Odyssey: Hopes and Dreams

(Essay # 10)

Societies around the globe face multiple crises. In this context, is marshalling hope and dreaming up beautiful futures—imagining a world that could be—a useful response, or is it escapism? Our hopes for a better world can be powerful springboards to action, but when does hope become hopium? And if we, you and I, do depend on our hopes and dreams to keep us going, what happens if our aspirations become longshots or even hopeless? This essay looks at these questions.

Two Paths of Change

For the longest time I thought major policy change would be driven by concrete responses to the awful things happening to human and natural communities around the world. 

Advocates for change would see new policies, for example, to curb corporate abuses and grab their wrists as they reached for ever more control over our politics. We would see strong action to address the vast social and economic inequalities. We would see measures to build on the hard-hitting clean air and water acts to eliminate the climate-ruining gases spewing from our runaway energy system. 

The push for all these and other policy efforts would include what we saw as “non-reformist reforms.”  They would look like reforms, but they would contain the seeds of deeper, transformational change—like ditching GDP in favor of new measures of societal well-being.

The victims of the many crises and their allies would find their voices, as would activists for the environment. Meanwhile, I and others would focus on the needed policy analysis, working to develop both reformist policies as well as the far-reaching prescriptions for the deeper changes that would address underlying causes. I for one have written several books full of policy prescriptions aimed at transformational change.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the revolution.

The efforts at policy-driven change remain ongoing and essential, and I am still involved in them.  But you will have noticed that their progress has been terribly slow. Meanwhile, an ominous deepening of what is now called the polycrisis has occurred, most visibly in the climate crisis and in threats to democracy here and abroad. That has led many people to flee the fetters of the practical world, at least in their dreams, and find hope in imagining a world that could be. 

Some of this is escapism, but often enough, these fetching worlds are rigorously grounded in biological and historical understandings. For example, one theme is that economic systems must learn from nature’s systems. Ecological economics, industrial ecology, the regenerative economy, and the circular economy all give some definition to this new thinking. Others are dreaming of flourishing worlds of democratic eco-socialism, while still others are looking to Asian religions and indigenous teachings for modern guidance. 

One sees in all these envisionings a dramatic change in dominant cultural values: a new consciousness that transcends the old barriers that separate us from each other and humans from nature. The current order increasingly lacks legitimacy, and alternative worldviews that can gain our allegiance are being advocated. As a leading thinker in this field, Jeremy Lent, says, “Once we shift our worldview, another world becomes possible.”

Yes, the new, dreamed of worlds will not compete yet in today’s practical politics. But they should not be dismissed as woolly, wild-eyed, or impractical. They are the first blueprints of the future, the playing fields of radical hope, the dreams that stuff is made of. 

Indeed, one can see a new consciousness at work today across the country. It is bringing concrete change in countless local communities where something new and different is being built. See, for example, the websites for the New Economy Coalition and the Wellbeing Economy 

Alliance and check out their member organizations. 

More and more people are searching for something beautiful, even if it is untethered from today’s “political realities.” If current trends continue and blossom, could we enter a world of consciousness-driven change—not piecemeal, practical, and incremental, but fresh, bold, and sweeping? What if enough people joined in John Lennon’s “you better free your mind instead” and the major force bringing a desirable future into the present is a sea change in the public mind? The phrase “consciousness change” would have a whole new meaning.

“Dream on,” the skeptic says.  “Yes, we will,” they reply.

Decades of discourse

scientists, economists, lawyers,

and here we are. Stuck.

That discourse cannot do

what must be done:

Reach to the human heart.

The core problems are

greed, arrogance, and apathy,

our dominant values astray.

What we need now is  

not more analysis but

a spiritual awakening

to a new consciousness.

So, bring on the preachers and prophets!

The poets and philosophers!

Bring on the story tellers, musicians, artists!

The teachers of ancient wisdoms!

Call them to strike the chords

of our shared humanity,

of our close kin to wild things. 

 

Of Hopes and Dreams and Beyond

Victor Hugo wrote that “There is nothing like a dream to create the future.” If we can first envision a future that works for people and planet, we can begin to make it happen. In one of his excellent novels Richard Flannagan asks, “What reality was ever created by realists? … What we cannot dream we can never do.”

Such dreams are manifestations of hope; the two are inseparable. The Rev. Jesse Jackson, a fellow South Carolinian of my generation, spoke about the importance of hope in 1988 at the Democratic National Convention: “Wherever you are tonight, you can make it. Hold your head high; stick your chest out. You can make it. It gets dark sometimes, but the morning comes. … Keep hope alive. Keep hope alive!” Jackson knows that hope is like vision—without it the people perish.

But hope can be treacherous. We should cling to hope, but only hope that is linked to commitment and action, not mere escapism, not hopium.

It takes a lot of hopium

to get me through the day.

There is always more hopium,

and I will take it any way.

 

I can grow my own hopium.

My mind’s a fertile field.

The less I know, the more I grow.

You cannot beat that deal.

 

I got a bumper crop last year 

when I turned off the news.

Being hopeful was easy when

I took a long news snooze.

 

There are far worse addictions;

hopium just affects the mind.

Yet in terms of climate worries,

it leaves them far behind.

 

Dreamy hope, comforting hope,

whenever needed it’s there.

There’s always more hopium

when I’m in my easy chair.

 

Hope without costs,

hope without consequence,

this hope’s a dope’s dope

in a cauldron of innocence.

 
Rebecca Solnit saw something else very important about hope. "The grounds for hope are in the shadows,” she writes, “in the people who are inventing the world while no one looks, who themselves don't know yet whether they will have any effect." Keep hope alive, Solnit says, but link it to action, to inventing a better world.  And, importantly, keep hope alive even in the face of total uncertainty that the work it inspires will be fruitful.
 
But what if one knows for a practical certainty that that work will not be successful and save the day? Here one enters the zone of despair. A lot of people today are despairing.
 
As I navigate among the various faces I have in this world—the Happy Everyday Me, the Policy Wonk Me, the New Radical Me—I sometimes fall into the zone of despair, and there I find the Despairing Me. I try not to go there, but I stumble.
 
In this windowless cellar of my mind, I have devastating thoughts, not phantasmagoric apparitions easily dismissed, but thoughts resulting from a calculus carefully tuned to empirical observation of the world spanning many years. 

There, I encounter the thought that human enterprise on the planet—ambitious, arrogant, heedless, at times inspiring—has inadvertently created an insatiable contraption that is now devouring the planet at a phenomenal rate that human societies can no longer control. 

If this contraption were bringing genuine human satisfaction and well-being while ruining the planet, well, that would be something. We would at least be going down happy. But for an apt description of our current human condition, I cannot but think instead of the lyric Tom Lehrer made famous, “The whole world is festering with unhappy souls.” 

Generally, people are unhappy for good reason. Some are unhappy because they are spoiled or misapprehending their circumstances, but for most there are genuine causes of human misery. Hard data support deprivations born in economic disparities, social inequities, environmental decay, climate change, political oppression, invidious discriminations, the failure of education and health systems, the loss of community solidarity and human companionship, and, perhaps most important, the widespread sense of powerlessness and hopelessness in the face of these challenges.

In this bottom chamber of despair, honesty cannot assign a decent probability or even a fighting chance of finding a solution. 

Faced with what seems a terrifying situation, human creativity can reach in several directions. First, there is Acceptance. One can accept this fate, hopelessness, with bitter nihilism or with hedonistic abandon or with a calm stoicism. I am told that Marcus Aurelius is all the rage today. Many will opt, as Thoreau noted, to live lives of quiet desperation and make the best of a bad situation. A different tack, waiting for the world beyond, is taken by some religious followers who put their faith in the afterlife, not this one.

Second, there is Denial. It too can take many directions. One can stick to living in the truthiness world free of fact and science and full of fake reality, like believing climate change a hoax. Or one might relax and assume these problems will be easily solved—somehow, someday, soon enough, by someone. This is the hopium solution, life from the easy chair. 

Then, there is the only response I and many others can live with: Resistance. In the end, one must act even in the face of hopelessness, warriors defending a sacred place, simply because it is the right thing to do, rebelling beyond hope because the human spirit says with insistence that what is unacceptable—all the suffering, all the loss, all the tears—must not be accepted. 

Beyond all our fears, it is.

Beyond grieving and crying, it is.

Beyond even hope, it is.

What then is left beyond?

A collapse of sentiment?

What do they feel:

the Black man in solitary,

the young girl buried

in the rubble of Gaza,

the Amazon dwellers

watching the forest die?

What do we feel, you and I?

Can the mere knowledge

of the world’s desperation

while still in a sheltered space

take us to a place beyond?

I can only speak for myself.

I hunger to strike a blow

so shattering that enthrallment

breaks into a million shards

and falls to the feet of the world.

Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus is an essay for our time. It is also my favorite. Camus says that Sisyphus was condemned by the gods to a dreadful and hopeless task, forever pushing a rock up to the top of the mountain only to see it roll back of its own weight. Sisyphus’ crime was “his hatred of death and his passion for life.”  Camus continues, describing Sisyphus’ hopelessness:
 
“If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.
 
“I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He concludes that all is well. This universe, henceforth without a master, seems to him neither sterile nor futile. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
 
There it is: the struggle toward the heights. I think we can be sustained and carried forward by the struggle, by being engaged in the fight, each as our capabilities and opportunities permit. 
 

The snow lies lightly on the lilacs

round by the kitchen door.

The juncos peck in stone cracks,

endless in their search for more.

 

I think that is my way too,

to keep the search going on.

What else really could I do

but find new ways to scorn.

 

As Camus said of Sisyphus 

who toiled with his stone,

there is no fate for us

that can’t be beat by scorn.

 

And so I scorn what passes here today

for equality and justice before the law,

for helping immigrants to find a way,

for promises the troops will withdraw.

  

Oh, purple mountain majesty!

Oh, fruited plains of amber grain!

The machine crushes endlessly

everything for investment’s gain.

 

And so we search for ways to fight.

We see the beauty of the snow,

but we know to make it right

may require our blood to flow.

 

We’ve seen the heads bandaged round,

the men and women teared by gas.

Each has earned a special crown.

They know the system will not last.

 

Scorn, rage, and many actions.

protests coming round the world.

Today we see but a fraction

of banners yet to be unfurled!

 

***
 
I thank Orion magazine for publishing pieces I have drawn upon in this essay. The poems are from books I have published over the last half-dozen years.

For more on the author, see www.gusspeth.org.
 
The Essays from the Edge are being posted at https://www.democracycollaborative.org/blogs.

Culture Shapes Society Shapes Politics

(Essay # 9)

In this season the mind turns inevitably to politics. Most of us have ideas about the ways in which our political system needs fixing. Many have written about the major pro-democracy reforms that are needed, including fundamental ones like securing the right to vote, freeing democracy from the clutches of big money, and having the national popular vote elect the president.  We pray that our politics, flaws and all, will work well enough come November.
 
But lately in this season I have been trying to go deeper than my usual dig. In the search to understand “what’s really going on here,” the following thoughts have occurred to me. 
 
We think of our political system being broken, which it is, but what if that is part of a bigger problem?
 
It has often been pointed out, going back to de Tocqueville, that Americans are obsessed with politics. Well, that is certainly true today, and there is very good reason for Americans to be obsessed. What happens this year in our politics is of the greatest importance for both people and the planet. I recently collaborated on a public statement saying that both our democracy and our climate are on the ballot in the 2024 elections. https://saving-democracy.net
 
What is less appreciated is that politics in America have become more important than they should ever be.
 
Our democracy is now saddled with innumerable issues that will affect the future of social and planetary well-being. So the question arises: why is our democracy freighted with so many weighty matters? I believe it is due in important part to fundamental flaws in our society. Those flaws leave too many large issues unresolved, and these unresolved matters, demanding answers and having nowhere else to go, surface endlessly in our politics and overwhelm it. 
 
Let me explain. Here is a thought experiment, the first of two in this essay. Please imagine a society: 
 
(1) that has lost much of its fundamental coherence and is no longer bound together well by shared values, aspirations, and understandings of the world and history;  
 
(2) that is cleaved, riven, by fundamental differences, and these cleavages are all increasingly splitting society in the same way, so that friendships, religion, housing, schooling, views about climate and gender and race and immigrants, and much else become polarized in the same political and partisan alignment; and 
 
(3) where issues on which society is deeply split are the main subjects in national politics and elections, so that elections and political outcomes are transcendently important, engaging peoples' whole sense of meaning and identity. 
 
Perhaps you don’t have to imagine such a society. You may have just read about one like this in the news. Those three points come close to describing our country today.
 
To me, our society has handed over too much to politics. Following from the failure of social norms and cultural values to deliver answers, too much has become political, the political causes all tend to split right and left, and among those causes are many issues of fundamental importance to their constituencies. 
 
In this society, can democracy govern well? I think not. There is lots of evidence to that effect. And in December 2024, the divisions that plagued us in October will likely still be here, mostly unresolved in November. Of course, the election is enormously important; there are more reasons to elect Harris and Democrats than I can count. Just consider this: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/09/climate/trump-oil-gas-mar-a-lago.html?smid=em-share. But polarization will persist after the election.
 
If this analysis is more or less right, what does it imply? I think it points to certain actions that should be center stage in a Harris administration. Our country needs to pursue, with determination, pro-democracy political reforms (both well-known ones as well as what David Orr calls Democracy 4.0) in close parallel with huge and synergistic efforts aimed at healing a fractured society and building a new culture of community-centered well-being and solidarity. 
 
Here is what I mean:
 
Senator Klobuchar and her colleagues have introduced an impressive bill that would shore up voting rights, protect election integrity, and otherwise greatly strengthen our democracy. The bill’s fate may well depend on the 2024 elections. Kamala has promised to sign the bill when passed.
https://www.klobuchar.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2023/7/klobuchar-colleagues-introduce-legislation-to-protect-the-freedom-to-vote-and-strengthen-our-democracy.

In books and articles, my friend David Orr has written brilliantly about today’s imperative of deeper democratic change, what he calls Democracy 4.0, change that would, among other things, bring the rights of nature and those of future generations into the democratic process.
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/democracy-4-0. 

In my Essay from the Edge No. 5 New Consciousness, I did my best to describe the path to a new American society. For example, among the values I discuss in this essay are environmental ones. If our society’s dominant cultural values had included a truly strong environmental ethic, we might have been arguing these past decades about the best way to curb greenhouse gas emissions, but we would not have been divided on whether to do it and do it quickly. These thoughts on societal change are just a contribution to a much bigger project in which we all have a role. https://www.democracycollaborative.org/blogs/5c9duzikm8reorxjyyjcmayv2oggb2-dc6ft.
 
There is another answer, of course—the authoritarian one. It would encourage democracy’s decline and impose its own “solutions” to society’s divisive issues. Trump’s affection for the world’s dictators and strongmen as well as his repeated rejection of democratic norms are another reason to defeat him decisively.
 
To conclude, here is a second thought experiment. In January of 1944, as he was engaged in the planning for D-Day, FDR knew even then of the importance of speaking to the post-war world. And so in his memorable State of the Union address, he laid out his Second Bill of Rights. He saw these rights as “a new basis of security and prosperity … established for all regardless of station, race, or creed.” Here is what he sought for us as rights, not mere goals:
 
“The right to a useful and remunerative job …;
The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation; …
The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
The right of every family to a decent home;
The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
The right to a good education.”

A few years ago, Lapham’s Quarterly noted that this Second Bill of Rights “was truly radical both then and now—almost as radical as the original Bill of Rights ratified in 1789. And the radical promise of the Second Bill of Rights goes unfulfilled to this day.” https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/second-bill-rights. 
 
I am near tears as I read FDR’s address. Consider how America would look today if this second Bill of Rights had been adopted 80 years ago and built upon as this great President envisioned. The successful struggle to make these rights everyday things would have transformed American society, eventually making these rights integral to American culture. As this new culture shaped new generations, we would become a people and a country fundamentally different from today. Our burden of democratic performance would be greatly lightened and our politics much closer to manageable scale. We must imagine the rights to health care and decent housing as secure as the rights to free speech and peaceable assembly.
 
“Who is there big enough to love the whole planet?” E.B. White wrote. “We must find such people for the next society.”
 
***
 
With special thanks to Tom Kinder, David Orr, and Alan Miller. 

For more on the author, see www.gusspeth.org.
 
The Essays from the Edge are being posted at https://www.democracycollaborative.org/blogs.

 

Silver Linings Playbook–Climate Edition

(Essay #8)

To my knowledge, I have never been accused of erring on the optimistic side of the climate issue, and too often I have been right. Still, I have thought a lot about how to make some lemonade out of this bitter lemon. To pursue silver linings is not to minimize the climate catastrophe now hard upon us. It is only to try to make the best of a bad situation.
 
Here are six silver linings—areas to which we can put our energies. We need to frame a positive politics for the climate issue, and these silver linings can help.
 
First, the most widely appreciated of these silver linings are the many ancillary benefits from the ongoing shift to widespread renewable energy, benefits beyond reducing greenhouse gas emissions like carbon dioxide and methane. The climate requirement will get us out of fossil fuels more quickly and thoroughly than the many longstanding fossil fuel problems ever could. 
 
The benefits will be enormous. The Lancet recently stressed that air and other pollution from fossil fuels contribute to huge health impacts, including asthma and other respiratory diseases, heart disease, cancers, poor birth outcomes, cognitive effects, and premature deaths—these fossil fuel deaths now estimated to be about 350,000 a year in the US. Beyond health benefits, retiring fossil fuels would bring dramatic reductions in surface mining, oil and other spills, pipelines, fracking, and more.
 
Similarly, while climate change promises to be devastating for the Earth’s biota, it is also possible that the imperative of keeping greenhouse gases in the world’s soils and forests will drive major new efforts to conserve natural habitats and healthy agricultural lands. We need to keep the world as green as possible. Climate change’s destruction of much biological diversity is now inevitable. Countervailing conservation is something we have to make happen.
 
Second, the climate disaster could draw communities together, much as natural disasters are documented as doing today. People will be required to fend more for themselves, and they could discover that in so doing they will succeed more often if they cooperate, if they support each other, if they accept and get beyond social and political divisions. The stronger the community bonds, the more intense the interactions across sectors and differences, the higher the spirit, the better off they will be as much of the world seems falling apart. 
 
There is much good that can come from community revitalization. Local, state, and regional governance could grow stronger, and their successes in response to the unprecedented climate challenge can carry over into other areas of public concern. Also, community climate efforts will be paired with individual efforts of homeowners to go solar and adopt climate friendly lifestyles, and in the process that will activate a larger constituency for other needed changes. Here’s another pattern: the fights to “own your own electrical utility” are not new, but the climate challenge is giving them new momentum.  
 
Implicit in these changes at the community level are corresponding changes in individual values. Crises, in this case the climate crisis, can compel a rethinking of what we value most highly and who we are and want to become. The results of this value change can be helpful across a broad front.
 
Third, the technologies driven to commercial scale by the imperative of addressing climate change will have other major benefits beyond climate. One can think of all the uses to which new battery technology can be put. And more: improvements in air conditioning and cooling technologies, electricity grid performance, energy efficient construction, biophilic design, green cities, and much more can better our lives as well as reduce climate threats.
 
Fourth, after decades of denigrating government and worshiping the market, the climate issue is leading to an appreciation of the need for effective, capable, and engaged government and, what’s more, government that is truly democratic—of, by, and for the actual people. The creeping corporatocracy and plutocracy that got us into this mess is not going to get us out of it, at least not until the economic elite are through making money out of both causing the problem and providing their profitable answers. Reagan said “government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” But of course, he had it backwards. With good government, we can solve a lot of America’s many problems. 
 
Fifth, the climate crisis is driving a lot of people to distraction, but it is also driving a lot of people to progressive activism. This growth is happening especially among the young and the old (everyone else is working too hard) and, to be sure, the victims, the moms, and the preachers. Here, we recall the leadership Bill McKibben is giving us, including most recently with Third Act for us elderly folks and before that with 350.org, and the powerful mobilization of young people by the Sunrise Movement and others. With climate threats helping to mobilize citizens, we can work to build a powerful progressive coalition addressing a large agenda of national needs.
 
Sixth, and importantly, societies here and abroad will eventually be forced to face the reality that the climate crisis is the result of the failure of economic and political systems. The climate demonstration banner says it all: “System Change Not Climate Change!” An economy so hellbent on profit and growth that it is destroying the planet’s habitability.  A politics so captured by economic interests that it can barely stir itself to save the planet.  Consumers so enthralled by the diversions and infatuations of modern life that they hardly care what is going on around them. That has been the pattern for a half century. But here is the good news: it is beginning to change, and to deal successfully with the climate threat it will have to change dramatically. The oncoming climate calamity is the most powerful argument for transformation of America’s political economy, and with that system change would come benefits for a wide range of today’s challenges.
 
Here is another way of looking at the need for deep change. Adaptation to climate realities will receive huge attention in the future. If tactical adaptation is the practical preparation for climate change’s impacts, then what I would call “systemic adaptation” is the design and adoption of the societal changes needed to correct the fundamental systemic flaws that have brought the climate crisis to our doorstep. Systemic adaptation looks beyond tactical measures like preparing for floods and extreme heat, and it asks what type of societies will fare best for people and the planet in the future. See https://e360.yale.edu/features/systemic-adaptation.
 
All of this raises an interesting question: what about international action? Might the climate crisis establish new paths for international cooperation and inclusion that might carry over more widely? We must hope that it will.
 
The silver linings of the climate storm clouds will not simply materialize down here on land. They must be first appreciated and then pursued as part of the climate struggle. This is a playbook after all. There is much to be done if we want to seize the opportunities just reviewed. Here are a few of the things we need to do, together.
 
We will need to avoid the pitfalls that are all around us in this area. Communities could disintegrate rather than cohere. New technologies, like those for geoengineering, could produce disasters. Climate change could further authoritarian tendencies as societies grasp for security and embrace fake solutions. Elites can be counted on to try to save themselves. Climate change could get too severe for adaptation, even systemic adaptation, to succeed and for the silver linings to be realized. 
 
Paul Raskin and his colleagues at the Tellus Institute have described positive scenarios, but they have also developed a "Fortress World" scenario—a place of gated communities, armed private security and even armies, safe and unsafe zones, all for the privileged elites. As government responses to climate stresses are puny and fail, some expensive private sector solutions are available to the rich while most people are shut out. There are not many silver linings in Fortress World.
 
Beyond avoiding pitfalls, we need to join in supporting the efforts, locally and nationally, to cut by 50 percent US greenhouse gas emissions and to protect 30 percent of America’s land, both by 2030—two ambitious goals already set by the Biden Administration. That means quickly putting a stiff fee on carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions and halting new fossil fuel investments and leases. 
 
We need to prepare our communities for the full destructive possibilities of climate change while working to bridge social and political divides, build local resilience, and strengthen governmental capacities. 
 
We are in an era of rapid technological change, some of it good and some not so. We need to support an effort to revitalize “technology assessment and choice,” an area where the federal government was once strong. We even had an independent Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, which was eliminated allegedly for budgetary reasons. 

Speaking of budgets, the crazy, broken federal budgeting process needs to be revamped so that careful attention can be given to building government capabilities and carrying out sustained, long-term programs.

 
Environmental and climate advocates need to join with the advocates promoting pro-democracy reforms, including campaign finance reform and public financing of elections. Pro-democracy reform is an environmental issue just as surely as putting a price on carbon or acting to save species. More broadly, advocacy groups need to come out of their issue-specific silos and join together to build a powerful new movement of movements. See the discussion at https://orionmagazine.org/article/6-progressive-books-climate-politics.

Regarding system change, the first steps toward a new system of political economy that gives priority to people, place, and planet occur at the personal level with the rise of a new consciousness. For some, a new consciousness can arrive as a spiritual awakening—a transform­ation of the human heart. For others it is a more intellectual process of learning to see the world anew.  From a society-wide perspective, it involves major cultural change and a reorientation of what society values and prizes most highly. 

If properly guided, nothing can drive this transformation in cultural values quite like the unfolding climate disaster. It can and will shatter settled assumptions and habitual thinking and prompt a search for the societal flaws that have brought the climate crisis to our doorstep. From this base of people alerted to the need for deep change in our economic and political systems, a movement for transformational change can be built. 

Readers who have stuck with me through previous Essays from the Edge will know that those pieces are a source of information and ideas for moving these proposals forward. The Essays from the Edge can be found online at democracycollaborative.org/essaysfromtheedge.

For more on the author, see www.gusspeth.org.

The Essays from the Edge are being posted at https://www.democracycollaborative.org/blogs.

I Hate Advertising

(Essay #7)

After six completed essays, I want to report on three essay efforts that I started but, for various reasons, decided not to pursue to completion. I want to share these stories with you because I believe they each contain valuable nuggets.
 
Advertising
 
The first one is about advertising. Here is how the essay began:
 
I hate advertising, and this is my diatribe on the subject. 
 
It is not just that advertising interferes with my TV viewing and other pleasures. If it were only that, I would be in a quandary since the ads sponsor many of the shows and games I watch. No, I hate it because of the deep damage it does to American society and its people. Advertising is one of the world’s most pernicious businesses.
 
In protest, I fast forward through ads whenever possible and mute others. And I have installed ad blockers. But that is like holding a little umbrella in one of today’s climate-fueled rain rivers.
 
Here is the good news: there are answers short of returning to the caves.
 
I thought I was off to a nice start. I had addressed advertising in my books, and I knew a few things, like that advertising to children was once tightly restricted in the United States. Then, in 1983 at the urging of the Reagan Administration the FCC deregulated it, and within a year the ten top toys all had ties to TV programs. By 2011 marketing to children had swelled to a $17 billion a year juggernaut. Children and adolescents now view 40,000 ads per year on TV alone. My plan was to develop the idea that advertising has been both key to our runaway consumerism and a huge barrier to needed transformations in our social values.
 
But I needed updating, so I started doing a little research—and my confidence fell apart. A decade or so ago, digital advertising in the US was a small part of the advertising industry. Now, it’s the mainstay, consuming almost 80 percent of rapidly swelling advertising expenditures, with mobile devices taking a major and growing share of that. Meanwhile, there are strange things going on. Tens of billions are being spent on influencer marketing, of all things. What’s driving this is not hard to figure. Screen time for US adults and teenagers is 6 to 8 hours a day. Digital platforms carrying ads typically get paid by how many clicks the ads get, so the platforms provide content that keeps eyes on the screen, no matter how socially destructive. Algorithms! 
 
I realized that ancient I, who spends zero time on social media and almost none on a phone of any sort, had no insight into this new world or what to do about it. What good would it do to write about highway billboards or other traditional ads? I also discovered that the First Amendment is now being used in new ways to protect “commercial speech” from regulation, adding a whole new and complexifying area for this old law professor. 
 
So, as much as I would dearly love to see advertising dramatically curtailed and reshaped by regulations, especially ads aimed at children and the vulnerable, I knew I was not the right person nor an essay the right format. As an alternative, do watch or rewatch the gripping, compelling Netflix doc, The Social Dilemma, available on the official Netflix site.

Climate
Another essay effort began with the thought that, despite the media attention the climate issue is finally getting, most of today’s climate news and discussion is focused on the immediate effects of climate change and neglects the horrendous downstream consequences.
 
I hope it is clear why I would want to present such distressing information. Understanding the full dimensions of the climate threat can drive home the need to head off the worst. That much we can still do. It can spur crisis readiness for what is unavoidably coming and, importantly, encourage people to ask what's wrong with a society and a world that has brought the climate tragedy to our doorsteps.
 
Here is what I had prepared:
 
A new and frightening world is unfolding around us. It is difficult to face, but please do. The scenarios I describe here are likely, some inevitable and some more speculative than others. The question for us now is whether societies will act with swift determination to minimize their prevalence and severity. 
 
Already underway, the first order effects of climate change are droughts, extreme heat, wildfires, severe storms, floods, unwelcome new weather patterns, melting of glaciers and landed ice, sea-level rise, and more.  
 
You know this world. It's the world we see emerging today.
 
These effects will lead in turn to second-order consequences, what economists call knock-on effects. Entirely predictable are widespread biological losses and ecosystem degradation, the spread of diseases into new areas, water and food shortages, persistent crop failures and famines, large-scale economic disruptions, uninhabitable zones along coasts and elsewhere, scorched cities, and major loss of human life.
 
Simultaneously with these changes, we will likely see still more consequences such as climate refugees and mass migrations, resource and other disputes within and between countries, and costly efforts at adaptation, much of it futile, as well as risky geo-engineering.
 
These impacts will greatly stress governments around the world. They will struggle to cope. We could see police forces and militaries called upon for social stability and invoked as solutions. There are already a number of countries tallied as “failed or failing states,” and climate change will drive these numbers up. At the international level, the multiple inadequacies of global governance, never strong except in economic spheres, will be magnified by the international tensions and domestic preoccupations caused by climate change. 
 
Equally telling will be the psychological burdens. The loss of homes, communities, and livelihoods; the many “excess deaths;” the destruction of much-loved natural and cultural resources including species, forests, and coastlines; the pall of grief, dread, and powerlessness—these will weigh heavily, especially on the young.  
 
There's more, possibly worse, for example the tendency of frightened, overwhelmed people to reach for authoritarian, strong-man solutions, but I’ve said enough.
 
Why did I move on from this essay?  I first paused because the draft was too bleak standing alone. As someone once said, things are much too bad for pessimism. An essay with this disturbing material would have to offer ways forward to contain the scope of climate disaster. And just then an invitation arrived from Yale University Press to reflect on my 2004 book, Red Sky at Morning, and that effort evolved into the vehicle to say better what I wanted to say about the climate situation. See the resulting Essay from the Edge No. 4. The above material didn’t make it into that essay, but it is important, so I present it here. 
 
Here is a current assessment of the climate situation and what must be done from top experts, Bob Watson and colleagues.  https://theconversation.com/the-overshoot-myth-you-cant-keep-burning-fossil-fuels-and-expect-scientists-of-the-future-to-get-us-back-to-1-5-c-230814. From the UN on through to the local level, I don’t think we are prepared for the climate impacts and calamitous changes that are coming, and there seems to be no concerted effort to get prepared at any level.
 
Federalism
A third essay I began and then halted was to focus on the possibility of shifting more of our progressive efforts away from the stalemate in Washington DC and towards other levels of government. 
Here is a draft I started toward that end:

The United States is faced with the unsettling combination of unprecedented challenges requiring strong, effective governance and a politics so broken that Washington rising to multiple challenges seems remote.
 
An apt metaphor for America’s national politics is trench warfare. Both Democrats and Republicans are dug in, with hardened, almost unmovable attitudes and positions.  Red and Blue forces face each other in stark opposition and mutual rejection. Massive efforts are expended for small gains that can be rolled back when power shifts.
 
This situation raises an important question: Is it time for progressives to adopt another, perhaps primary approach that involves shifting out of Washington? This alternative strategy might (1) identify what is most needed from Washington and devise and pursue strategies to secure these outcomes and prevent negative ones, (2) concentrate far more progressive energies on other levels of governance—international, state, regional, and local, and (3) seek a new level of non-governmental governance, for example involving civil society and enlightened elements of the private sector. The core idea is to locate public policy at the most effective level of governance, depending on the issue. The old saying that the nation-state is too small for the big things and too big for the small things doesn’t quite get it right, but you get the idea.
 
Already, many encouraging initiatives are underway across the country at the local and state levels. We recall the go-it-alone initiatives in California and elsewhere in response to the Trump administration. And perhaps there are things to be learned from other federal countries, like Canada.
 
Should efforts be pursued to bring together a new strategy for progressives of many stripes to get behind?  Might progressives see enough positive in decentralization and a New Federalism to support such an approach?  Might decentralization mean abandoning large numbers of people to reactionary state governments or diminishing our centuries long struggle for a more perfect union? There is sadness in seeing the national experiment come to the distressing situation in which we now find ourselves. Still, might it be that thinking, planning, and acting in a new way is now the best path for making real progress? 
 
I halted on this one for two related reasons you may have guessed. First, I decided that a full essay would make more sense if—damn the thought—Trump were unfortunately to win the presidential election this year. That said to me: shelve the idea for now. And second, I am totally excited and energized by the Harris-Walz ticket, and I want to join with others now in focusing on building a new and positive era in our national politics! Still, it’s worth keeping this range of issues in mind as we proceed. For the period ahead, we will need vital governance at all levels, from local to global.
 
***

Signing off for a while.  Thank you for reading. I have enjoyed preparing these essays, and I hope you found them helpful. 
 
It’s time now to go get out the vote. There are several great programs for writing postcards. Third Act has one. It is estimated that there are about 13 million environmentally inclined Americans who don’t vote regularly in federal elections. Check out the Environmental Voter Project for how you can help on that.

For more on the author, see www.gusspeth.org.

The Essays from the Edge are being posted at https://www.democracycollaborative.org/blogs.

New System Possibility

Good reason to despair, yet grief was purged 
by tracing how creation reigned supreme. 
The pupa cracked, the butterfly emerged: 
America, still emerging from its dream.    Clive James

(Essay #6)

My previous essays have tried to describe some of the major challenges our country faces. We have, as Clive James notes, “good reason to despair.” But we know that is not an option.
 
Instead, many of us think the situation we face calls for transformative change. By that we mean major change in our existing political and economic systems. The goal is to imagine and then seek a new system of political economy that ensures the priority of people, place, and planet and leads to flourishing human and natural communities. 
 
But how would this new system look and work? Often there is a lack of clarity about the actual shape of a transformed society. There’s comfort in staying with a generous dose of generality, and I, on occasion, have stayed there. But the first step is surely to have a good sense of the directions to pursue. So in this essay I will describe rather concretely what I mean by transformative change to a new system of political economy.
 
Different folks have different ideas about what transformative change would look like. There is transformation lite and transformation deep. At the lite end of the spectrum are welcomed changes that look a lot like traditional reforms but can contain the seeds of fundamental shifts. The ideas I will present here tend towards the deep change end of the spectrum. They are not as radical as some, but a portion of readers may think, indeed, he has gone off the deep end. 
 
As I present this new system, I keep in mind this bit of wisdom from author Richard Flanagan: “What we cannot dream we can never do.” We do need dreams! But we have more than dreams now. We know a great deal about how to promote the changes I will describe. Pioneering initiatives are being pursued here and abroad. Moreover, there are mounting pressures moving us in these directions, including climate change. 
 
Transitions
 
I believe system change in America can best be approached through a series of interacting, mutually reinforcing transitions. Such transformations—some aborning, some farther off, and all difficult but none impossible—would alter the current system’s key motivational structures. Note that they are transitions: progress can be made over time, and there are partway houses.
 
The growth transition. GDP—think “grossly distorted picture”—is recognized as a poor guide, ignored in favor of measuring progress toward democratically determined priorities and social and environmental wellbeing.
 
The corporate transition. Profit becomes a relatively minor motivation for businesses. Producing social and environmental wellbeing comes first. Economic democracy is everywhere and takes many forms: worker ownership, co-ops, community and public ownership, credit unions, public-private and for-profit, not-for-profit hybrids. For big corporations, stakeholder boards are mandated as are high standards of social and environmental performance, transparency, and accountability.
 
The market transition. As a governing force in economic life, the market is now powerfully complemented by cooperation and by planning. Tight market regulation keeps prices honest and wages fair.
 
Transition in investment and finance. Investment for high financial returns is largely replaced by investment for high social and environmental returns. Public and community banking predominates over private. Main Street tops Wall Street.
 
The social transition. Powerful social justice measures—tax fairness, a job guarantee, fully adequate minimum wage and unemployment compensation, strong unions, equal pay for equal work, good child care and paid leave, paid opportunities in social and environmental services—ensure fundamental fairness and genuine equal opportunity, defeating both economic deprivation and gross inequality.
 
The lifestyle and culture transition. Vain attempts to satisfy non-material needs with material possessions give way to new lifestyles based on the recognition that other people are our main source of happiness. Nature is seen not as ours to exploit but as a communion of subjects in which we are integral. (For a full description of the all-important transition in cultural values, see my Essay from the Edge No. 5.)
 
The communities transition. Runaway enterprise and throwaway communities are replaced by vital communities that prize human solidarity, local control, and rootedness. Joy in diversity supplants racial and religious discrimination and intolerance.
 
The democracy transition. Creeping corporatocracy and plutocracy are rolled back as political reforms bring true popular sovereignty and empowerment of marginalized groups—actual government of, by, and for the people. Governing is focused where it is most effective—local, state, national, or international—with decisionmaking on issues guided to the most decentralized level feasible.
 
These transitions provide the truest escape from the currently failing system and the foundation for an attractive next system. (Note that transitions about international and defense affairs, though omitted here, must be added.)
 
American Dreamscape
 
Here is a dreamscape of an America made possible by these transitions. Down these paths, we can envision interesting aspects of life in this new setting.
 
For starters, much of economic and social life is rooted in our communities and surrounding regions. Production of food and much more is local and regional. Enterprises are mostly locally owned and committed to the long-term wellbeing of employees (their neighbors) and the viability of their communities (their towns).  
 
Worker and community ownership are prominent, often taking the form of co-ops and credit unions. Community wealth building, where communities have ownership and control of their assets, is commonplace. Cooperation moderates competition, and companies stress wellbeing and not profit. Indeed, the profit motive has faded into the background. 
 
Production systems are designed to mimic biological ones, with waste streams eliminated or becoming a useful input elsewhere. The provision of services replaces the purchase of many goods, and sharing, collaborative consumption, and community ownership are commonplace. Few people own things they can borrow or rent. Products are more durable and are easy to repair, with components that can be reused or recycled.
 
Growth in GDP is not seen as a priority, and GDP is viewed as a misleading measure of wellbeing and progress. Instead, new indicators of national and community wellbeing—including measures of social and natural capital—are closely watched. 
 
Socially, formal work hours have been cut back and paid leaves added, freeing up time for family, friends, hobbies, continuing education, skills development, caregiving, volunteering, sports, outdoor recreation, and participating in the arts. Life is less frenetic. Mindfulness and living simply carry the day. 
 
Because large inequalities are at the root of so many social and environmental problems, measures have been implemented to ensure much greater equality not only of opportunity but also of outcomes. Because life is simpler and less grasping and there is less advertising and people are not so status conscious, a fairer sharing of economic resources is possible. 
 
The overlapping webs of encounter and participation that were once hallmarks of America, a nation of joiners, have been rebuilt. Trust in each other is high. Community bonds are strong; civic associations and community service groups plentiful; support for teachers and caregivers high. Personal security, tolerance of difference, and empathy predominate. 
 
Special attention is given to children and young people. Their education and receipt of loving care, shelter, good nutrition and health care, and an environment free of pollutants and violence are the measures of how well society is doing.
 
Consumerism is supplanted by the search for abundance in things that truly bring happiness and joy—family, friends, the natural world, meaningful work. Communities enjoy a strong rebirth of needed skills and trades, crafts, and self-provisioning. Conspicuous consumption is considered vulgar and has been replaced by new investment in natural amenities, education, and community wealth.
 
Voting rights everywhere are secure, and almost everyone votes, but voting is considered only part of popular democracy. Local governance stresses participatory, direct, and deliberative democracy. At the national level, a host of pro-democracy reforms are in place. Citizens are seized with the responsibility to manage and extend the commons—the valuable assets that belong to everyone—through community land trusts, public spaces, and more. 
 
Despite the many ways life will be more local, and in defiance of the resulting temptation to parochialism, Americans feel a sense of citizenship at larger levels of social and political organization, including at the global level where there is a new sense of global citizenship and a strong global citizens movement.
 
There is a palpable sense that all economic and social activity is nested in the natural world and dependent on it. Zero discharge of pollutants, toxics, and greenhouse gases is the norm. Renewable energy is used everywhere, with maximum efficiency. Green chemistry has replaced the use of toxic solvents and hazardous substances. Organic farming has eliminated pesticide and herbicide use. Biophilic design has brought nature into our buildings and communities.
 
Businesses are forced to pay for their “external” environmental damages, like climate change impacts, as some economists have long preached. Schools stress environmental education and pursue “no child left inside” programs. Ecosystem restoration, especially repairing the damages caused by climate change, is a main focus of community action. Major efforts are made to return carbon to soils and forests.
 
As humorist Dave Barry often exclaimed, “I’m not making this up!” Around our country there is actual evidence of all these things, some in place and some still only as proposals for new policies. They do not predominate, not yet the norm, but they are there. They provide guideposts showing the way.  And there is a world out there of non-profit groups and coalitions working for these changes and ready to help. The path, a poet said, is made by walking.

Coda: The Complication

I so wish I could end here with this delightfully positive story. But it would not be honest to fail to mention the great complication looming over this entire essay. There is a problem in the path of any positive future—the climate problem. Possibilities like the ones just sketched could be severely limited by the slow pace of climate action here and abroad. The reality of global warming and climate change is already hard upon us, and it will worsen. My guess is that the world will soon be consumed with the consequences of climate change. How America and the world address the climate issue will be a powerful determinant of what future is possible. 

To that end, we must proceed with urgency to do what is so clearly needed: a dramatic reduction in greenhouse gas emissions in all the major countries. But along with emissions reduction and adaptation to climate impacts, we must also pursue the system changes needed to correct the fundamental flaws that have delivered the climate crisis to our doorstep. 

We should not see climate as a separate problem. The climate crisis is the world’s political economies at work. The oncoming climate calamity is the strongest argument for transformation of America’s political economy. Elsewhere, I have argued that the system changes advocated in the essay—the transitions—are what we need to cope with climate change over time. My hope is that the US and other countries will see the wisdom of fusing measures for transformative change with measures to address climate threats. The two should go forward hand in hand.

For more on the author, see www.gusspeth.org.

The Essays from the Edge are being posted at https://www.democracycollaborative.org/blogs.