Insightful analysis from Andrew Bacevich on energy and consumption

I don't know how many people here are fans of Andrew Bacevich's work, or caught his interview on Bill Moyers' Journal in mid-August. Personally, I find him incredibly insightful and thought his interview with Moyers was excellent. I'd like to post a portion of that interview that, I believe, helps explain the predicament we're in -- and how our political system is not well-suited to deal with it.

I'd suggest reading the full interview transcript for a more complete understanding of Bacevich's views.

BILL MOYERS: You're the only author I have read, since I read Jimmy Carter, who gives so much time to the President's speech on July 15th, 1979. Why does that speech speak to you so strongly?

ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, this is the so-called Malaise Speech, even though he never used the word "malaise" in the text to the address. It's a very powerful speech, I think, because President Carter says in that speech, oil, our dependence on oil, poses a looming threat to the country. If we act now, we may be able to fix this problem. If we don't act now, we're headed down a path in which not only will we become increasingly dependent upon foreign oil, but we will have opted for a false model of freedom. A freedom of materialism, a freedom of self-indulgence, a freedom of collective recklessness. And what the President was saying at the time was, we need to think about what we mean by freedom. We need to choose a definition of freedom which is anchored in truth, and the way to manifest that choice, is by addressing our energy problem.

He had a profound understanding of the dilemma facing the country in the post Vietnam period. And of course, he was completely hooted, derided, disregarded.

BILL MOYERS: And he lost the election. You in fact say-

ANDREW BACEVICH: Exactly.

BILL MOYERS: -this speech killed any chance he had of winning reelection. Why? Because the American people didn't want to settle for less?

ANDREW BACEVICH: They absolutely did not. And indeed, the election of 1980 was the great expression of that, because in 1980, we have a candidate, perhaps the most skillful politician of our time, Ronald Reagan, who says that, "Doom-sayers, gloom-sayers, don't listen to them. The country's best days are ahead of us."

BILL MOYERS: Morning in America.

ANDREW BACEVICH: It's Morning in America. And you don't have to sacrifice, you can have more, all we need to do is get government out of the way, and drill more holes for oil, because the President led us to believe the supply of oil was infinite.

BILL MOYERS: You describe Ronald Reagan as the "modern prophet of profligacy. The politician who gave moral sanction to the empire of consumption."

ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, to understand the truth about President Reagan, is to understand why so much of what we imagined to be our politics is misleading and false. He was the guy who came in and said we need to shrink the size of government. Government didn't shrink during the Reagan era, it grew.

He came in and he said we need to reduce the level of federal spending. He didn't reduce it, it went through the roof, and the budget deficits for his time were the greatest they had been since World War Two.

BILL MOYERS: And do you remember that it was his successor, his Vice President, the first President Bush who said in 1992, the American way of life is not negotiable.

ANDREW BACEVICH: And all presidents, again, this is not a Republican thing, or a Democratic thing, all presidents, all administrations are committed to that proposition. Now, I would say, that probably, 90 percent of the American people today would concur. The American way of life is not up for negotiation.

What I would invite them to consider is that, if you want to preserve that which you value most in the American way of life, and of course you need to ask yourself, what is it you value most. That if you want to preserve that which you value most in the American way of life, then we need to change the American way of life. We need to modify that which may be peripheral, in order to preserve that which is at the center of what we value.

READ THE REST HERE

we are hard-nosed scientists and engineers.

;-)

Also, is there any room for historians in your boat as well as scientists and engineers? I guess I could still qualify for the "engineer" part, as my first degree was in civil engineering. Then again, one of the reasons I don't fully trust scientists and engineers is that I find the two fields tend toward an overwhelmingly positivist view of current affairs and predicaments, and are all too often likely to ignore or gloss over the "human" side of things. For me, it's the whole "qualitative" vs. "quantitative" argument -- and science and engineering go too much for the latter, IMHO.

country.

You know ZERO science and even less about engineering.

I was struck by this exchange:


It reinforces one of my primary beliefs: that politics, regardless of party or ideology, is part of the problem, and can never be part of the solution. While it may be easier to live under the rule of a more humane parcel of rogues, at its heart politics is one of the primary guardian institutions of modern industrial civilization. The role of all politics is to ensure that power is managed, and the management of power is always done for the benefit of the holders of power. It doesn't matter whether the power managers are Democrats, Republicans, Tories, Grits, Social Democrats, Communists or a military junta, they fulfill the same role in service of the same beneficiaries.

In order to fulfill that role they unite with the other guardian institutions -- the economic, industrial, religious, educational and communications organizations. Together they create, maintain and protect a noetic milieu in which any values except the ones they support are seen as absurd, incomprehensible, dangerous or even insane. The primary value these guardians support is the paradigm of material growth, and the most dangerous of radical ideas are proposals to limit, halt or reverse that growth.

Bacevich almost gets it, but I think he's still too embedded in the power matrix to take the final freeing step.

I think that outside of a select few -- for example, John David Greer, Sharon Astyk and David Holmgren -- MOST of us aren't ready to take that final freeing step.

Bacevich, to his credit, gets most of it WHILE still associated with that "power matrix". I think that the fact that he comes from a conservative POV has to be taken into consideration as well -- he's not going to reach the exact same end conclusions as those from a more left-of-center POV, but there's certainly enough common ground between us to not get too caught up in the nuanced differences.

Never mind, "morning in America" always makes me think of that.