designed to service our vast, complex, and growing society for the coming century. His is designed for the previous centuries. It’s as he were—like George Bush II before him—driving down the future’s road of twists, turns, forks, and potholes, staring into the rearview mirror.

This would be merely foolish and not actually immoral if we lived in a world of infinite resources and peaceful, well-fed, contented nations. We don’t, of course. Billions of people are malnourished, the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans are warming in ways not friendly to crops and coastal cities, not to mention most of the planet’s ecosystems.  After sixty years of profligacy by history’s wealthiest societies, of treating the sacred privilege of high-speed transportation like throwaway toys and the air and oceans like our personal garbage can, all of nature is sounding the alarm: the biosphere cannot afford another sixty years of Civilization’s adolescence.[viii]

We cannot even afford to behave as a middle-aged adult might. We need a kind of wisdom I see in my father-in-law, a man who, although wealthy by the standards of 95% of the world’s citizens, lives a comfortable but hardly ostentatious life. He knows that anything that he spends will not be there for his grandchildren and great grandchildren not yet born. Besides the original Americans, few in the U.S. consider their actions beyond the generations directly in front of their face. Our conversation rarely goes beyond the needs and wants of the 325 million Americans who already—for the most part—take for granted Civilization’s great gifts of clean running water, sewage disposal, safe births, long life spans, and plentiful food.

Let’s imagine, however, that our new leader has a Road on Damascus epiphany and decides with our blessing to make the wisest choices for our transportation, communication, education, and healthcare needs, pursuing, as he called it, an “America’s Infrastructure First” policy. Trillions of American dollars are then efficiently diverted into all the solar, renewable, and smart systems that you and your in-group consider prudent. Americans get well-paying jobs, the economy roars, America is great again.  So, what about the rest of our human family? Those not in the United States, or in Europe, or of the wealthy half of China?  The other eight-and-half billion people who will be sharing the Earth with us in 2050.

Let’s follow the logic of the human predicament: We could keep wishing them well, of course, sending them a little aid and our best Christian prayers and Buddhist compassion, and maybe hope that China will keep building them roads and dams. But that hasn’t really helped so much yet. See, the wealthiest 17% of the world appropriates 70% of all new wealth.[ix] That is, not only does this top economic tier own 85 percent of Civilization’s total wealth, but they also take for themselves most of the increase in GDP each year.[x] So, as the swelling populations of mostly poor people continue to be added to mostly arid, crowded landscapes, their individual share of this 30 percent cannot expand enough to develop their own set of massive infrastructure improvements. They are caught in the vicious cycle of poverty begetting poverty.

To continue the logic of the human predicament: What if somehow we experienced a punctuated jump in our consciousness, enough of one that we were suddenly willing to forgo our luxuries so that others around the world could secure their necessities. For example, what if we diverted trillions of American dollars of infrastructure projects to their countries. Yay us! Nine, perhaps ten to eleven billion people could expect lights in their homes at night, heat and air conditioning, jobs, cars, and meat on their tables. The vicious cycle turns into the virtuous cycle of wealth begetting wealth. All because we decided equality was more important than personal surfeit. 

But then, could the Earth afford it? Since at least 1985, the human footprint has exceeded what the biosphere can absorb and renew.[xi] That means, each year the Earth is losing forests, soils, stored water, biospheric resilience, that sort of thing. The atmosphere warms, the oceans warm and acidify, the ancient aquifers dry out; the soil—the mother of all life—washes into the seas. And each year we further increase our footprint over the previous. The ecological deficit grows. As we all know by now, most of the footprint has been impressed upon the Earth by the wealthiest 17% or so. Yet, no matter whose fault it is, there is no evidence to suggest that there is enough of the Earth for everyone on the planet to live a long, comfortable, well-nourished life. This is in a nutshell the human predicament. We seemed damned if we do, and damned if we don’t.

This is not an excuse for apathy or pessimism. Rather it is a better reason for each one of us to mature quickly, both so that we can be of service to our fellows as best we can and to make wise decisions for ourselves, our loved ones, and all whom we encounter during the turbulent times ahead. At that point, the allegiance to fictions of Democrat and Republican may be remembered as quaint luxuries of childish societies. There is no uniquely Republican hate, or Democratic anger, or Christian love, or Buddhist compassion. Hate, anger, love, and compassion are universal experiences, and all of us share in these.

[i] There is some precedence, sort of, for Electoral College faithlessness. In 1876, the Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes lost the popular vote to the Democrat Samuel J. Tilden, but was awarded twenty contested Electoral College votes in what is called the Compromise of 1877. Also, it is calculated that there have been 157 “faithless” electors in U.S. history, less than one percent of the total (Barrow, B. (2016, November 26) Can Electors Vote for Clinton Rather than Trump? How the Electoral College Works. Los Angeles Times. Accessed November 27 at http://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-pol-electoral-college-2016-story.html

[ii] And emolument is, for those who are not a walking dictionary,a “salary, fee, or profit from employment or office.”

[iii] Borger, J. (2016, November 27) ‘A Recipe for Scandal: Trump Conflicts of Interest Point to Constitutional Crisis. The Guardian. Accessed November 27, 2016 at https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/27/donald-trump-conflicts-interest-constitutional-crisis. According to the Guardian, “That view is not restricted to academics and Democrats. Richard Painter, George W Bush’s chief ethics counsel, agrees that without a major reconfiguration of the Trump Organization, the president-elect is heading for a constitutional collision with the electoral college. “The important thing for the electoral college is to ensure that he technically complies with the constitution,” Painter told the Observer.


[iv] I do love alliterations.

[v] Berman, R. (2016, August 9) Donald Trump's Big-Spending Infrastructure Dream. The Atlantic. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/08/donald-trumps-big-spending-infrastructure-dream/494993/

 Drew, E. (2016, February 25) A Country Breaking Down. The New York Review of Books. Accessed November 26, 2016 at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/02/25/infrastructure-country-breaking-down/

[vi] For example,

Kahn, J. (2006) China Courts Africa, Angling for Strategic Gains, New York Times, November 3.

Libre, R. (2010, Februrary 1) Proposed Dam to Flood Burma, While Powering China. MinnPost.

Perlez, J. (2006) Forests in Southeast Asia Fall to Prosperity’s Ax, New York Times, April 29.

Shih, T.H. (2013, November 18) China to Provide Africa with US $1tr Financing. South China Morning Post.

Sun, Y. (2014, February 19) China, Myanmar Face Myitsone Dam Truths. The Irrawaddy.

[vii] From https://www.donaldjtrump.com/policies/an-americas-infrastructure-first-plan

[viii] Btw, no offence meant toward adolescents. For people in their teen years, behaving as an adolescent is age-appropriate and mature. However, when six-thousand year old Civilization is still behaving as an adolescent, it is behaving inappropriately and immaturely—check out my video, The Evolution of Consciousness 5: Is a Shift in Consciousness our Salvation? a Summary at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS1q1CvogDQ

[ix] Speth, J.G. (2008:49) The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability, Yale University Press, New Haven.

[x] Serageldin, I. (2002) World Poverty and Hunger—the Challenge for Science, Science, v. 296, pp. 54-58. Another source, from the Zurich bank, Credit Suisse finds that the top ten percent (about 730 million people) own 86 percent of the world’s wealth. Credit Suisse (2013, October) Global Wealth Report 2013. Credit Suisse Research Institute.

[xi] http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/

Donald Trump as Avatar and Scapegoat

We now know that of the half of the American electorate that actually voted, about half of those pulled the lever for Donald Trump, about half for Hillary Clinton, and a few percent for the smattering of other candidates. And those of us who live in the traditionally blue states are feeling indeed quite blue. This is a now time for all to heal a bit after a bitter campaign, for all to perhaps huddle with likeminded friends and family. There, one camp can celebrate their triumph uninhibited; the other can lick their wounds without further upset.

Here I offer a meta-analysis of the Trump phenomenon in composite form, as the complexity of it precludes an airtight linear narrative. I will eschew commenting on political and media strategies, personal shortcomings, the undemocratic electoral process, and demographic evaluations, important as these may be. Instead, I offer a historical, environmental, and economic perspective.

Thread One: The Human Predicament

Let us keep in mind a most important planetary backdrop to the American elections and to every human endeavor, really: the human population is still growing at the astounding rate of 80 million people a year; we have long passed peak water, land, forests, fish, ocean health, climate benignancy, and food security—that is, we have far fewer resources for far more people; inequality is at an all time high, both at home and internationally; over two billion people suffer from malnourishment; 800 million actually feel the daily pangs of hunger; trillions of dollars of wealth disappeared from the world’s bottom 99% in the Great Recession of 2008; and sixty-five million people have recently become refuges of war, persecution, and climate. Whether one is conscious of these or not, they are powerful problems of planetary scale and are far more significant than even the American elections. Clearly, however, the political decisions made by the world’s most powerful military and economy (yes, the U.S. is still number one) have significant ramifications for all these problems, and for the biosphere, itself. Donald Trump has shown mostly ignorance or outright antipathy to all these concerns. With all three branches of government soon to be in Republican hands, humanity's upward climb has just gotten steeper.

 Thread Two: America’s Golden Moment

After World War II, international conditions favored America’s economic supremacy. Every other industrial economy had been devastated in the war. And so for the next thirty years American industry was without competition. As Robert Reich suggests in his book Supercapitalism, during this special period the vast profits were shared relatively amicably between corporations, labor, and government. High corporate taxes and a large middle class paid for America’s great military build up, infrastructure projects, and new safety net programs. This was the time of Eisenhower’s National Highway System; the space missions that culminated in moon landings; important environmental and social justice legislation, such as the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, the Civil Rights Act, and Title ix; almost every Entitlement Program outside of Social Security, itself; and wars in Korea and Vietnam that were expensive for the governments, profitable for business, and devastating for the host countries. This very short historical period was America’s golden moment.

Then, one by one, a number of countries, first in Europe and Japan and then the Four Asian Tigers came on line, taking in Western finance to build export economies to sell products to Westerners. By the 1990s, China and a host of Asian and Latin American countries were joining the gravy train. American products became decreasingly competitive. American wages, taxes, and environmental laws pushed American businesses to other countries they could more easily exploit. Automation too had its inexorable effect, replacing the monotonous, repetitive, unskilled work of America’s uneducated, principally white, middle class. In the following decades America became hollowed out of its traditional industries (steel, automobile, kitchen appliances, electronics, etc.), and the barely skilled Americans without college degrees found themselves working for a minimum wage in service jobs and as salesclerks in huge box stores that sold cheap products made by people overseas who had taken their previous middle class jobs.

But Americans were hooked on those consumer products, on electronics and cars and furniture and bath towels and all the rest. To maintain any semblance of a consumer lifestyle, Americans had to buy on credit. And the credit came easily, too easily. By the first decade of this new century, Americans were trillions of dollars in debt, individually and collectively. American financiers meanwhile had become rich beyond historical compare, by lending to their fellow Americans, mostly in the form of mortgages, credit cards, and government spending, and by creating all sorts of clever abstract financial “products” that had nothing to do with the brick-and-mortar economy that serves humanity. In 2011 Robert Reich, economist and former Labor Secretary under Bill Clinton observed, “The ratio of corporate profits to wages is now higher than at any time since just before the Great Depression.” We were in a new gilded age, according to the Nobel prize- winning economist Paul Krugman. Not since the 1920s, had wealth in the U.S. been so mal-distributed. And then in 2014, the economist Thomas Pikkety confirmed this with a flood of data in his tome, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. And, he argued, this trend would continue into the century.

With an accelerating pace, transportation and particularly communication innovations have made the 99% more aware of their unequal position, of just how wealthy and powerful and famous the one percent is. How beautiful they are, how smart, educated, sophisticated, and cosmopolitan. With television, the 99% became like kids with their faces pressed against the candy store window, looking in at all the goodies that they could not have.

Then in 2008 the financial bubble burst. Ben Bernanke, Chair of the Federal Reserve at the time called it, “… the worst financial crisis in global history, including the Great Depression.” Of the 13 “most important financial institutions in the United States, 12 were at risk of failure within a period of a week or two.”[i] Economists feared a complete global economic meltdown. By 2011, 1.2 million Americans had lost their homes to foreclosure, over eight million had lost jobs, and collectively eight trillion dollars of wealth (albeit mostly bubble real estate wealth) had disappeared from their lives.[ii]  On the other hand, the elite financial institutions, whose casino-like shenanigans created the meltdown of the economic system, fared quite well. In one of the largest upward redistributions of wealth, at least eleven trillion dollars of American tax-payer money has been committed to bail out the financial institutions and over three trillion has been actually invested.[iii] Trillions of dollars from the 99% had gone to prop up the one percent.

Thread Three: Wealth, Status, and Race

 An Oxfam 2014 report entitled Working For The Few: Political Capture And Economic Inequality, asks the very sensible question, “How do the rules governing national economies become subservient to elite interests?” It answers the question through several case studies in societies as different from each other as those of the United States, Europe, India, Pakistan, Mexico, and the Horn of Africa.  The authors note that, “This is a problem inherent to the nature of politics. … The influence of wealthy groups leads to imbalanced political rights and representation. The outcomes include the capture of legislative and regulatory decision-making functions by those powerful groups. … Concentration of wealth in the hands of the few leads to undue political influence, which ultimately robs citizens of natural resource revenues, produces unfair tax policies and encourages corrupt practices, and challenges the regulatory powers of governments. Taken together, all of these consequences serve to worsen accountability and social inclusion.” This explains why in the past decades wealth has been concentrating ever upward. And it also explains why government often comes off as incompetent. When seen through the lens of oligarchy and elite self-interest, government decisions and actions are actually quite rational and effective.

The oligarchy (the 0.01%) cannot maintain such inequality by themselves. There are simply too few of them. So, they buy off the elite and the affluent (the top twenty percent or so) to do their bidding.[iv] In Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America, regional oligarchs have given away their country’s natural resources to nourish First World affluence, leaving their own citizens scrounging for essentials.[v] In the United States, Europe, and the wealthy Asian-Pacific countries, a huge middle class has wed their interests to those of the wealthiest. As long as they have jobs, plenty of meat and entertainment, a car and at least the illusion of upward mobility, these hundreds of millions have quietly accepted the outrages of the ruling classes.

The middle class complicity in planetary-wide suffering is not wholly unlike the role of poor non-slaveholding farmers (who were a majority) in the Southern slavery states. Too poor to own slaves, they were nevertheless willing to be complicit with the practice and to fight in a brutal war and even sacrifice their lives for the rich plantation owners’ right to own slaves.[vi] Through a reading of thousands of letters of American Civil War soldiers, the historian Chandra Manning suggests that a partial explanation for such seemingly irrational convictions and behaviors goes beyond simple economics: it can be found in the socio-psychological depths of slavery and racism, wherein one’s sense of self-esteem and status was—no matter how poor the white person—supported by being regarded, at the very least, theoretically equal to all other whites, and superior to the black slave.[vii] There was the hope instilled by the aristocracy and the Confederate government that non-slaveholders could one day become fortunate enough to become a slaveholder, made more likely through one’s merit as a soldier. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, the dominant paradigm engendered a fear in all whites that ending slavery would result in the destruction of Southern society—a highly advanced civilization of great sophistication, in their minds—followed by terrible chaos.[viii] The historian Jeffrey Winters found nearly identical psycho-social explanations—sans the racism—for the bond between the lower classes and the oligarchs against the slaves in democratic BCE Athens.[ix]

 So now back to this century: Things looked so bad in 2008 that Americans actually voted a black man into the presidency. 43% of white voters opted for Barak Obama. Then in 2012, 39% did so again when the Republicans put up against the incumbent one of richest, best looking, white men ever to run for the office. Mitt Romney barely lost, but lose he did. But that a white man of such pedigree was defeated by a black man (however brilliant, witty, graceful, dignified, even wise) should have given us pause. How could that happen in historically racist America?  Most of us on the winning side were too jubilant to analyze it. Clearly, we surmised, America’s collective consciousness was evolving and, well, we had just sailed through some currents of good fortune. 

Meanwhile, the white people with high school diplomas were seething. Wealth and privilege were no longer theirs, and now neither was even their superiority. The world, as Thomas Friedman put it, was “Hot, Flat and Crowded.” The flat referred to the fact that dark skinned people overseas could do the same work as Americans, even more because they’d work 35-hour days if they could, and for far less pay. Not only could they load a conveyer belt and answer a telephone as well as an American, but they could also write code and design software. Americans meanwhile had become overweight and obese, unemployed and underemployed. Many were deeper in debt and without healthcare. And they would not be sending their children to the colleges that had become such an ostentatious part of the high school discourse. They could neither afford these schools nor provide the kind of home culture that encouraged higher education.

Thread Four: The Rise of the Strongmen

Those political party pundits who are still blaming the media and the FBI and trying to parse out the electoral map, dissecting the swing counties within swing states, are missing the point. It’s not about fine-tuning the details. It’s about the big-picture. It’s about the values and beliefs through which we will individually and together create the world we live in. And although there are, of course, many in the Democrat Party who have helped blaze the path towards a more sustainable and equitable future, the party as a whole has clearly not inspired in their electorate much wisdom and hope. With our backs now against the wall, how do we impress upon all that climate change is no hoax; that neither is the rage that our white brothers and sisters feel as history’s sunshine seems to be setting on their scrubby lawns; that neither is the American history of abuse of our fellow Native Americans and people of color; that neither is the profligacy and violence of big business, the financial system, and the American military machine. And neither is the notion that the United States could jettison its moral compass and follow other powerful nation-states into the dangerous waters haunted by demagogues and autocrats.

Britain had their Brexit, and all over the world, authoritarian and nationalist demagogues and strongmen have risen to power. Some of these powerful states were among the world’s most inclusive, open, and progressive at century’s start. Presently all those strongmen listed below enjoy extraordinary approval ratings in their country. Here’s a short list:

                                      President Xi Jinping                              China

                                      President Vladimir Putin                       Russia

                                     P.M. Narendra Modi                               India

                                       President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan         Turkey

                                         P.M. Viktor Orbán                                  Hungary

                                      P.M. Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu           Israel

                                      President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi              Egypt

                                             President Rodrigo Duterte                    Philippines

To this list we can now add President Elect Donald Trump, USA.

 Thread Five: Trump as Apotheosis

Given the outrageous complexity of the society in which we find ourselves, it is almost impossible to get a true bead on causes and consequences. Even the most educated and intelligent argue endlessly over every last detail. So how are the less educated to fare? Well, usually, they resort to hyper-simplifying the natural complexity into a few confused bits—immigration, trade, Wall Street, and mostly government. And this last one they get right. Not because government has been more exploitive than Wall Street, but because the principle purpose of government is to provide a safe environment for its citizens, safe from Nature’s ravishes, safe from outside enemies, and safe from the exploitation of unequal wealth and power. To this last responsibility, government has failed miserably. The U.S. government has allowed wealth and power to run roughshod over the needs of its people, over the environment, over the weak all over the world, and over the government itself.

Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump were arguably the two most popular American candidates of the 2016 election cycle. They both were the representations of our disgust and outrage about present conditions and of our hopes for a committed response. Bernie spoke for the millennials, to the educated, and to the more progressive groups of society. Donald took on the values and beliefs of the less educated, more conservative members of the electorate. Not having any real ideology of his own, he fed the needs of his narcissism and megalomania with the admiration of a group who had no representation. He filled their psychological needs, and they filled his.

A big problem for his followers, of course, is that he has no solutions. He can’t have any. There are no easy solutions to the complex challenges that vex Civilization. And, furthermore, the values that are informing his promises smack of resentment, calculated self-interest, and a rational detachment from nature and from the full spectrum of our human family. These come from the same toolkit of values, beliefs, and worldviews that have proved incongruous with reality: the ecologic and economic crises demonstrate this to us with unrelenting consistency. When we apply insufficiently simplistic solutions to complex problems, the unintended consequences will pop out elsewhere.  Al-Queda after the proxy war against the USSR in Afghanistan; ISIS after the Iraq invasion; the population explosion after the Green Revolution; and gang wars and a runaway prison population from the "War on Drugs;" to name a few.

The whole global system is trembling. Volatility in markets, in emotions, in elections, and in relations between the big global powers is becoming ever more obvious. As in the 20th century world wars and in the “sixties” we seem to once again be on the cusp of convulsive planetary forces. In the face of these, the poor and once middle class sense their impotence. Donald Trump has become the incarnation of their frustrations and rage, their avatar. Soon enough, when they realize that he cannot deliver on his mix of vagaries, contradictions, and lies, they will turn on him, and he will become their scapegoat, perhaps the human sacrifice for us all.

[i] Worstall, T. (2014, Aug 27) Ben Bernanke: The 2008 Financial Crisis Was Worse Than The Great Depression. Forbes. Accessed November 13, 2016 at http://www.forbes.com/sites/timwors.

[ii] Schoen (2010), Dorfman, D. (2011), Isidore (2010, 2011).  According to Ivry, Keoun and Kuntz (2011) 3.6 million homes had been foreclosed between August 2007 and November 2011.

[iii] Goldman (2009), Pittman and Ivry (2009). Nomi Prins (2011:5) argues that total bailout comes closer to thirteeen trillion dollars.

Goldman, D. (2009) CNNMoney.com’s Bailout Tracker, CNNMoney.  Available at http://money.cnn.com/news/storysupplement/economy/bailouttracker/#STIMULUS.  Accessed October 29, 2011.  

Pittman, M., and Ivry, B. (2009) U.S. Bailout, Stimulus Pledges Total $11.6 Trillion, Bloomberg. Available at http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aZchK__XUF84.  Accessed November 13, 2011.

Prins, N. (2011) It Takes a Pillage: An Epic Tale of Power, Deceit, and the Untold Trillions, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.

[iv] For historical examples, see Winters, J.A. (2011) Oligarchy. Cambridge University Press, New York.

[v] See for example, Galeano (1973/1997), Chomsky (1989), Perkins (2004, 2007), Palast (2007:152-153), Maathai (2009), Skidmore, Smith, and Green (2010), Acemoglu and Robinson (2012).

Galeano, E. (1973/1997) Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent. Monthly Review Press, New York.

Perkins, J. (2004) Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, Barrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., San Francisco, CA.

Perkins, J. (2007) The Secret History of the American Empire. Dutton, New York.

Chomsky, N. (1989) Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies, Second End Press, Boston, MA.

Palast, G. (2007) Armed Madhouse. Plume Books, New York.

Maathai, W. (2009) The Challenge for Africa. Anchor Books, New York.

Skidmore, T.E., Smith, P.H., and Green, J.N. (2010) Modern Latin America, Seventh Edition. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK.

Acemoglu, D., and Robinson, J.A. (2012a) Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, Crown Business New York. 

[vi] Gutman, H.G., director (1989) Who Built America? Working People and the Nation’s Economy, Politics, Culture and Society, American Social History Project, Pantheon Books, New York. My understanding of this psycho-social phenomenon comes originally from my dear friend and historian Bruce Baskind. 

[vii] Manning, C.E (2007). What This Cruel War was Over: Soldiers, Slavery and The Civil War. Alfred A. Knopf, New York.

[viii] Manning (2007).

[ix] Winters (2011).

The Cultural And Phenomenological Evolution Of Humans

Not only have humans had to adapt to changing natural conditions—the climate and geography and the fauna and flora of a place—but increasingly people had to adapt to human culture, as well. Culture was created by the mind and, correspondingly, culture created new environments to which the mind had to adapt. With specialization, for instance, came novel roles—the shaman, the priest, the doctor, the scribe, the lawyer, the blacksmith, the organizer, the warrior, the farmer. With each role emerged whole new worlds and worldviews, new societal niches and power relationships, status, wealth, and standards for sexual selection. Reading social cues became increasingly important, as did wit, charisma, and facility with language, spoken and later written. It may even be that culture more than the wild is responsible for the present structure of the human brain.[1] 

Together, culture and nature provided more complex environments to which people had to adapt and which, in turn, sped up human evolution. It has been estimated that, had we been changing as rapidly throughout the past six million years as we have in the past ten thousand, the genetic difference between humans and the chimpanzees would be 160 times greater than they actually are.[2] The pace of biological and, to a far greater extent, cultural change accelerated as the auto-catalytic and cross-catalytic cybernetic[3] reinforcement process involving innovation, surplus, and population took-off.  Each innovation, every addition of material wealth, every shift in population, changed the environment to which people had to adjust. 

It takes only the slightest leap of faith to entertain the notion that as the material exterior lives of humans changed so did people’s internal phenomenological experiences.  That is, the inner life evolved. Through etymology—the study of the origin of words—and comparative linguistics we can appreciate how language reflected the coming into being of new objects and people’s relationships to those objects and to other people who were affected by those objects, and then to oneself as an individual. Not just new, but entirely novel thoughts, values, beliefs, and behaviors emerged. A stonewall, a catapult, and a pen each changes the material and mental landscape of its inhabitants. One materializes ownership; one amplifies violence; one manifests the legal contract, algebra, and the labyrinthine possibilities of literature. And from each one of these manifestations spilled out a more complex cornucopia of possibilities for humans to experience. Culture and individual became synergistically involved (unconsciously mostly) in the emergence of novel, more complex societies and cultures that fed through each person and, in turn, became the raw materials for further complexity and novelty. 

Like any hypothesis under consideration, for cultural and mental evolution to be scientifically accepted there must exist a causal mechanism—a material thing or a process or pathway(s) through which the change is brought into being.[4] Biological evolution required both natural selection and genetic coding as causal mechanisms before it was accepted as a viable theory beyond rational dispute. In planetary evolution, the geothermal dynamics of plate tectonics provided the mechanism missing in Wegner’s earlier inchoate Continental Drift hypothesis. But since our thoughts and feelings are nonmaterial, their evolution and their causal mechanisms are difficult to discern. Even if all our inner lives were encoded in the material structures of our brain, this soft material quickly decomposes and disappears. Francis Fukuyama noted that, “Reliance on the archeological record also leads to a bias toward materialistic explanations for change, since much of the spiritual and cognitive world of prehistoric civilization is effectively lost.”[5] So an evolution of cultural consciousness stands almost outside scientific scrutiny.

This is where the idea of “universal Darwinism” and Richard Dawkin’s playful concept of the meme come in handy.[6] Universal Darwinism suggests that for any system (not just the biological) to undergo evolution, only three conditions must be met: the traits of that system must vary in some way; there must a mechanism to select for those variations that are most successful in the environment; and there must be a causal mechanism to copy the successful traits into future generations of that system.[7] For the intangible world of consciousness and culture, memes are the variable traits that can be copied. The meme is conceptualized as a reproducible unit of information.[8]

It can be any idea, thing, value, belief, etc. that can be replicated. It can be as mundane as shoes and earrings; as abstract as the unwritten rules of courtship; as significant as ownership and patriotism. These are all memes.  If it can be replicated it is, by definition, a meme.[ix]

The meme “phone,” for example, can vary in color, size, shape, function, whether it is wired or wireless, etc.  The causal mechanisms for copying the memes are the neurons. These nerve cells (within the brain mostly) have become—through the billions of years—highly evolved instruments for processing, manipulating, and transmitting information. According to this idea—to this meme about memes—brain cells called mirror neurons copy the memes.[x] The memes are then stored, manipulated, and transmitted back to the organism’s environment by the brain’s complex neural network. For memes, as with the genes that preceded them, to reproduce is to be successful. What selects which memes will be successful?  The natural environment, the culture, the individual human brain.

By co-evolutionary logic, those memes useful to our survival endured. The psychologist Susan Blackmore suggests, for instance, that the meme language co-evolved with bigger brains, each facilitating the evolution of the other.[xi] The bigger brain facilitated the copying of language, and those people who were facile with the language were most successful in their cultural and natural environments. Meanwhile, both enhanced the reproductive success of humans. But not without some personal trade-offs.   The bigger brain made birth far more painful and potentially fatal for the mother. And then once that dangerous bridge is successfully crossed, the big brain takes years to develop. Managing gravity on two legs, outwitting faster, stronger, better armed species, competing with members of our own species, learning language and the subtle rules of culture—all these require at least a decade—and now two to three decades—of dependency and metabolic energy from the community.[xii] Also, using twenty percent of a person’s total energy output, the bigger brain requires that its host intake substantially more nutrients than it did when it had a smaller brain. Our species had to become better at procuring food in a world where the competition is, by nature, stiff. Here the brain paid its way by providing for long-term memory, sequential memory, copying, innovation, language, attention, reasoning, problem-solving, inhibition of impulses, delayed gratification, goal-attainment, planning, flexibility, integration over space and time, social intelligence, empathy, and so forth.[xiii]

Not all successful memes are beneficial to the host. Similar to the bio-logic of genes, also surviving are numerous seemingly useless memes—fads like party balloons and pet rocks and bell-bottoms. They serve no apparent evolutionary benefit, but like the many hitchhiker genes in our genome, they come along for the ride because they do not significantly compromise the individual, either. Also thriving have been lots of memes that are actually deleterious to many people—to the point of being catastrophic to the species—and yet they have managed to survive because they are so advantageous to some few people. War and cluster bombs, dishonesty, junk food, large families, conspicuous consumption, and planned obsolescence top the short list. 

However they manifest—whether by this hypothetical memetic process or not—our interior lives are far more complex than the external ones. Intricate as a car may be—the mechanics, metallurgy, combustion, electronics, and so forth—the meanings we give to a car and what it symbolizes in our minds (individually and collectively) and all the cultural spin-offs are incomparably more complex. The freedom and pleasure of driving; the pain and suffering of collisions; the thoughts and experiences related to traffic, to laws, to the types of communities it fosters (urban, suburban, rural), to the spin-off businesses of metal, tire, concrete, and petroleum, and to the history of these, corporate capitalism and national economies, of wars, unions and global warming; and even the simple value judgments that enters one’s mind as a person passes a Toyota Prius or the late GM Hummer (R.I.P.). The mental ripple effects of this one material meme seem virtually infinite. 

Like many other successful complex systems—the Internet, biological ecosystems, living organisms and Life, itself—culture exists as “a nested fractal network of independent beings” in continual change.[xiv] The human brain can be crudely imagined as a pulsing circuitry of some hundred billion cells or nodes within a network, making perhaps as many a quadrillion connections.[xv] One level up, each brain operates as a single node, connected to billions of others in a series of interconnected configurations, of families, friends, organizations, communities, etc. All together they produce the global society. And just as a symphony is not composed simply of musicians fingering their instruments, but also of a shared and collaborative internal experience, the emergent symphony of humanity involves society and culture, the exterior and the interior experience of it, as Civilization. And the experiences of the symphony occur at all levels simultaneously. Civilization and the individual feedback upon each other (much like two facing mirrors), producing nearly infinite intercourse. And since their adaptive success is entwined, Civilization and the individual share a co-evolutionary existence.

[1] Sagan, C. (1977:103). The Dragons of Eden, Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence, Ballantine Books, New York.

[2] McAuliffe, K. (2009, March) Are We Still Evolving? Discover, pp. 51-56, 58.

[3] Autocatalytic means that the process is internally self-perpetuating. Cross-catalytic means that systems catalyze other systems. Cybernetic means that the system (a person or society, in this case) reads environmental stimuli and responds.

[4] Or the hypothesis may fit within a mathematical relationship and therefore not need a causal mechanism.

[5] Fukuyama F. (2011:52)  The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York.

[6] Memes—                                                                                                                                   Dawkins, R. (1976) The Selfish Gene, Oxford University Press, Oxford.                                           Blackmore, S. (1999) The Meme Machine, Oxford University Press, Oxford. 

Universal Darwinism or similar idea of evolution in systems other than those living—  Dennet, D.C. (1995) Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, Simon and Schuster, New York.                  Blackmore (1999).                                                                                                      

Smolin, L. (1999) The Life of the Cosmos, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Chaisson, E.J. (2001) Cosmic Evolution: The Rise of Complexity, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. 

Oudeyer, P-Y, and Kaplan, F. (2007) Language Evolution as Darwinian Process: Computational Studies. Cognitive Process, v. 8, pp. 21-35.

Beddoe et al. (2009) submit in PNAS that “The evolution of cultures follows rules analogous to those governing the evolution of organisms, but they vary in their units of selection (cultural variants vs. genetic variants) and the method of transmission of successful variants to the next generation (learning vs. genes).”   Beddoe, R., Costanza, R., Farley, J. Garza, E., Kent, J., Kubiszewski, I., Martinez, L., McCowen, T., Murphy, K., Myers, N., Ogden, Z., Stapleton, K. and Woodward, J. (2009) Overcoming Systematic Roadblocks to Sustainability: The Evolutionary Redesign of Worldviews, Institutions, and Technologies. Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), v. 106, pp. 2483-2489.

[7] Palumbi, S.R. (2001b:39) The Evolution Explosion: How Humans Cause Rapid Evolutionary Change, W.W. Norton and Company, New York.                                                                   

Campbell, J. (2009) Bayesian Methods and Universal Darwinism, American Institute of Physics, Conference Proceedings, v. 1193, pp. 40-47.  Available at http://arxiv.org/pdf/1001.0068.pdf.  Accessed February 28, 2013. 

[8] Unlike the gene, the meme does not necessarily exist as a material entity.  However, among the biggest proponents of the concept have been the materialist philosophers. Materialist and idealist are the two endpoints of the dualist worldview. Dualists perceive matter and mind (or spirit) as being of two very different qualities. To the materialist, matter is primary, and all else—if it truly exists—is caused by matter acted upon by one of the four fundamental forces in the space-time field. For the materialist, consciousness presents great difficulties, as it appears to be a phenomenon that exists outside the materialist paradigm.

[ix] Blackmore (1999).

[x] McNamara, A. (2011) Can We Measure Memes? Frontiers in Evolutionary Neuroscience, v. 3(1). Available at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3118481/. Accessed July 4, 2016.

[xi] Blackmore (1999).

[xii] Potts, R. (2007) Big Brains Explained. Nature, v. 480, pp. 43-44.

[xiii] Ramachandran, V.S. (2000) Mirror Neurons and Imitation Learning as the Driving Force Behind the Great Leap Forward in Human Evolution, Edge.  Available at http://www.edge.org/conversation/mirror-neurons-and-imitation-learning-as-the-driving-force-behind-the-great-leap-forward-in-human-evolution.  Accessed Mach 2, 2013.

Ramachandran, V.S. (2011) The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human, W.W. Norton & Company, New York.

Coolidge, F. L. and Wynn, T. (2001). Executive Functions of the Frontal Lobes and the Evolutionary Ascendancy of Homo sapiens, Cambridge Archaeological Journal,  v. 11, 255-260.

      Coolidge, F.L. and Wynn, T. (2005) Working Memory, its Executive Functions, and the Emergence of Modern Thinking, Cambridge Archaeological Journal, v. 15, pp. 5-26

Rizzolatti, G., and Craighero, L. (2004) The Mirror-Neuron System, Annual Review of Neuroscience, v. 27, pp. 169-192.

Potts (2011). 

[xiv] Margulis, L. and Sagan, D. (1995) What is Life? University of California Press, Berkeley, CA.

[xv] Pennisi, E. (2006) Brain Evolution of the Far Side, Science, v. 314, pp. 244-245.  A node, by definition, can be thought of as any element, or a system really, (like a cell, brain, person, organization, town, etc.) that can be connected to other nodes (at all the different levels) in a complex of networks. 

There is No Trump Card

As we watch the train wreck of American “democracy” with morbid fascination, unable to avert our eyes from our favorite news sources, we often sense in our more honest moments that we are witnessing in real time the consequences of decades of socio-economic mismanagement on the part of the elites and satiated apathy on ours. We have lived well enough to leave well enough alone, and the wealthy and powerful have taken full advantage of our torpor. We are waking up from the middle class dream into a reality whose hollowed out industrial towns, unskilled labor force, rusty and crumbling infrastructure, existential suffering, and political incompetence resemble more the Third World and the 20th century Soviet Empire than the grand myths of America.

On voting days, I always did feel – despite the obvious charade– a certain delight in participating in an event that included me in something so much larger than myself. The service of the volunteers at the polling locations reminded me that there is a genuine human desire to cooperate to make the world a better place. And my vote represented an incremental step on humanity’s evolutionary path.

It does not feel the same this year. While we slog through the most personal, least substantive campaign in my lifetime, the planet is literally burning around us. Nearly every significant measure of the state of the planet and of Civilization is worsening. Losses in biodiversity, rising atmospheric temperature and ocean acidity, diminishing forests, fish stocks, and water and food security—all these remain on pace. For the first time in two hundred years, there are fewer democracies than before. Inequality in wealth is at its highest level in human history. Billions of people suffer from malnutrition, unsanitary conditions, and non-potable water. Malnutrition, by the way, breaks down like this: 800 million to a billion suffer from lack of calories and protein, and over two billion people suffer the physically- and mentally-stunting effects of micronutrient deficiencies. Sixty-five million people are climate, war, and economic refugees. At least three billion live on less than $2.50 a day; four billion people live on less than $4 a day. Meanwhile, some billion of us enjoy a cornucopia of food and material stuff, and some fifteen million of those live the unconstrained lives of royalty.

When they did finally wake up, millions of Americans found themselves no longer part of the gravy train. They were unemployed, underemployed, unskilled, and uneducated. They worked at Wal-Mart selling cheap imports, making some arbitrarily determined minimum wage without benefits, paid sick leave, or even job security for the job they did not really want. And there was little hope for improvement. The American dream was a mirage rapidly diminishing over the horizon.  We see and feel their dismay, their alarm, their rage. They feel as if the American political system has failed them.  Given the options, they blame one political party or the other. And, of course, the presidential candidate becomes the scapegoat upon which we heap all our frustrations and resentments.

Okay, first Hillary Clinton. Yes, she’s completely establishment. She commands enormous fees for speeches at Wall Street conferences. She has served in numerous top government positions – U.S. Senator, Secretary of State, and First Lady to the Arkansas Governor and American President. Her husband Bill oversaw the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act and the beginning of the new Gilded Age. Like Obama and the previous presidents, she will surely appoint Goldman Sachs elites as economic advisors, do relatively little to improve planetary environmental conditions, and make the world safe for military contractors and business oligarchs. Under her watch, the twinned crises of environmental and socio-economic breakdown will surely continue unabated.

Then there’s Donald Trump, who at the time of this writing is playing out the script of his predictable self-destruction. That some thirty or forty percent of Americans still support him, or, for that matter, have ever supported him, may defy some sense of reality on the part of most of the world citizens. Yet, there is surely plenty of historical precedent. Throughout the Western world, at least, some similar proportion of the electorate is, in their confused resentment, supporting an anti-immigrant, anti-environmental, anti-anything-that-is-loving agenda.

If we were not in unprecedented times, perhaps it would not matter which of these two representatives of the wealthiest and most powerful was voted into the single most powerful position in the world. However, we do live during unprecedented times. The human population is still swelling; global food security is in serious jeopardy; conflict is once again heating up on the planet, from the big belligerents like the U.S., Russia and China, to regional and civil conflicts all over the globe. Global warming will exacerbate all our problems, leading to ever-larger stress-producing waves of refugees. The issues are interrelated, deeply buried in the foundations of Civilization, and complex beyond our reckoning.

Neither of these candidates will likely improve the conditions of the human dilemma. Nothing in their records suggests they possess the necessary level of consciousness to provide paradigm-shifting leadership. Neither of them approaches the wisdom of the present president, and even Barak Obama could not disentangle the political Gordian knots. However… the big however: given the complexity of problems, tensions, and surprises that heads of state and other powerful elites will surely face in the coming years, I think there is little choice but to pull the lever for Hillary Clinton. Then, we can get on with the important task of righting the listing ship of Civilization.

The Complete Equality Of Women

Almost miraculously the global average human fertility rate has dropped. Plummeted. From a global average of 5 children per woman in 1950 to nearly 2.5 in 2015.  Precisely what has caused it to halve in these last seventy or so years is unknown. Likely, it is due to a complex of biological and cultural variables. Without question, however, the single most powerful direct factor is the rising empowerment of women. In every setting where women have had more say in their personal lives and more say in the functioning of the society in general, the better circumstances become—not only for women, but for everyone involved. Worldwide, when women’s education levels rise, fertility drops.[i] Worldwide, when women are empowered— meaning that they have more decision-making power in family matters and with their bodies (by, for example, having the freedom to use contraceptives)—both fertility and child mortality drops.[ii] Worldwide, when poor women are the recipients of microloans, more of the money goes into the family needs, business ventures, and paying back the loans, and less into tobacco, gambling, and alcohol than when the loans go to men.[iii] Sexual equality is good for Civilization and good for the Earth.

 Inequality, sexual and otherwise, is so indefensible philosophically, I will assume an audience that needs no persuasion. However, a very brief history does serve our purposes. Hunter-gatherer societies were far more equitable in most every way than is Civilization. This is particularly true with respect to women.[iv] Equality in mobile hunter-gatherer societies was adaptive. In the journal Science, for instance, anthropologists found that equality of the sexes among hunter-gatherers explained the important role of cooperation and concord that is characteristic of bands made of unrelated and potentially competitive families.[v]

With large-scale agriculture everything changed. Large irrigation projects, as one example, required a concentration of enormous resources and effort and therefore organization, which precipitated the rise of permanent leaders. The crops harvested could now feed not only the farmers, but also others not directly involved in farming. In time, these non-farming five to ten percent became the rulers, warriors, priests, craftsmen, organizers, and tradesmen—society’s elite and affluent. Status and hierarchy were codified and etched into the social fabric. Religion legitimized the inequality, especially that of women, an inequality that persists today, most obviously among the clergy. Although there are female saints and venerated religious figures and mystics, there have been, as of yet, no female popes, cardinals, bishops, priests, and Dalai Lamas, some very few Imams, and just recently some very few Brahman priests, and some small percentage of rabbis and pastors. Indeed, in all the spheres of influence—political, military, religious, business, and media—women still represent a small minority of the leaders.

Given the completely subordinate role played by women for most of Civilization’s six thousand year history, the past century’s trend of women’s increasing power and influence in the affairs of society bodes well for us. Although men and women are of equal value, we are not the same. Testosterone and estrogen levels, if nothing else, guarantee that. For six thousand years, or for as long as women have been subordinated, Civilization has proceeded without the full compliment of the human potential. And so, like an aircraft flying with only one wing, Civilization is hurtling to its demise. To adequately and wisely meet the unprecedented challenges of the human predicament and of dieback, to veer our ship back towards a sustainable future, we will need our specie’s full breadth and depth. We will need women walking not behind men but shoulder to shoulder. And perhaps even often ahead, leading the way, if we are to overcome the ramifications of millennia of unfettered patriarchy.

[i]  Martin, T.C. and Juarez, F. (2005) The Impact of Women’s Education on Fertility in Latin America: Searching for Explanations. International Family Planning Perspectives, v. 21(2), pp. 52-57, 80.

[ii] For example, Eswaran (2002), Upadhyay et al. (2014).

Eswaran, M. (2002) The Empowerment of Women, Fertility, and Child Mortality: Towards a Theoretical Analysis. Journal of Population Economics, v. 15, pp. 433-454.

Upadhyay, U.D., Gipson, J.D., Withers, M., Lewis, S., Ciardaldi, E.J., Fraser, A., Huchko, M.J., Prata, N. (2014) Women’s Empowerment and Fertility: A Review of the Literature. Social Science & Medicine, v. 115, pp. 111-120.

[iii]  Amendáriz, B. and Roome, N. (2008) Empowering Women Via Microfinance in Fragile States. CEB Working Paper no. 08/001, Centre Emile Bernheim.

[iv] For example,  Endicott, K.L. (1981) The Conditions of Egalitarian Male-Female Relationships in Foraging Societies. Canberra Anthropology, v. 4 (2), 10 pp.

[v]  Dyble, M;, Salali, G.D., Chaudhary, N., Page, A., Smith, D., Thompson, J., Vinicius, L., Mace, R., Migliano, A.B. (2015) Sex Equality Can Explain the Unique Social Structure of Hunter-Gatherer Bands. Science, v. 348, pp. 796-798.