No Fuel Like an Old Fuel

Since the 1970s, the media have habitually referred to the various fuels we use - oil, natural gas, coal, uranium, etc. etc. - as "energy." And since the '70s, in a futile, passive-aggressive sort of way, I've found this terminology regrettable and irritating.

It's true in a technical sense that these fuels constitute "potential" energy - as contrasted with "kinetic" energy, i.e., energy that's actually making something happen - but then so does almost everything. But the reason I object to referring to fuel willy-nilly as energy is precisely because it blurs this distinction and glosses over the sometimes ugly and dangerous process of converting "potential" to "actual."

This dualistic understanding of energy is already present in ancient Greek thought, as enunciated by Aristotle, in the distinction between δυναμις and ένέργεια, potentiality and actuality. But I think the Chinese duality of "fiery yang energy" and "cool, watery yin energy" provides a better frame of reference for our cultural inclination to burn stuff as a way of making things happen.

Or rather, a way of making "magic" or "miracles." Because that's where a lot of fuel is being spent, to overcome some of the natural limitations on human freedom.

For instance, as physical beings, we humans are not free to violate the law of gravity. I'm certainly free to walk off the edge of a steep cliff if I want, but certain unavoidable penalties will follow. But thanks to modern technological wizardry, I can exploit loopholes in the law of gravity and go flying around the world or even to other worlds. But this quasi-magical feat can be achieved only by converting significant amounts of fuel into energy to counteract gravity.

So, too, with all our other modern marvels, from light bulbs to CAT scans to telephones to toasters. Every one of our "miracles of science" requires us to send a little more fuel up in smoke.

How much? Well, according to figures from the U.S. Department of Energy's Energy Information Administration, the United States is currently consuming oil and other petroleum products at a rate of about 600 million barrels a month. That's about 25 billion gallons, which works out to about 80 gallons a month for every man, woman and child in the nation.

And that's actually down from the all-time high, which was set in August 2005, when Americans consumed about 671 million barrels. It would be nice to believe that the 12 percent drop since then was a result of a sharp increase in our awareness of the high environmental and sociopolitical costs of fuel, but alas, it's more likely a result of the economy's less-than-stellar performance the past few years.

Just for the record, the EIA figures going back to January 1981 show Americans have consumed a total of 8.1 trillion barrels of petroleum products over that period (through March of this year), or about 341 trillion gallons.

It required millions of years, of course, for all that petroleum and all the coal and other fuels we use to accumulate inside the Earth - an operation, beyond all doubt, of "receptive" yin energy. But our outgoing yang-dominated society has a hard time seeing value in keeping something in a state of potentiality, stored up for possible future use. We want to convert these substances into energy, and cash, as fast as possible. So it is that we had the "Drill here, drill now!" movement, though it has gone a bit quiet the past few weeks as we all watch crude oil spew into the Gulf of Mexico.

Integral to the traditional understanding of the dualisms of potential/actual and yin/yang are notions of proportionality and balance: When things get out of balance, when we lose our sense of proportion, bad stuff happens. Or from another point of view, an environmental catastrophe could be God's way of telling us we're leaning way too far to one side.

Roots

I'm sitting here with a rather obvious reminder of how rash it can be to forget that things that appear on the surface to be totally disconnected - for example, a nondescript, seemingly dead piece of vine on one side of the yard and a sprig of poison ivy on the other - often turn out to share a single root.

This image is a fairly obvious metaphor for the kind of connectedness I wrote about a few posts back in terms of family trees and "one life," but it's also a way to start attempting to reconcile what might appear to be a glaring inconsistency in my recent rambling divigations.

On the one hand, I spewed quite a bit of verbiage scorning contemporary atomistic-individualistic models of the person as "illusory" and "a betrayal of our true nature as humans." But in my last two posts, I endorsed the idea that the only real foundation for ethics "is each person knowing right from wrong and persistently trying to live in accordance with this knowledge." In other words, a truly ethical society exists only when each individual in that society lives ethically.

So it certainly could appear as if I'm condemning social atomism with one breath and promoting it with the next. Obviously, that's not my intention. By way of explanation, I want to reiterate the distinction I made previously between "individualism" and "individuality."

I defined individualism as "the assembling of a personal identity through selective self-identification with a collection of intellectual components such as beliefs, ideas, attitudes, interests or affinities, and physical activities, possessions and displays." I've ranted more than once, in fact, about our seeming acceptance of this externalized model of identity formation.

But I haven't offered a definition yet of what I would allow as "real" individuality or how it's cultivated, mostly because it's harder to define. In fact, I believe the ultimate basis of individuality or "personhood" is a kind of inner core that is the part of us that connects us with the whole stream of life. Ultimately, it's a mysterium, irreducible to a verbal formulation: It's to be lived, not discussed.

So it's easier to talk about the "how" than the "what." And the "how" is of course quite well known, and has been known for millennia. I'll let Plato explain one way of looking at it, and leave it at that for now:

“Now we have also been saying for a long time, have we not, that, when the soul makes use of the body for any inquiry, either through seeing or hearing or any of the other senses — for inquiry through the body means inquiry through the senses — then it is dragged by the body to things which never remain the same, and it wanders about and is confused and dizzy like a drunken man because it lays hold upon such things?”
“Certainly.”
“But when the soul inquires alone by itself, it departs into the realm of the pure, the everlasting, the immortal and the changeless, and being akin to these it dwells always with them whenever it is by itself and is not hindered, and it has rest from its wanderings and remains always the same and unchanging with the changeless, since it is in communion therewith. And this state of the soul is called wisdom.”

Phaedo, 79c-d; trans. by Harold North Fowler. Online at the Perseus Digital Library.

Insanity Defense

I'm not at all confident that yesterday's post ended up saying what I set out to say, so I want to try to clarify it a little, if possible.

Perhaps the main fault of the Sophists' definitions of justice (diakosynē) as "the advantage of the powerful" or "everyone guarding against everyone" is that both suppose that justice (and by extension any ethical imperative) varies according to incidental factors such as social status or political role.

We certainly see this type of thinking in contemporary culture. The very existence of theories of business ethics makes this clear, as it assumes that my ethical imperatives or obligations as a business owner or manager are different from those I must meet purely as a human being. Plato, Hans-Georg Gadamer and I all reject this approach, as Gadamer states succinctly in one of the passages I quoted yesterday: "Justice does not exist when each person watches the other and guards against him, but when each watches himself and guards the right and just being of his inner constitution."

To put it as plainly as I can, my ethical obligations don't change just because my social or political status does. But our society widely assumes just the opposite: There are different ethical standards for different kinds or classes of people. If I accumulate great wealth, if I buy or open a business, if I'm elected to political office, if I achieve a position of leadership in a church or other religious or social movement, a whole new set of rules is assumed to apply to my behavior. And these new rules invariably seem to be formulated in terms of how much I can get away with in my new position.

I don't think this is right. I believe Plato is quite right to argue that the real basis of all ethics, and thus the only firm foundation for a society, is each person knowing right from wrong and persistently trying to live in accordance with this knowledge. And I'm convinced that we all know "on some level" what really is right or wrong, even when we're bending over backwards mentally to find some rationalization for doing what's wrong. As I said before, some things are always wrong. Moreover, we know they're wrong: murder, rape, theft, dishonesty, failure to keep promises, cowardice, scapegoating, etc. etc. etc. What's to debate?

We all know from watching "Law and Order" that the legal definition of insanity is the inability to tell right from wrong. Today, there are armies of lawyers, advertisers,political consultants and other clever people - Sophists, in other words - who labor to convince us that up is down, white is black, day is night and, yes, wrong is right. To the extent that our society accepts their arguments and adjusts its laws and social norms to incorporate them, our society is legally insane. No wonder, then, that so many people look at what's going on around us and conclude that the inmates have taken over the asylum.

Sophistry Then and Now

Americans have always liked to think of themselves as the heirs of ancient Greek democracy and Roman republicanism. Certainly, the Founding Fathers, imbued with the Neoclassicism of their era, looked to these ancient civilizations as models in establishing our democratic-republican political system. But the parallels between our society and theirs are far from perfect. In many ways, our picture of our ancient forerunners draws more from nostalgia than historical accuracy, and our picture of ourselves owes at least as much to our ideals as to a sober assessment of the facts.

One characteristic, however, which I believe we do share with ancient Greece is the presence in both societies of significant numbers of Sophists, and the social-political-ethical disruptiveness they invariably produce.

The ancient Sophists were teachers, often itinerant, who claimed to be able to inculcate the sons of the well-to-do with the “wisdom” (sophia) necessary to be successful in life. In practice, this meant teaching them some basics of what we would call today the “liberal arts” but more particularly the art of rhetoric, with special emphasis on developing the ability to persuade anyone of anything, to argue both sides of a question with equal skill and thus to win any argument – and by fair means or foul.

As Hans-Georg Gadamer points out (in Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato, translated by P. Christopher Smith; Yale University Press, 1980), the rise of sophism had a deeply disturbing effect on the Athenians. The ability of the Sophists to confound any argument led to something of a crisis of confidence in the principles by which the citizens had lived for centuries. And it was this crisis that led the citizens to condemn Socrates to death, because they believed (mistakenly) that his questioning of people’s assumptions and values was just more of the same sophistry. Plato, of course, believed that Socrates’ dialectical method aimed to uncover truth, not to stultify it as the Sophists did, and spent the rest of his career trying to demonstrate this difference through his dialogues:

Plato must have asked himself how a Socrates was possible in a polis [city] whose political sense was as corrupted as the political sense of the Athens of that time. What power could have enabled someone, quite in contrast to the usual ways of doing things, to hold to what is “just” as though it were something real beyond all question and all dispute? Must not the “just” have been as tangibly evident and inescapably real for him as the tangible facts of our existence are for the rest of us? Plato’s answer to this question was the doctrine of ideas. What is just is not something valid by a convention whose bindingness could be disputed; rather it is something so overwhelmingly real that its existence transcends all behavior established by the social convention and all of a society’s beliefs (doxai). (“Logos and Ergon in Plato’s Lysis,” p. 4)

Plato’s most famous dialogue, the Republic, is devoted in its entirety to the question of what justice really is. It’s important to note that the Greek word translated as justice, diakosynē like so many ancient Greek words, has no exact synonym in English. As Gadamer explains, “Diakosynē is the true political virtue. It means more than the justice which distributes justly … It has the ancient and traditional sense of the quintessential civic virtue underlying any community and any authentic government … Diakosynē is what justice, integrity, rule by law and a civic sense are, all in one.”

The dialogue, in part, pits Socrates against two Sophists, Thrasymachus and Callicles, who claim that justice is “the advantage of the powerful.” In other words, what is called justice is really nothing of the sort, but rather is what rulers use to keep the citizenry cowed, complacent and cooperative. Alternatively, these Sophists argue, justice refers to the structures that the masses create to try to protect themselves from the predations of the powerful. Either way, they see justice in terms of the uses or abuses of power. Socrates (and Plato) naturally reject these claims, as well as the larger sophistic worldview from which they spring. As Gadamer puts it:

Plato’s Socratic insight was that a binding political ethos … no longer existed once sophism had come to define the spirit of education. To be sure, justice and the virtue of the political man were precisely what the Sophists’ education sought to inculcate, too. But Socrates had uncovered the real content and dogma of their new ethos. For the Sophists, justice is only the conventions of the weak which protect the interests of the latter. For the Sophists, ethical principles are no longer valid in themselves but only as a form of our mutual “keeping an eye” on one another. The “just” is that by means of which one person can assert himself against another with help from everyone else, and as such, it is adhered to only out of mutual distrust and fear … And whether the Sophists conceive of themselves as conservative or revolutionary, indeed, even when the Sophists think that they are giving a foundation to the authority of civil law, in principle they have already perverted the sense of justice … Thus Callicles’ and Thrasymachus’ declaration that might makes right only serves to disclose the mentality which prevails in all sophism: No one does what is right voluntarily.

[To Plato, in contrast] What is right and just is not the right that someone has in opposition to another. Rather, it is being just: Each is just by himself and all are just together. Justice does not exist when each person watches the other and guards against him, but when each watches himself and guards the right and just being of his inner constitution. (“Plato and the Poets,” 50-51; emphasis in original)

Now, not to be invidious, but despite the lip service paid by modern historians to the influence of Greek philosophy on the Western world, anyone who looks carefully at the state of our politics and our culture generally must conclude that the teachings of the “great philosophers” have had far less influence on us than those of the Sophists.

To take but one example from contemporary society, there’s a widespread view that the term “business ethics” is an oxymoron. This cynical opinion is based, sad to say, on the actual observed behavior of some business people. But a lot of the things that businesses do – and here we’re talking more about large corporations than small, sole-proprietor-type companies – that have such obviously harmful effects on individuals, communities and the nation as a whole are perfectly allowable under prevailing theories of ethics in business.

There are two main lines of thought in the study of ethics as applied to business, “shareholder values” and “stakeholder values.” The first argues that the sole purpose of a business, and the sole legitimate goal of a business’ owner or owners, is to earn a profit. In the process of doing so, the company will inevitably produce benefits for the community in the form of jobs created, taxes paid and so on. However, these are merely side-effects, and the business’ manager(s) mustn’t allow them to distract him or her from his or her profit-seeking. And equally, any negative effects that follow from the owner’s profit-seeking decisions – pollution of the air and water, destruction of communities by factory closings, perversion of the legislative process through influence-peddling, etc. etc. – should be ignored, because the decision ultimately will conduce to the “greater good” through the always-efficient and semi-divine workings of the free market.

The stakeholder approach differs by arguing that because businesses do not operate in a vacuum, their decisions and practices have an impact on wide swathes of society. Thus, many people besides the owner(s) have a “stake” in what the business does. Certainly, it’s in society’s best interest to have healthy, successful businesses creating jobs and paying taxes, but it’s also important to make sure those businesses aren’t doing more harm than good by causing those negative effects I mentioned above. So if they do cause harm, they must be required to make up for it in some way; for example, by “remediating” polluted sites or destroyed wetlands, or by “investing” in socially laudable enterprises such as job-training programs.

Which of these “theories” is really a sophistic way of evading the demands of a real ethics? Both, actually. The “shareholder” school is simply an updated version of the claim put forth by Thrasymachus: Justice is the advantage of the powerful. And the “stakeholder” view is Callicles’ claim, in modern dress, that justice is “keeping an eye” on each other.

The basis of these sophistic rationalizations is the same modern sociopolitical theories that represent people as atomistic “rational agents” whose pursuit of their own individual benefit will automatically benefit everyone else. Likewise, theories of business ethics claim that corporations also must be allowed maximum freedom to pursue profit by any means they see fit. If coal miners die, if oil-drilling rigs explode and pollute entire seas, if the whole financial industry implodes under the weight of its own misrepresentations, these are just “perturbations” in the process of the economy finding its “equilibrium.” The “greater good” – our energy- and money-intensive lifestyle – will still be served if we just overlook these minor, short-term, isolated, unrepresentative problems (sorry, “challenges”) and remember that the market will eventually sort everything out to everyone’s ultimate benefit.

The very fact that these things are presented as debatable shows how far we’ve strayed from a real understanding of what is ethical; that is, it shows how much we’ve allowed the Sophists of our time to blow smoke and cloud the issues. What the economists and “ethicists” are doing with these “theories” is nothing more than providing a veneer of intellectual justification for businesses doing what they wanted to do in the first place. And the proper response is not to debate the Sophists point-by-point, but to tell them, in all seriousness, “Don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining.”

Forget the “greater good.” Some things are just wrong.