dy/dx=0

Primitivist philosophers like Derrick Jensen and John Zerzan present a critique of the origins of "The Problem of Civilization" along with proposals for what a sustainable end-state for our civilization might look like (low human population, low technology, no industrial agriculture, no fossil fuel use etc.), without worrying overmuch about how we get from here to there.

I largely accept their critique about the origins of our predicament, and like them I think we're going to be heading back in that direction once we get past the inflection point we are now entering. The inflection will be marked by a shift from expansion to contraction in most of the markers we use now to define "progress": industrial production, GDP and personal incomes, social complexity and the rule of law, energy consumption, the global food supply, and ultimately global population levels.

From what I can tell, we seem to be nearing a point where the course of human progress appears to hang still in the air, like an arrow shot straight up, before it reverses course and begins the inevitable gravity-driven return to the Earth. Like that arrow in flight, our civilization's trajectory is governed largely by forces beyond our control. We have aimed the arrow and loosed the bow. Now the less personal forces of wind and gravity - in the case of civilization those forces include limited energy supplies, soil and water depeletion, climate change and socioeconomic dynamics - are shaping our course.

Of course we are human, so we tend to reject the idea that our fate is completely beyond our control. Most of us cling to the faith that far-sighted national policies will be able to alter the course we have been on for the last 10,000 years.

Unfortunately, it's likely that the coming change in the curve of social progress from a positive slope to a negative slope isn't going to be managed by top-down policy changes. Rather than driving change, policy shifts are generally undertaken in response to changes that have already occurred. Counter-examples, like JFK's drive towards global peace in 1963 are rare.

Local policies will be more proactive in some places, and may help to ease the transition, but I expect that most attempts to institute effective proactive policies - especially at national levels - will be strongly resisted by both the power elite and the grass roots because they will be seen as defeatist. Returning to Kennedy's desires for world peace, the institutional resistance to that policy change was made abundantly clear to the world that November in Dallas.

Ultimately I think that the world population has to settle at a level below (possible much below) one billion for it to be sustainable over the long term. How long it will take to get there depends on how much we have already damaged the planet, and how much we are prepared to continue damaging it in our forlorn oursuit of the status quo. That tally of destruction is by no means complete yet, so we really don't know how bad the damage is, but the current signals are deeply discouraging. The more damage we have inflicted, the steeper the post-inflection decline will be and the lower our final population level. This is standard for species that are correcting from an overshoot condition.

In the end, the only arrow whose trajectory we can control is our own.


Best wishes for world and personal peace.

:P

x=0

because it doesn't indicate a maximum or a minimum, but a point at which the curvature changes. See, for instance, http://mathworld.wolfram.com/InflectionPoint.html

y=x^3, as the example points out, does indeed have dy/dx=0 (though that isn't necessary for an inflection point) at x=0, but it is neither a maximum nor a minimum. At all other points, y increases with x.

That would be technically correct, I suppose. Does it matter?

I suppose my point is that, if you're going to try to look technical, the technical details have to be right.

I'll confess up front that I'm not really a "technical person", at least not any more. For many decades I thought I was, thanks to having a research biochemist for a father, a physicist for a mother and growing up immersed in the sciences. During that time I learned a lot about the technical world, both from self-study and in formal university schooling (which included more mathematics than I ever thought I could forget). Fairly recently I came to the conclusion that technical knowledge, past a certain point which is not all that complex, is more a part of the problem than part of the solution. Technical knowledge generally just reinforces the whole "tool-monkey" paradigm.

When I made the shift down from head to heart, from analysis to synthesis, from reductionism to holism, I was left with a lot of ineradicable but now fairly useless technical knowledge. What I decided to do with the the leftover arcana in my memory banks was to treat them as metaphor. As a language that speaks to a certain part of the brain, and carries a particular emotive content, they enable a kind of communication that is quite unlike the standard squishy terminology of the humanities. Using that language imparts a different flavour to the communication, a flavour that can be very useful when I want to encourage the reader to adopt a sharper, more critical attitude toward the softer ideas I normally deal with.

Of course, as your objection points out, if someone is invested in the idea of the supremacy of science and is also knowledgeable in the field, they will assume I'm using the language literally rather than as metaphor. Imprecision such as you noticed may keep them from being able to see the essential idea. I'm not saying you failed to grasp the nub of my argument, just that in general the rejection of one aspect of a communication can block the whole channel.

So I have to ask myself, is this an important enough impediment to warrant a change of approach? Should I spend time in research to tighten up all my technical analogies so that they are literally correct as well as colloquially comprehensible? The answer I've come to is that this is not important enough for me to lose sleep over. For every reader who objects as you have, there are hundreds of others who understand my intentions perfectly.

My role here is not to win over every ardent critic, but to write what I believe to be the truth, to write from my heart, and to try and make my ideas accessible to those who may be interested and open to hearing them.

'Maximum' is understood by everyone; and 'peak', 'turning point' and so on. But 'dy/dx=0' as a title makes the piece less accessible. I took it to imply that some analysis was coming up; for people who didn't get as far as calculus, it's just gobbledygook. That limits it as a metaphor.

I agree that the title is a little indigestible...

The arrow of human history is that *nothing* ever gets simpler, and it's folly to believe that it will happen this time. I don't buy what it says below about an "ever-growing population," but I do see us achieving a balance at a sustainable level by way of greatly increased social and technological complexity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephemeralization

Ephemeralization, a term coined by R. Buckminster Fuller, is the ability of technological advancement to do "more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing". Fuller's vision was that ephemeralization will result in ever-increasing standards of living for an ever-growing population despite finite resources. The concept has been embraced by those who argue against Malthusian philosophy.

Heyligen, Alvin Toffler, and others have written about how ephemeralization, though it may increase our power to solve physical problems, can make non-physical problems much worse. Increasing system complexity and information overload make it difficult and stressful for the people who must control the ephemeralized systems.

In his classic book "The Collapse of Complex Societies" he introduces the idea that complex societies eventually collapse due to decreasing marginal return on complexity. The premise is that as societies get bigger and more complex, they face larger problems which they overcome by further increasing their complexity. As some point it takes more energy to increase and manage the complexity than you get back from solving the problems, and society becomes increasingly vulnerable to collapse. Essentially the complexity that was developed to solve problems becomes a problem in its own right.

That's diametrically opposed to Fuller's "Ephemeralization" or Kurzweil's "Singulatity", both of which seem to assume that there is little intrinsic cost to increased complexity.

And I just don't see it.

If our own society is collapsing now, it's not because it's too complex but because it's too simple. We're trying to operate with a Congressional system designed for a population of barely more than 1/100 of what it is at present and based on the assumption that any random politician is equipped to make decisions involving sophisticated social, economic, and technological issues.

In something of the same way, the earliest empires may have kept collapsing because their system was an expanded version of a petty kingdom, with a king and his close relatives doing all the governing, and it didn't adapt well to crisis or internal dissent. By the time of ancient Rome or China, they'd worked out more sophisticated bureaucratic structures and the global order got a lot more stable.

There may be something to the idea that empires cannot effectively grow beyond a certain size -- and that a periodic devolution to smaller and more manageable units is inevitable. The Eurozone certainly seems to be suffering the downside of trying to incorporate too many incompatible sub-units within a one-size-fits-all economy. But there again, the problem may be one of trying to impose an artificial simplicity on a grab-bag of nations at different levels of development -- and the real solution might be to let the natural complexity of the continent express itself.

or this




but I thought your article was interesting

When some financial mind thought it would be a good idea to take parts of this debt and this debt, good and bad and mix them up. Higher math is usually a good thing but they are a financial disaster.

Money itself is a derivative, in that it derives its value from an underlying product or service. But when that derived value is imputed to the money itself, thereby separating the thing of value from the abstraction of its value, we get the whole mess we're in today. Perhaps we should blame the Mesopotamians.

I'm much in favour of dropping back to barter or gift economies to get out of the mess that money has made.

this - "Now the less personal forces of wind and gravity - in the case of civilization those forces include limited energy supplies, soil and water depeletion, climate change and socioeconomic dynamics - are shaping our course."

None of those are "collectively" beyond our control. Are energy supplies really 'limited' if you include solar, wind and water power?

Then especially if you look at how a whole lot of energy gets used, for a couple of examples.

First, collect some rare and not-so-rare metals. Then assemble them into a complex machines. Then train people to operate those complex machines. Then fly those complex machines halfway around the planet and blow sh*t up with them.

Not only a frigging useless waste of energy, but actually counter-productive. But it burns a lot of this supposedly finite resource.

Second, gather a couple of groups of people and fly and drive them to a location. Then have a whole bunch of other people drive to this location and also assemble various equipment and tools and supplies. Then proceed to spend a few hours watching and filming a group of grown men attempt to strike a little white ball with sticks.

Massive amounts of energy being used in those sporting activities at all levels and in a huge variety of sports just for the purpose of keeping many of us entertained.

Now you would sort of think that if we really believed that we had these problems of limited resources and carbon pollution causing climate disasters, that we would first curtail these kinds of wasteful expenditures and find some other way to keep ourselves entertained.

But clearly that is not gonna happen until perhaps everything falls apart.

The loss of soil fertility certainly is, unless we stop industrial farming. Same for fresh water depletion. Climate change is going to keep on increasing for the next century at least, even if we stopp burning all fossil fuels tomorrow. And I can't believe I forgot to mention the death of the oceans.

By "energy" in this context I really mean "oil", and perhaps I should have made that explicit. Consider that the international oil market may have only 30 years to go before it's bone dry, whereupon the only oil that countries will have is what they produce within their own borders. Solar and wind generated electricity won't replace oil as a transportation fuel before then. It won't even take 30 years for the social and economic disruptions precipitated by progressively more constrained oil supplies make the world a deeply unhappy place.

We might be able to mitigate any one problem if it presented itself in isolation. The fact that we're facing at least a half a dozen doozies that all interact is what turns this from a weekend problem-solving exercise into the Herculean task of coping with a clusterfuck.

and climate change was/is within our control, but we have continued to choose to do nothing.

Spock: Well, it looks like this is it.

Bones: A while back you said there are always alternatives.

Spock: (arches eyebrow) It seems I was mistaken.

Bones: (muttering) Well, at least I lived long enough to hear that.

If the energy is available, we will find ways to use it. Hell, we sometimes want to force ourselves to use energy, with all the ideas of large scale federal job programs and such.

ecological destruction. Personal lifestyle changes under capitalism are close to irrelevant. I can fix my home with solar panels if I'm rich, or plant a garden if I have the time and I don't live in Texas, but the only way to stop banks from bulldozing houses, the US military from polluting, and industry from producing ridiculous waste during production is system change.