IMPUNITY, n.  Wealth. Ambrose Bierce

Ambrose Bierce. The Devil’s Dictionary (The Peter Pauper Press 1958)
Pp 31

“A Single Error More Than All The Others…” John Ruskin

“And, as far as I have taken cognizance of the causes of the many failures to which the efforts of intelligent men are liable, more especially in matters political, they seem to me more largely to spring from this single error more than from all the others, that the inquiry into the doubtful, and in some sort inexplicable, relations of capability, chance, resistance, and inconvenience, invariably precedes, even if it do not altogether supersede, the determination of what is absolutely desirable and just. Nor is it any wonder that sometimes the too cold calculation of our powers should reconcile us too easily to our shortcomings, and even lead us into the fatal error of supposing that our conjectural utmost is in itself well, or in other words, that the necessity of offences renders them inoffensive.”

John Ruskin: The Seven Lamps Of Architecture ( Boston: Thomas Crowell and Company, 1880). Pp 3.

Link: Wikipedia entry for John Ruskin Arts and Crafts Figurehead)

DANTE’S INFERNO, Illustrated by DORE

PLATE 44

CANTO XIX

“They come to the third gulf, wherein are punished those who have been guilty of simony. These are fixed with the head downwards in certain apertures, so that no more of them than the legs appears without, and on the soles of their feet are seen burning flames.”

Dante Inferno Illustrated by Gustave Dore,Paddington Press (New York: 1996). First published in 1890? ed. Divine Comedy A.L. Burt, New York.

“As In The Twenties, Voices Of Protest Were Attacked As “Subversive,” or “Un-American.”” Robert Goldston

“The New Deal reached a stalemate in 1938 and was drowned by the war. Unfortunately, also drowned was the spirit which had supported it. The years following World War II were to see a dreary repetition of the hysteria, public apathy, and return to overweening private greed which marked the years after World War I. There was to be another and even more damaging “red scare” presided over by Wisconsin’ Senator Joe McCarthy (and supported by a large segment of the American people). There was to be a return to business ethics and private morality in place of the public ethics of the thirties. Bruce Barton’s revelation of Christ as a businessman was hardly more indicative of the spirit of the twenties than General Motors President Charles Wilson’s brusque “What’s-Good-For-General-Motors-Is-Good-For-America” was of the fifties. While the newfound prosperity of America was poured into goods, services and hardware, into ever bigger and more vulgar automobiles, ever flashier kitchens, ever more clever gadgets, it was to be withheld from the public sector of the economy. The shiny new cars cluttered poorly paved city streets. The flashy kitchens were often found in crumbling public housing. Well-dressed children attended public schools whose buildings were a national disgrace; they were taught by teachers whose salaries were a national shame. And once again, as in the twenties, voices of protest against the decay of public community were attacked as “subversive,” or “un-American.””

Robert Goldston, The Great Depression: The United States In The Thirties (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968).

WHAT’S THIS?

We are here to have a general discussion about acute transformations.

WHAT’S THIS?

Enticing, colorful figures, no? Enlightening explanation and stimulating discussion are sure to follow.

NATURAL SYSTEMS are highly dynamic, increasingly unstable. Geometric, compounding, multiplying, exponential.

Here is your simple graph of exponential change occurring in some phenomenon. Some thing- measured on the “y” or vertical axis- is changing. Or “growing.” (Let’s call growth a subset of “change.” that will be consistent with our discussion here).

“It” is changing with respect to something else on the “x” axis. Here, the “x” axis is denoted as “time.” That will be apropos here too. We could show lots of other things, in other ways, but for our purposes here we can let the “x” axis refer, in general, to time.

As you can see, this is a general discussion. We do not mean to lecture. You are familiar with and understand simple geometric behavior like this. (Insert citation and reference to the Web Lesson by —-.)

So let’s just intuitively treat the “x” axis as time. The time scale along this axis is not defined. It is variable from illustration to illustration. It is speculative, and illustrative only. It should suggest thought and not conclusions. The graphs illustrate only very general phenomena, and the subject of “time” in this discussion is a very uncertain (and controversial) thing. Questions of time and timing are central here, as you will well know from the uncertainty of your own speculations. When indeed? How fast? Speed is, after all, change over time…

We repeatedly use vivid, colorful figures in order to constantly keep the acute, irresistible nature of exponential growth in sharp focus as we go along.

Figure 1.

 t = TIME

Time on “x” axis. Something Else is Changing Exponentially.

Figure 2.

DYNAMIC EQUILIBRIUM

You recognize this. This is how variable phenomena stay notionally “stable” over time under the influence of “moderating” or modulating external factors.

Figure 3.

DYNAMIC EQUILIBRIUM (2)

Here’s a graphic way of looking at it.

Figure 4.

PUNCTUATED EQUILIBRIUM

Something is relatively (dynamically) stable. Over a much longer time frame, external “events” perturb it, and it departs from its range of stability. It then “equilibrates” around some dramatically different, new range of stability.

Our general awareness of this phenomenon is associated with biological evolution. Good resources would be Edmund O. Wilson, Stephen Jay Gould, Matt Ridley and other good popular writers who discuss biological evolution. (We have here E.O. Wilson, In Search Of Nature (New York: Island Press1996), Stephen Jay Gould, Full House (New York: Harmony Books 1996), and Matt Ridley, The Red Queen (New York: Penguin Books 1993).

Of course, this behavior is not restricted to biological phenomena (none of the best rules of the universe are). This matter is studied in systems theory, chaos theory and theoretical math, too. A good place to look into this would be James Gleick, Chaos: Making A New Science (New York: Penguin Books 1997), and, of course, Ilya Prigogine (Insert Reference).

(A note about dimensionality. Our graphic figures here are in two dimension, and we will keep them that way. In general, everything we have to say can be enriched by thinking in more than two dimensions- especially mathematical constructs like chaos theory. After all, reducing things to two dimensions is really quite an abstraction isn’t it?)

Figure 5.

A BRIEF INTERLUDE ABOUT TIME.

And Some Thoughts about Numbers and Words.

 It is very difficult to explain and evoke with words alone the natural behaviors of systems that we are discussing here. Some of us are graphic learners, anyway. Some of us are tactile learners and some of us are auditory learners and some of us are oral learners and some of us are oral-genital learners. But we can all learn, right?

We do this without numbers. There are only a “couple” of numbers here, and we have taken pains to write them out alphabetically, and they will (still) be controversial. Numbers provoke controversy and argument, rightly so. They are also intellectually seductive and distracting, and rightly so. We are not demographers, or toxicologists, or experts of any particular stripe. You, dear Reader, probably are. Please comment, or argue, or help us with facts or data or references or proofs, if you care to. Please.

This presentation is crude. Intentionally. It is abstract. Deliberately. It is imprecise. On purpose. Our intent is manifestly not to make proofs, or arguments, or conclusions, or refutations. It is not to present points of view. It is to evoke understanding.

The references we include are not intended to provide up-to-date data, or cutting-edge projections, or contemporary research, either. Deliberately. They are books, generally, that have helped us with understanding and meaning. If you care to extend our conversation with data and references that are contemporary and comprehensive, please do.

We intend to be general and abstract. We argue that the general observations we make here are uncontroversial- at least among the sane. Nearly anyone likely to read this will recognize uncertainty, argument, contention and controversy in these sober matters. But no-one will dispute the generalities, we hope, abstracted as they are, unless they are ideologically or personally unable to come to terms with this.

Some of us have a hard time acknowledging the harm we do when our livelihoods -and our very lives- depend on it. People in business can have a hard time acknowledging the contradictions in capitalism. People who justify their consumption can have a hard time acknowledging the harm we do to others and our planet. For many of us, the coming transformations don’t only challenge the goodness of our self-perceptions. They provoke visceral, existential fear.

But we argue that there are not two -or multiple- sides to this. We mean to capture the whole story here, without the kinds of particularities that might personalize this or create false ideological divides or controversies. We are not right, or wrong. If you want to argue about that, do it at home. We are all in the shit here, and there isn’t any other side to it. That is what we mean by the whole story, and it is why we mean to be crude, blunt, abstract and general. No-one is innocent. And no-one is on the right side of anything. Not the Law, or Goodness, or Righteousness or Rightness, or God.

Figure 6.

EXPONENTIAL CHANGE COMPOUNDED UPON EXPONENTIAL CHANGE.

Acceleration. Turbo-charged.

Figure 7.

“STRANGE ATTRACTORS.”

When a previously stable system becomes unstable and departs (exponentially), we have no idea where it might go. In some sense, we cannot even imagine the possibilities of new “states” to which a now wildly unstable system might migrate and evolve a new state of dynamic stability. In chaos theory, these “states” can be called “attractors.” There are even “strange attractors.” Like my sister. Good references would be, again, James Gleick and Ilya Prigogine.

Figure 8.

UTTER UNPREDICTABILITY.

Again, from the perspective or point of view of a familiar and recognizable stability (or “attractor”), possible futures are utterly unpredictable. They are profoundly, literally, unimaginable. Future, altered paradigms have uncountenanced, incomprehensibly foreign paradigms of their own. Nothing can prepare us. (See Immanuel Wallerstein, cited below).

Figure 9.

“BREAKOUT:” BIFURCATION

Stable systems are dynamically “equilibrating” because external destabilizing events (inputs) are countered by relatively small “outputs” that reorient the system back toward the “attractor” around which it is “balanced.”

If  “outputs” become gradually larger relative to “inputs,” the system is increasingly unstable. This is “positive feedback.” Eventually, some “input” will cause the system to completely depart from the region of stability and head for… well, the unknowable. Some mid-sized city in Nebraska. Bifurcation.

Figure 10.

EXPONENTIAL CHANGES AND LIMITS.

Wherever you are in an exponential equation or system, everything looks the same. Your experience of the changes in the system today looks like the experience of yesterday, and of tomorrow (until some kind of “breakout” occurs). One cannot, from within the system, tell where one is on the “slope” of exponential change. Everything is relative.

Only externalities, in the form of limits, make it possible to distinguish one “location” from another inside the logic of exponential growth. It is only something from without the paradigm of geometric increase -something non-geometrical, or absolute, or linear, or “external” in a profound sense- that disturbs the “view.”

Only something that is systemically, mathematically “alien” can even enter into the picture and give it any sort of datum or baseline. Exponential change doesn’t even look like change, since it is eternal… relative change. Until something alien introduces absolute change. Then, and only then, can you see any sort of distinct landscape going by: external, non-geometric “limiting” factors like resource constraints, or catastrophe, or imminent paradigmatic transformation. Then you see immense, profound change in the system: radical departure from growth, e.g. decline, cataclysm, extermination. One could profitably read E.F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful (London: Blond and Briggs, 1973) and (further citations: The Limits To Growth and ref. population). 

Figure 11.

GROWTH UPON GROWTH.

Look at the form here- just so we’re not mistaking anything. Externalities impose dynamic stability on a phenomenon that would otherwise multiply geometrically. Increasing instability leads to a “bifurcation” or departure from the region of stability. The system roars off to some new “attractor” or region, where it stabilizes.

Notice the overall form here. The larger form shows a geometrical “growth” at a meta-level. The local phenomenon of geometric multiplication is “regulated.” At the larger “scale,” the meta-phenomenon is also geometrical multiplication. Many natural systems exhibit this- e.g. human population.

Consider the “acceleration” of two (or more) geometrically multiplying factors. Then “multiply” that behavior by this meta-phenomenon. Phenomenal!

Figure 12.

ACCELERATION PHENOMENON.

Think of the step-wise line on this figure as some sort of progression of successive transformations. “improvements” in agricultural technology would be a good example. These “enhancements” are an accelerant- they geometrically compound the underlying exponential growth.

Figure 13.

TECHNOLOGICAL “ADVANCES” AS TRANSFORMATIONS.

Here’s an example. Quarrel with the simplification if you like. We are not experts and will do you the indignity of not being offended. The graph represents (theoretically) human population. Let’s say, planetary. The domestication of food-stock (plant and animal), cultivation, and the major technological achievement of the moldboard plow each successively multiply the productive capacity of agriculture and husbandry. Each leads to a multiplication in population. We… are in the Age of Petroleum Fertilizers and Mechanized, Industrial Agriculture and Resource Exploitation.

Figure 14.

FIRST GENERAL FORM.

Here’s the general form. Think of medical technology, or transportation. And think of social/cultural technologies too- cooperation, language, exchange media, urbanization, labor specialization, labor exploitation, capital accumulation.

Figure 15.

“TRAUMATIC” EVENTS ARE THE NORM.

Another General Form. Traumatic, Large-Scale Variations Become the Norm.

Accelerating transformations, like technological innovations, actually multiply effects beyond the underlying geometrical growth. But they are external, and may have fundamental limits in themselves. They can have their own internal, destabilizing limiting “logic-” especially since they cause the underlying phenomenon to be altered- but note that they act as “local” equilibrating events. Think about the “hydraulic civilizations” that grew enormously because of extensive irrigation technologies, such as the Anasazi, the Meso-American and Peruvian, the Egyptian and the Chinese civilizations.

Figure 16.

MAY YOU HAVE THE MISFORTUNE TO LIVE IN INTERESTING TIMES.

Another figure returning our attention to human population over time. Think about it- these systemic instabilities and traumas make for exciting times! Lots of people dying and shit.

Figure 17.

WHO, ME?

 
When Barbara Ehrenreich refers to the possibility, even likelihood, of human extinction in the journal The Nation, it is time to think. (Insert Citation.) There have been some big extinctions in the past, and believe me, they must have been exciting! Again, one could refer to evolutionary paleontologists like Wilson and Gould. A particularly poignant book to go look at would be: Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin, The Sixth Extinction: Patterns Of Life And The Future Of Mankind (New York: Anchor Books 1995). No-one in their right mind disputes that we are in a great period of great extinctions- one to compare to the grand-daddy of ‘em all, the end-Permian. And the vulnerable species are the out-liers, especially the large, the highly specialized, those that depend on a complex hierarchy of other life forms, and those that consume food that is most like themselves. In any self-respecting extinction, odds are the large mammals are toast.

Figure 18.

IS THERE A MORAL QUESTION HERE?

Probably not really, looking at the overall picture we are putting together. But here. Three figures that follow this one will explain it.

Figure 19.

“SOFT LANDING.”

“a” here can represent some (theoretical) numerical value. This could apply (does apply) to amoeba and mule deer, but say human population is increasing rapidly, and limits and traumas lead to a sort of a catastrophic “imbalance” and population “adjusts” and rebalances around some significantly lowered number. Let’s say, and we could argue, that the peak value is around eleven billion living humans, and the lower value shown is about six billion. “a” is then about five billion, no?

This is speculative. We don’t assert that human population can stabilize, long-term, around six billion. It can’t.

The question of time and timing is compelling here, too. If the elapse of time between these two points is long, then the decrease will be a significant, but maybe not cataclysmic, change in the rate of deaths over births. But maybe you are a demographer (we are not). Remember that right now, any rate of births over deaths is within a complex, exponential population growth equation, anyway.

If the time frame is shorter, say on the order of a human lifetime or a generation, things look mighty exciting indeed. Five billion people die, excess of deaths over births (roughly), young, early, reluctantly and of “unnatural cause.” Wow!

The population of parts of Europe generally decreased by about a third in the course of the Plagues. One could read Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century (Toronto: Random House 1978) for a lively account.

Figure 20.

“HARD LANDING.”

A more extreme scenario. Population screams up a bit higher (this is what many of us have been concerned about). Resource crisis is more acute, rapid and generally calamitous. Just for fun, let’s say that in this scenario, humans become extinct within what we may generally think of as the same “event.” Maybe within one lifetime, or one generation, even.

Say population peaked at more like fifteen million. From fifteen to zip in a lifetime. Use your imagination. Now That’s got to have enough excitement to go around for the whole group! Just for the record: We, the Editors, think maybe birth rates worldwide will go down, now.

Figure 21.

IS THIS A MORAL QUESTION?

This figure just abstractly compares the two generalizations. Does you inner paleontologist really give a shit? Or are you really concerned about experiencing this kind of excitement yourself? Moral question, or no?

Look at “b” minus “a.” Fifteen million people die, unintentionally, leaving none (and an unrecognizable planet). Or five million die, leaving some, on an unfamiliar planet, and with a wildly unstable and improbable future. The net, b – a = ten billion excess deaths. Insofar as this matters, this is why some of us have made precautionary urges for us to change our collective behavior.

Let’s take a bathroom break. Back in fifteen minutes?

Figure 22.

EXTERNAL POPULATION EFFECTS

Back to another example of transformation. Say medical technologies lead to successive increases in life expectancy, and hence population. But then a global health event disrupts the picture- say the overload of toxic build-up in the human environment- and population precipitously declines. Our Stolen Future by Theo Colburn, Dianne Dumanoski, and John Peterson Myers (New York: Penguin 1996)  (and….) is a worthwhile read. And, of course, Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. Laurie Garret: The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases In A World Out Of Balance (New York: Farar, Straus and Giroux 1994) is a responsible account.

Figure 23.

Figure 23.

SECOND GENERAL FORM.

A general form again. Technologies have unintended consequences. Those destructive, unpredicted ones? Those consequences? Those were the unintended ones….

Let’s say that the upper graph there represents dollars spent globally, on medical care and technologies. This could be per capita, or absolute. Whatever. We, the Editors, think it has probably peaked, either way. That other curve there is human population, marching along… exponentially.

Or let’s say that the upper graph there represents human life expectancy, at birth, worldwide. It has been increasing, due to a number of factors, many of them discussed here… until now. That is human population there again, in the background, marching along… exponentially. We, the Editors, think maybe human life expectancy at birth, globally, has peaked, for the foreseeable future. Maybe forever. Probably.

Figure 24.

SALVATION? OR JUST ANOTHER TRAUMA?

There are always unintended consequences. Technologies (of this kind) are self-arresting, and inherently contain the contradictions and limits that will bring the system back within “the rules.” It is one of the astounding features of humans that some of us always believe that this solution, this technology, this salvation, this is the one… that won’t. Them’s the rules.

Figure 25.

MULTIPLYING FREQUENCY AND INTENSITY.

We have reached a region of profound instability. Relatively small perturbances in the system are producing more extreme and radical “outputs.” The global climate is disrupted. Our analytic sciences, that are only beginning to understand and describe highly complex systems, are inadequate. The sciences of stable systems are inadequate to give meaning to the reality of profound transformation.

The global “climate” (the term itself seems tiny and inadequate to the cataclysmic transformation our ecosystem is embarking upon) is disrupted.

Our society, our species and our interspecies interdependencies are on the brink of unprecedentedly traumatic disruptions that will feed back upon themselves. There is much, much more to say about social transformations, disruptions and destructive, violent “positive feedback” than we will say here. A look back at Figure 20 should do the trick. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse ride together.

It is refreshing that Immanuel Wallerstein has examined the implications of chaos theory for social theory. In The End Of The World As We Know It (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota 1999) he analyses increasing economic and social instability and disruptive positive feedback, and how they lead to radical departure from a region of social, cultural and economic stability. (Insert quote from The Nation).

Figure 26.

THE GREEN COUNTER-REVOLUTION.

 
Here’s an example. Food production has been increasing, and human population with it- exponentially. It is going to decline. It is going to go from a multiplying feedback to an absolute limit – nongeometric- situation.

And! Fisheries are collapsing.

Figure 27.

THE END OF FUEL.

Civilizations have grown as their technologies to extract, transport and utilize energy have multiplied. Then they have reached the absolute limits of their energy bases. The technologies, the complex civilizations that allowed their accumulation, and their populations have all concurrently collapsed. The collapse of civilizations correlates precisely to their blowing through -geometrically- the limits -absolute- of their resource bases. You have probably read the popular Jared Diamond books, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates Of Human Societies (New York: Norton 1998) and Collapse (Insert Citation).

Figure 28.

THIRD GENERAL FORM.

Another general form. Resource: you name it. Water, soil, air, plant-based foods, fish, oil, wood, what-have-you.

The absolute resource constraints are reached, simultaneously, for many critical resources. Each in turn weakens the stability of the system. The unstable swings introduced by each reinforce the others, in “positive feedback.” At each instant, the increasing instability of the system makes it more brittle, less resilient, less able to neutralize destabilizing “inputs.” Each trauma, in turn, reduces the resourcefulness of the system.

Instability is a geometric phenomenon, too. This is, after all, within the logic of a geometrical system. Compounding is negative. This is what “positive feedback” means. If you have an account that grows by some percentage and you make a regular draw on it that exceeds that growth, what happens? The power of compounding works both ways.

Figure 29.

FOURTH GENERAL FORM.

Figure 30

FIFTH GENERAL FORM.

 
Another general form.  Some “thing” is accelerated by external transformation such as technology (the upper orange curve). This accelerated phenomenon runs ahead of the background rate of increase of, say, human population (the lower tan curve).  Look at the affect on human population- the bold, pink curve. Extetrnalities, in the form of a geometric “accelerant” and an absolute limit or constraint that is outside the paradigm of exponential growth, have destabilized the system. Collapse ensues.

Examples abound. We have cited many. Now’s your chance- use your imagination. Here’s a good example: petroleum. Oil extraction, world wide, has peaked. This is not subject to credible dispute.

Our production of food depends on petroleum. We use multiple calories in motor fuels to produce a calorie of food. And nitrate fertilizers are literally made of petroleum.

That big red dot there? The End. Some absolute limit. It is observable in either axis, once you see it. It is an absolute limit to an absolute number- say the number of people a resource base can sustain. And it is observable in time- the time beyond which the system cannot be “equilibrated.”

A Note About “Carrying Capacity.” (Insert Text.)

Figure 31.

ABSOLUTE LIMITS: SIXTH GENERAL FORM.

An increasing unstable system (declining upper line- declining absolutely) supported by declining resource base (declining line- absolutely) with declining resiliency (declining line) and declining ability to absorb perturbances (yes, absolutely! the declining line).

Externally, absolute limits (the ability of the natural system to be a “sink” for degradation and contamination, depletion of fisheries, limits to agricultural production, etc). Come up as events.

Instabilities in the system lead to increasing frequency and magnitude of systemic social traumas, e.g. social inequalities, injustice, instability, violence, extremism, totalitarianism, etc.

External traumatic events compound and multiply the instabilities- e.g. climatic disruption, environmental catastrophes, rising sea levels, natural catastrophes both predictable and unimaginable.

Multiply all these together. This is, after all, a geometric, exponential system and these effects all compound and amplify one another.

Figure 32.

THE SEVENTH GENERAL FORM.

Get some sleep. 

WHAT WOULDN’T YOU DO? Our Obligation to Prevent the Theft of Power

You wouldn’t throw yourself out in front of a car to keep yourself from getting hurt, would you?

Would you throw yourself out in front of a car to keep someone else from getting hurt? Your kids? My kids? Dick Cheney’s kids?

We, the Editors, wouldn’t throw ourselves in the path of an election. We are not Politicians, or Public Officials, or Your Representatives. Seeking public office seems tantamount to throwing ourselves in the path of certain pain and probable destruction. We wouldn’t do it to save ourselves. We have come to recognize a perpetual crossfire when we see one.

We don’t want to be in public office. But there is a yawning, immense gulf of things we wouldn’t do to get there.

It is pretty much the same gulf of unsavory or unconscionable things we wouldn’t want you, or anyone who might represent us, to have done to get there. Things ranging from the crassly hypocritical to the unquestionably dishonest to the outrageously illegal to the unspeakably evil.

We have all collectively and democratically established that there are things that shouldn’t be done to get into public office. Mostly they just simply shouldn’t be done. We are not going to do such things, and we don’t want you to do such things, and we don’t want you in office if you do such things. Actually, we hope to imprison you if you do. Kind of obliged to, really.

In fact, we generally believe that even a willingness to do such things ought to ineluctably exclude you from public office. Or at least exclude you from fair election to office by We, the intelligent and compassionate, People.

We reluctantly give rise to the question of WHY some folks do things that are at the very least dishonest to get into powerful positions in the public trust, in theoretically representative public institutions.

It is inescapable that, once they get there, greedy and abusive people will do great harm to you, me and other things living or not.

It goes without saying that they are seeking power in order to do things we wouldn’t want done, not in our public trust, not in our public institutions, and not in our names. They will range up through the criminal to the thuggish, and right on into the unconscionable. Hopefully, for a while, at least some of these things will be illegal- at least in more advanced, civilized and ethical places than the Executive Branch of the Government of the United States. We will set this aside for the moment.

“Falsification becomes an essential talent for the elected, and eagerness to be duped a characteristic for the citizen. This also suggests that only people with severely deformed characters will be able to rise to high office. The system can’t help but reward those whose primary talents are acting and punish those who are straightforward.”

John Ralston Saul: Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West. New York, MacMillan; 1992. Pp. 496

Bad people do bad things to seize power. They will. They are doing them now. Look. This is the undoing at the core of theoretically representative government. Undemocratic people will do undemocratic things to get power. In power-seeking as well as in exercising power, they will always have the advantage over those who would uphold democratic principles and scruple at behaving anti-democratically. But we will set aside this for the moment too.

Peculiarly enough, people who wouldn’t imagine themselves doing such bad things themselves will willingly, eagerly and resolutely vote for people who do. This is a matter for future pondering. But we refer you to our essay entitled Extremism Is Safe and dated 05 September 2008, and set this too aside for the moment.

Here is the question we would now put before you. To excavate, articulate and bring into our public conversation.

What would you do to keep these people from plundering power?

These people differ from you and we. This is nothing less, and nothing more, than an undeniable ethical difference.

What will you do to keep them from stealing our community welfare?

We know that others –some certain particular others- will do harm in public office that you couldn’t yourself do. And we know that these are very great abuses that will do terrible damage, and that these others will, without hesitation or scruple, do these harms. They will do them in YOUR NAME.

Furthermore, they will do wrong just to get there- to get into these positions of power. To get YOUR VOTE. We are preparing an Essay with the working title What Would You Make Them Do. We anticipate posting it within a day or two.

What damage does this do to our democratic institutions, to our society, to how we govern and guide one another and ourselves? What irrecoverable harm does this anti-democratic hijacking of the electoral processes of democratic representation do to the very foundations of how we dwell together? But we will set this question too, aside for the moment.

Do we scruple at the same points- the same junctures in the path of ethical conduct- to PREVENT people from doing these harms?

These harms will occur if we do not act, publicly and ethically. What do we, as participants in a civil society, do to prevent harms we wouldn’t commit?

“Here we come upon a terrible facet of ethically asymmetric warfare: when your enemy has no scruples, your own scruples become another weapon in his hand.”

Sam Harris, The End Of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. 2004: W.W. Norton, New York. pp 202

We think this is an important question, now. As members of the planetary community, our ethical “compasses” arrest our conduct. What ethical compass guides what we do to arrest –prevent- specific, predictable injuries done by the nefarious?

It is obvious that we individuals must make these judgments. We make the ethical choices, and we are finally doing the killing: throwing the switches and the triggers. Writing parking tickets, defaulting mortgages, endorsing the World Bank, or pinning little cloth stars on lapels for that matter. Obviously, all of we individuals in such a society are responsible and accountable for the killing. Obviously, all of us are killers. Especially, all of us who advocate for such policies. There is no dishonor in honesty. Real, participatory, representative government is not trivial. It is not enough to put a magnetic ribbon on your car. Take it off. You delude yourself. No-one is innocent.

We have restated the established, peremptory argument for why communities could, or should, sanction personal behaviors that jeopardize the community.  Questions such as whether you or I might kill to prevent another from killing. Or argue that a society could, or ought to, kill to prevent killing, or other more general arguments of this color and stripe. This is nothing more than the argument that to obstruct harm-doers, we- as individuals and as a society- are justified in exacting the same measure of harm as others would themselves do. The same, in principle, and in practice. The same, in moral equivalence. The same measure, for reason of deterrence as for reason of potential gain. The same, in a utilitarian calculus of greater good. The same, organ for organ, limb for limb, eye for eye.  We talk of deterrence and pre-emption. We are not only justified, but obliged, morally required, to match evil with sanction, with evil for evil, by this social calculus. This kind of argumentation has a proper place in our recent collective anguish about the terror of torture undertaken in our names in foreign places and domestic ones. This is not a new argument. In fact, this line of inquiry might be banal, but we are trying to give shape to this more specific, final question.

To what extent are you and I responsible for the wrongs, the inevitable killing, of power-seekers who do not yet act in our names?

Imagine the deeds of power-seekers who would appropriate and seize your power, and act in your name. Imagine that you are at this moment accountable for their deeds.

Imagine what you might do to prevent them. At this moment. Imagine that you are accountable for what you, at this moment, DO NOT DO to obstruct them.

Are we absolved in the exact measure of what we scrupled –refused- to do to appropriate power ourselves?

We are guilty- guilty to the full measure of the deeds that are done in our names, but in a further measure, to be added to it: That which we did not do. That which we refused to do, that which we scrupled to do, that which we lacked the courage to do, to keep evildoers from taking power.

This is the net marginal difference between what we did not do to take power ourselves, and what we did not do to keep evildoers from taking it.

This may be the calculus of what distinguishes true democracy and representative government from something else. This may the precise measure of the obligatory burden of representative participation. Again, no-one is innocent.

What wouldn’t you do?

What would you do to keep another from doing harm?

Harm to our common welfare- mine, and yours? That of your children? My children? African children?

What would you do to keep another from the specific act, at this moment, of seizing power, of appropriating your public institutions, of appropriating YOUR VOICE? How does this differ from what you would do- or would not do- to appropriate power yourself?

Would you throw yourself in front of a car to keep from getting hurt?

What will you do? Can we interest you in a yard sign?