History, Meta Intelligence, Page 2

Monomania and the West

There have been all kinds of “voices” in the history of Western civilization. Perhaps the loudest voice is that of monomaniacs, who always claim that behind the appearance of the many is the one. If we illustrate the West, and at its roots, the intersection of Athens and Jerusalem, we see the origins of this monomania. Plato’s realm of ideas was supposed to explain everything encountered in our daily lives. His main student and rival, Aristotle, has his own competing explanation, based in biology instead of mathematics.

These monomanias in their modern counterpart in ideologies. In communism, the key to have everything is class and the resulting class struggles. Nazism revolves around race and racial conflict.

In our own era, the era of scientism, we have the idea of god replaced with Stephen Hawking’s “mind of god,” Leon Lederman’s The God Particle and KAKU Michio’s The God Equation. In the 2009 film, Angels & Demons, there’s a senior Vatican official, played by Ewan McGregor, who is absolutely outraged by the blasphemous phrase, “the god particle.”

Currently, the monomania impetus continues full-force. For example, Professor Seth Lloyd of MIT tells us that reality is the cosmos and not chaos, because all of reality together is a computer. His MIT colleague, Max Tegmark, argues in his books that the world is not explained by mathematics, but rather is mathematics. Perhaps the climax of this kind of thinking is given to us by the essay “Everything Is Computation” by Joscha Bach:

These days we see a tremendous number of significant scientific news stories, and it’s hard to say which has the highest significance. Climate models indicate that we are past crucial tipping points and irrevocably headed for a new, difficult age for our civilization. Mark van Raamsdonk expands on the work of Brian Swingle and Juan Maldacena and demonstrates how we can abolish the idea of spacetime in favor of a discrete tensor network, thus opening the way for a unified theory of physics. Bruce Conklin, George Church, and others have given us CRISPR/Cas9, a technology that holds promise for simple and ubiquitous gene editing. “Deep learning” starts to tell us how hierarchies of interconnected feature detectors can autonomously form a model of the world, learn to solve problems, and recognize speech, images, and video.

It is perhaps equally important to notice where we lack progress: Sociology fails to teach us how societies work; philosophy seems to have become infertile; the economic sciences seem ill-equipped to inform our economic and fiscal policies; psychology does not encompass the logic of our psyche; and neuroscience tells us where things happen in the brain but largely not what they are.

In my view, the 20th century’s most important addition to understanding the world is not positivist science, computer technology, spaceflight, or the foundational theories of physics.

It is the notion of computation. Computation, at its core, and as informally described as possible, is simple: Every observation yields a set of discernible differences.

These we call information. If the observation corresponds to a system that can change its state, we can describe those state changes. If we identify regularity in those state changes, we are looking at a computational system. If the regularity is completely described, we call this system an algorithm. Once a system can perform conditional state transitions and revisit earlier states, it becomes almost impossible to stop it from performing arbitrary computation. In the infinite case that is, if we allow it to make an unbounded number of state transitions and use unbounded storage for the states—it becomes a Turing machine, or a Lambda calculus, or a Post machine, or one of the many other mutually equivalent formalisms that capture universal computation.

Computational terms rephrase the idea of “causality,” something that philosophers have struggled with for centuries. Causality is the transition from one state in a computational system to the next. They also replace the concept of “mechanism” in mechanistic, or naturalistic, philosophy. Computationalism is the new mechanism, and unlike its predecessor, it is not fraught with misleading intuitions of moving parts.

Computation is different from mathematics. Mathematics turns out to be the domain of formal languages and is mostly undecidable, which is just another word for saying “uncomputable” (since decision making and proving are alternative words for computation, too). All our explorations into mathematics are computational ones, though. To compute means to actually do all the work, to move from one state to the next.

Computation changes our idea of knowledge: Instead of justified true belief, knowledge describes a local minimum in capturing regularities between observables. Knowledge is almost never static but progresses on a gradient through a state space of possible worldviews. We will no longer aspire to teach our children the truth, because, like us, they will never stop changing their minds. We will teach them how to productively change their minds, how to explore the never-ending land of insight.

A growing number of physicists understands that the universe is not mathematical but computational, and physics is in the business of finding an algorithm that can reproduce our observations. The switch from uncomputable mathematical notions (such as continuous space) makes progress possible. Climate science, molecular genetics, and AI are computational sciences. Sociology, psychology, and neuroscience are not: They still seem confused by the apparent dichotomy between mechanism (rigid moving parts) and the objects of their study. They are looking for social, behavioral, chemical, neural regularities, where they should be looking for computational ones.

Everything is computation.
Know This: Today’s Most Interesting and Important Scientific Ideas, Discoveries, and Developments, John Brockman (editor), Harper Perennial, 2017, pages 228-230.

Friedrich Nietzsche rebelled against this type of thinking the most profoundly. If scientism represents the modern, then Nietzsche was the prophet of postmodernism. Nietzsche’s famous phrase, “God is dead.” is not about a creator or divinity, but rather finality itself. There is no final explanation.

Wrestling with History: Alexis de Tocqueville

Alexis de Tocqueville, a brilliant French historian, wrote Democracy in America. This book is a supreme example of U.S.-watching.

Another book of his, Recollections, shows him wrestling with history itself. If we remember that Clio is the muse of history, then we might say that Recollections is the chronicle of de Tocqueville’s encounter with her.

The question of human history and what de Tocqueville called “the world’s destiny” are described as follows:

l wrote histories without taking part in public affairs, and politicians whose only concern was to control events without a thought of describing them. And I have invariably noticed that the former see general causes everywhere, whereas the latter, spending their lives amid the disconnected events of each day, freely attribute everything to particular incidents and think that all the little strings their hands are busy pulling daily are those that control the world’s destiny. Probably both of them are mistaken.

For my part I hate all those absolute systems that make all the events of history depend on great first causes linked together by the chain of fate and thus succeed, so to speak, in banishing men from the history of the human race. Their boasted breadth seems to me narrow, and their mathematical exactness false. I believe, pace the writers who find these sublime theories to feed their vanity and lighten their labours, that many important historical facts can be explained only by accidental circumstances, while many others are inexplicable. Finally, that chance, or rather the concatenation of secondary causes, which we call by that name because we can’t sort them all out, is a very important element in all that we see taking place in the world’s theatre. But I am firmly convinced that chance can do nothing unless the ground has been prepared in advance. Antecedent facts, the nature of institutions, turns of mind and the state of mores are the materials from which chance composes those impromptu events that surprise and terrify us.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Recollections, 1893, Anchor Books, page 78.

De Tocqueville warns us that the world’s destiny is always murky and what he calls a labyrinth and a whirlwind. He says:

Mentally I reviewed the history of our last sixty years and smiled bitterly to myself as I thought of the illusions cherished at the end of each phase of this long revolution; the theories feeding these illusions; our historians’ learned daydreams, and all the ingenious false systems by which men sought to explain a present still unclearly seen and to foresee the unseen future.
Recollections, page 83.

He continues:

Shall we reach, as other prophets as vain perhaps as their predecessors assure us, a more complete and profound social transformation than our fathers ever foresaw or desired, and which we ourselves cannot yet conceive; or may we not simply end up in that intermittent anarchy which is well known to be the chronic incurable disease of old peoples? I cannot tell, and do not know when this long voyage will end; I am tired of mistaking deceptive mists for the bank. And I often wonder whether that solid land we have sought for so long actually exists, and whether it is not our fate the rove the seas forever!
Recollections, pages 83-84.

And yet, with all that profound uncertainty, he offers a very sweeping interpretation of French history from the French Revolution (1789) to the French Revolution of 1848. The famous painting by Eugène Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People (French: La Liberté guidant le peuple), commemorating the July Revolution of 1830, falls in between.

Despite de Tocqueville’s warnings about the slipperiness of historical judgement, he arrives at an extremely precise interpretation of his own:

Seen as a whole from a distance, our history from 1789 to 1830 appears to be forty-one years of deadly struggle between the Ancien Régime with its traditions, memories, hopes and men (i.e. the aristocrats), and the new France led by the middle class. 1830 would seem to have ended the first period of our revolutions, or rather, of our revolution, for it was always one and the same, through its various fortunes and passions, whose beginning our fathers saw and whose end we shall in all probability not see. All that remained of the Ancien Régime was destroyed forever. In 1830 the triumph of the middle class was decisive and so complete that the narrow limits of the bourgeoisie encompassed all political powers, franchises, prerogatives, indeed the whole government, to the exclusion, in law, of all beneath it and, in fact, of all that had once been above it. Thus the bourgeoisie became not only the sole director of society, but also, one might say, its cultivator. It settled into every office, prodigiously increased the number of offices, and made a habit of living off the public Treasury almost as much as from its own industry.
Recollections, page 5.

Reviewing the first sentence from the quote above, one can see a deep characterization of an era, with the conclusion “in 1830 the triumph of the middle class was decisive…” Notice the profound paradox that on one hand de Tocqueville spoke of the elusiveness of history despite providing the definite description of this period. Contrast “seen as a whole from a distance” with one of the themes of his recollections, that it is not given to us to understand history.

Why Is the World So Nightmarish?

The phrase, “La Belle Époque” (French: “The Beautiful Era”) refers to the atmosphere in Europe and especially France, the high point of which lasted from 1900 to 1914, with the outbreak of World War I. The whole era was characterized by the phrase, “la douceur de la vie” (French: “the sweetness of life”). People of the time would say that if you weren’t alive then, they could not communicate how charming life was at the time.

The sinking of the Titanic in April, 1912 is the symbolic catastrophe that heralded the end of the era. Anyone who watched Downton Abbey would perhaps remember the opening scene, which depicts the newspaper announcing it with a screaming headline.

The great masterpiece, Journey to the End of the Night (French: Voyage au bout de la nuit, 1932), describes the whole world around World War I as a nightmarish battlefield of previously unseen scope. Céline’s protagonist, Ferdinand, travels the world, from battles in Europe to Africa, then to New York and Detroit’s Ford assembly line before returning to France, finding that the nightmare is global and inescapable.

Céline died within 24 hours of Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway is famous for the quote from The Sun Also Rises (set in the 1920s), “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills.”

The question is how could we ever explain complete evaporation of the sweetness of life and transformation into such a nightmare, culminating into the world of today.

Lastly, think of the point made in Sebastian Haffner’s The Meaning of Hitler, how Hitler fit into this nightmarization of the world. Haffner writes:

It is impossible for a serious historian to maintain that without Hitler world history in the twentieth century would have taken the course it has taken. It is by no means certain that without Hitler a second world war would even have taken place; it is quite certain that if it had taken place it would have taken a different course — possibly even with different alliances, fronts and outcomes. Today’s world, whether we like it or not, is the work of Hitler. Without Hitler there would have been no partition of Germany and Europe; without Hitler there would be no Americans and no Russians in Berlin; without Hitler there would be no Israel; without Hitler there would be no de-colonization, at least not such a rapid one; there would be no Asian, Arab or Black African emancipation, and no diminution of European preeminence. Or, more accurately, there would be none of this without Hitler’s mistakes. He certainly did not want any of it.

(The Meaning of Hitler, Harvard University Press, 1979, page 100)

No-one has yet captured how the nightmarish feeling of 2025 is itself downstream from the preceding era.

India: Deep History

In his lectures, Professor Amartya Sen, the Harvard Nobel Prize in Economics winner, mentions Sir Mortimer Wheeler, Director-General of the Archaeological Survey of India. Wheeler wrote, while reporting on the excavation of the Indus Valley Civilization (of India), that the plumbing and sewerage were advanced, in some ways surpassing modern equivalents.

Sen’s larger point is that history is characterized by phases of rise and fall and not just classes and class struggles à la Marx.

Consider the following depiction of the East India Company, from The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company (also subtitled The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire) by William Dalrymple.

On 28 August 1608, Captain William Hawkins, a bluff sea captain with the Third Voyage, anchored his ship, the Hector, off Surat, and so became the first commander of an EIC vessel to set foot on Indian soil.

India then had a population of 150 million — about a fifth of the world’s total — and was producing about a quarter of global manufacturing; indeed, in many ways it was the world’s industrial powerhouse and the world’s leader in manufactured textiles. Not for nothing are so many English words connected with weaving — chintz, calico, shawl, pyjamas, khaki, dungarees, cummerbund, taffetas — of Indian origin. It was certainly responsible for a much larger share of world trade than any comparable zone and the weight of its economic power even reached Mexico, whose textile manufacture suffered a crisis of ‘de-industrialisation’ due to Indian cloth imports. In comparison, England then had just 5 per cent of India’s population and was producing just under 3 per cent of the world’s manufactured goods. A good proportion of the profits on this found its way to the Mughal exchequer in Agra, making the Mughal Emperor, with an income of around £100 million,* by far the richest monarch in the world.

The Mughal capitals were the megacities of their day: ‘They are second to none either in Asia or in Europe,’ thought the Jesuit Fr Antonio Monserrate, ‘with regards either to size, population, or wealth. Their cities are crowded with merchants, who gather from all over Asia. There is no art or craft which is not practised there.’ Between 1586 and 1605, European silver flowed into the Mughal heartland at the astonishing rate of 18 metric tons a year, for as William Hawkins observed, all nations bring coyne and carry away commodities for the same’. For their grubby contemporaries in the West, stumbling around in their codpieces, the silk-clad Mughals, dripping in jewels, were the living embodiment of wealth and power — a meaning that has remained impregnated in the word ‘mogul’ ever since.

By the early seventeenth century, Europeans had become used to easy military victories over the other peoples of the world.

* Over £10,000 million today.

Think of the larger point: what you just read is the story of Indian de-industrialization and its negative results. Ask yourself whether American de-industrialization is something of an echo of this, as manufacturing is offshored.

“De-Globalization?”

The classic study of the “swirl of processes and events” that ended previous globalization episodes is the theme of Princeton Professor Harold James’ 2002 book, The End of Globalization: Lessons from the Great Depression.

“Globalization” is here. Signified by an increasingly close economic interconnection that has led to profound political and social change worldwide, the process seems irreversible. In this book, however, Harold James provides a sobering historical perspective, exploring the circumstances in which the globally integrated world of an earlier era broke down under the pressure of unexpected events.

James examines one of the great historical nightmares of the twentieth century: the collapse of globalism in the Great Depression. Analyzing this collapse in terms of three main components of global economics—capital flows, trade and international migration—James argues that it was not simply a consequence of the strains of World War I, but resulted from the interplay of resentments against all these elements of mobility, as well as from the policies and institutions designed to assuage the threats of globalism.

Could it happen again? There are significant parallels today: highly integrated systems are inherently vulnerable to collapse, and world financial markets are vulnerable and unstable.

While James does not foresee another Great Depression, his book provides a cautionary tale in which institutions meant to save the world from the consequences of globalization—think WTO and IMF, in our own time—ended by destroying both prosperity and peace.

Legitimate fears about “globalization reversal” have been well put by Zakaria:

Davos, Switzerland —

President Trump’s speech here at the World Economic Forum went over relatively well. That’s partly because Davos is a conclave of business executives, and they like Trump’s pro-business message. But mostly, the president’s reception was a testament to the fact that he and what he represents are no longer unusual or exceptional. Look around the world and you will see: Trump and Trumpism have become normalized.

Davos was once the place where countries clamored to demonstrate their commitment to opening up their economies and societies. After all, these forces were producing global growth and lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty. Every year, a different nation would become the star of the forum, usually with a celebrated finance minister who was seen as the architect of a boom. The United States was the most energetic promoter of these twin ideas of economic openness and political freedom.

Today, Davos feels very different. Despite the fact that, throughout the world, growth remains solid and countries are moving ahead, the tenor of the times has changed. Where globalization was once the main topic, today it is the populist backlash to it. Where once there was a firm conviction about the way of the future, today there is uncertainty and unease.

This is not simply atmospherics and rhetoric. Ruchir Sharma of Morgan Stanley Investment Management points out that since 2008, we have entered a phase of “deglobalization.” Global trade, which rose almost uninterruptedly since the 1970s, has stagnated, while capital flows have fallen. Net migration flows from poor countries to rich ones have also dropped. In 2018, net migration to the United States hit its lowest point in a decade.

The shift in approach can best be seen in the case of India. In 2018, Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to Davos to decry the fact that “many countries are becoming inward focused and globalization is shrinking.” Since then, his government has increased tariffs on hundreds of items and taken steps to shield India’s farmers, shopkeepers, digital companies and many others from the dangers of international competition. The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative recently called out India for having the highest tariffs of any major economy in the world.

Indian officials used to aggressively court foreign investment, which was much needed to spur growth. Last week, with India’s economy slowing badly, Jeff Bezos announced a $1 billion investment in the country. (Bezos owns The Post.) But the minister of commerce and industry scoffed at the move, saying Amazon wasn’t “doing a great favor to India” and besides was probably engaging in anti-competitive, “predatory” practices. Often, protectionist policies help favored local producers. Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad recently criticized some of Modi’s policies toward Muslims. The Indian government effectively cut off imports of Malaysian palm oil. In a familiar pattern, one of the chief beneficiaries was a local billionaire long associated with Modi.

The Economist notes that Europe, once one of the chief motors for openness in economics and politics, is also rediscovering state intervention to prop up domestic industries. And if you think the Internet is exempt from these tendencies, think again. The European Center for International Political Economy tracks the number of protectionist measures put in place to “localize” the digital economy in 64 countries. It has been surging for years, especially since 2008.

It’s important not to exaggerate the backlash to globalization.

As a 2019 report by DHL demonstrates, globalization is still strong and, by some measures, continues to expand. People still want to trade, travel and transact across the world. But in government policy, where economic logic once trumped politics, today it is often the reverse. Economist Nouriel Roubini argues that the cumulative result of all these measures — protecting local industries, subsidizing national champions, restricting immigration — is to sap growth. “It means slower growth, fewer jobs, less efficient economies,” he told me recently. We’ve seen it happen many times in the past, not least in India, which suffered decades of stagnation as a result of protectionist policies, and we will see the impact in years to come.

Nevertheless, today, nationalism and protectionism prevail.

This phase of deglobalization is being steered from the top. The world’s leading nations are, as always, the agenda-setters. The example of China, which has shielded some of its markets and still grown rapidly, has made a deep impression on much of the world. Probably deeper still is the example of the planet’s greatest champion of liberty and openness, the United States, which now has a president who calls for managed trade, more limited immigration and protectionist measures. At Davos, Trump invited every nation to follow his example. More and more are complying.
“The world is de-globalizing. Trump set the example.” The Washington Post, Fareed Zakaria

Students should sense that while history does not repeat itself, it sometimes rhymes and this is a major danger. It also might imply that coping with climate change will be all the harder because American-led unilateralism everywhere would mean world policy paralysis.

Movies as an Education in Global Looting: The Sea Hawk (1940)

Movies and the World as an Arena of Violent Domination and Global Looting

The classic Warner Brothers swashbuckler, The Sea Hawk, from 1940, within its romantic adventures and intricate swordfights (perhaps comparable to the car chases of later movies) is a partly historical, partly fictional version of a world built on imperial struggles and ransacking and despoiling. The hegemonic power in the West (and perhaps worldwide) is Spain. Phillip II the king-emperor wants to own and dominate and rule the whole world. In 1588, his Spanish Armada loses to England. (The British of course want to compare this to the Battle of Britain against the German Luftwaffe.)

Set in 1585, The Sea Hawk opens with King Philip II of Spain plotting world domination, laughing that all world maps will soon read simply “Spain” — once England is out of the way, of course.

The Spanish ambassador departs for England to escort his niece to Queen Elizabeth’s court, but in a spectacular sea battle, the Spanish galley is soundly damaged, boarded, raided and sunk by a group of pirates led by Captain Geoffrey Thorpe, a Sir Walter Raleigh stand-in played by Erroll Flynn. Thorpe rescues the galley slaves — they row the boat — and spares the crew, taking them aboard and delivering them to England. The jewels and other bounty (or a portion thereof) are a gift to the Queen.

His crew is part of a noble privateer coalition — the Sea Hawks — who justify their piracy as reclamation of English goods (and enslaved sailors) from the Spanish behemoth. The political fallout from Thorpe’s abduction of the ambassador forces Elizabeth to outlaw the Sea Hawks, including an official denial (and private approval) of his mission to Panama to steal a shipment of Aztec gold.

Inca gold is also mentioned in the movie as a target of robbing.

Sir John Hawkins (1532–1595), part of this group of global sailor-pirates and master-mariners, was one of the most notable sailors and naval commanders of the sixteenth century.

He is known for his pivotal role in the maritime history of England and the rise of the global slave trade.

John Hawkins, the son of a merchant, was born in Plymouth in 1532. He became a sea captain and in 1562 became the first Englishman to start capturing people in Sierra Leone and selling them as slaves to Spanish settlers in the Caribbean. (Notice that selling slaves does not discriminate against Spaniards even with Phillip II threatening England. Business is business.)

Stealing Aztec gold as part of colonial or imperial plundering and the slave trade were part of the dark side of history, something the standard history books “skate over” dishonestly.

A key scene between the Spanish aristocratic beauty and Captain Thorpe:

Doña María Álvarez de Córdoba: “I’m not in the habit of conversing with thieves. I thought I made that quite clear, Captain Thorpe.”

Captain Geoffrey Thorpe: “Why, yes, all except your definition. Tell me, is a thief an Englishman who steals?”

Doña María Álvarez de Córdoba: “It’s anybody who steals… whether it’s piracy or robbing women.”

Captain Geoffrey Thorpe: “Oh, I see. I’ve been admiring some of the jewels we found in your chest… particularly the wrought gold. It’s Aztec, isn’t it? I wonder just how those Indians were persuaded to part with it.”
The Sea Hawk (1940)

Donald Trump continues this tradition of looting when he says of Iraq’s oil:

“Think of it as our oil under their sand.”

Thus the whole world is an arena where the weak don’t have any property rights: not the oil or gold, not themselves (slavery) and not their country (colonialism).

This exploitative hierarchy and “world-system” is part of “the way of the world” and even a romantic adventure story like 1940’s The Sea Hawk gives you a Hollywoodized glimpse into its roots. Imperial struggles in the West spill over into colonization and ransacking and looting. History books one sees in high school are dishonest and in that sense uninformative or even disinformative.

The popular PBS travel series Rick Steves’ Europe unintentionally gives us a wonderful example of this notion of plunder and looting as a pillar of world history in the show on Venice. Rick Steves is talking about the various statues in Venice’s central St. Mark’s Square (Piazza San Marco), and comments “I’d call the style ‘Early Ransack.’”

This Rick Steves quip about ransacking and historical wealth-building is very informative.

Education and Circular Causation: Everything Causes Everything Else

The student will have seen in these educational essays the notion of “Husserl’s rhomboid”:

The great philosopher, Edmund Husserl, who died in 1938, would bring a matchbox to class and show his students they see parts and some surface area of the matchbox (a kind of rhomboid, hence the name “Husserl’s rhomboid”) but never all of it at the same time. Students can walk around the matchbox and see facets. They can twirl the matchbox but whatever they do, the students cannot “espy” or glimpse all of it except in their imaginations, once they have been exposed to all of it, side by side, facet by facet.

Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish economist who won the Nobel Prize in 1974, has something a bit analogous when he speaks of “circular cumulative causation”:

Circular cumulative causation is a theory developed by Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal in 1956. It is a multi-causal approach where the core variables and their linkages are delineated. The idea behind it is that a change in one form of an institution will lead to successive changes in other institutions. These changes are circular in that they continue in a cycle, many times in a negative way, in which there is no end, and cumulative in that they persist in each round. The change does not occur all at once, which would lead to chaos, rather the changes occur gradually.

Gunnar Myrdal developed the concept from Knut Wicksell and developed it with Nicholas Kaldor when they worked together at the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe.

In the characteristics relevant to an economy’s development process, Myrdal mentioned the availability of natural resources, the historical traditions of production activity, national cohesion, religions and ideologies, and economic, social and political leadership.

He writes:

“The notion of stable equilibrium is normally a false analogy to choose when constructing a theory to explain the changes in a social system.

What is wrong with the stable equilibrium assumption as applied to social reality is the very idea that a social process follows a direction—though it might move towards it in a circuitous way—towards a position which in some sense or other can be described as a state of equilibrium between forces. Behind this idea is another and still more basic assumption, namely that a change will regularly call forth a reaction in the system in the form of changes which on the whole go in the opposite direction to the first change. The idea I want to expound in this book is that, on the contrary, in the normal case there is no such a tendency towards automatic self-stabilisation in the social system. The system is by itself not moving towards any sort of balance between forces, but is constantly on the move away from such a situation. In the normal case a change does not call forth countervailing changes but, instead, supporting changes, which move the system in the same direction as the first change but much further. Because of such circular causation as a social process tends to become cumulative and often gather speed at an accelerating rate…”
(Gunnar Myrdal, Economic Theory and Underdeveloped Regions, Gerald Duckworth, 1957, pp. 12–13)

Myrdal developed further the circular cumulative causation concept and stated that it makes different assumptions from that of stable equilibrium on what can be considered the most important forces guiding the evolution of social processes. These forces characterize the dynamics of these processes in two diverse ways.

These essays that you are reading here are examples encouraging students to put causes in a kind of circle: history exists because economics exists because psychology exists because society exists because history exists. Everything is causing everything else. There isn’t a simple “linear parade.”

By way of contrast, in a person’s private life, he/she went to the dentist before buying the batteries and after having lunch. There’s a timeline of events.

In history, there are such linear timelines also: John Kennedy was assassinated before Donald Trump became president. You had breakfast before dinner. You slept before you got up in the morning.

However, processes (industrialism, migration, urbanization, inflation, etc.) are not analyzable as events like meals and one-time occurrences but are more like getting old or learning a language.

Multi-causal interpretations and circular causes get the student out of simple, “this happened and that happened” in favor of “this and that caused each other, going both ways and interacting with other pressures too.” Everything is causing and altering everything else in all directions.

Climate-Watching: A Collision of Economics and History: In Pennsylvania, the Debate over Climate Is a Bitter One

The state has both a long history of environmental action and a longstanding dependence on fossil fuels.

[from Inside Climate News, by David Shribman, July 17, 2022]

This is a state where natural gas production reached a record 7.1 trillion cubic feet in 2020, the most of any state outside Texas and more than the energy supplied by the state’s nuclear power plants. It’s a state that has 49 underground gas storage sites, more than any other in the nation. Its coal production ranks behind only Wyoming and West Virginia, and only Wyoming and Texas export more total energy to other parts of the country.

This is also a state where voters will select a new governor and a new senator in November. No state has more vital elections this year; no state has a more complicated and more contentious political culture; and no state provides a better test case for environmental issues and for the future of the climate-change debate.

Welcome to Pennsylvania.

Don’t pack a sweater: the average temperature in the state has risen by 2.8 degrees Fahrenheit since the first Earth Day, in 1970, a bigger increase than the national average.

Don’t breathe deeply: the state’s two major cities, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, are among the nation’s worst 25 metropolitan areas for annual particulate air pollution.

And don’t fail to note the irony—of a state whose economy and lifestyle are unusually dependent on fossil fuels but whose history is unusually rich in the love of nature and the protection of the environment. It is this collision of economics and history that makes environmental issues so emotional, the debate so bitter, the outcome so vital.

Pennsylvania was the home of John J. Audubon, who cultivated in Americans a love of bird life; Rachel Carson, whose clarion call about the environment jolted the country and shook the Kennedy administration; John Chapman, known to school children nationwide as Johnny Appleseed; J. Horace McFarland, a photographer and conservationist celebrated as the Father of the National Park Service; Harold L. Ickes, the pathfinding Secretary of the Interior during the Franklin D. Roosevelt years who shored up perhaps the least effective and most corrupt arm of government while elevating the standards and practices of the National Park Service; and Jerome Rodale, the publisher whose books gave voice to the ethos of sustainable agriculture. And it was the adopted home of William Penn, the founder of the colony that would bear his name and the author of a conservation edict requiring that 20 percent of the land in the Province of Pennsylvania be preserved as wooded. It is no surprise that Pennsylvania was one of the first states to adopt an Environmental Bill of Rights.

But Pennsylvania also was the setting for environmental milestones of an entirely different type. In Donora, a 1948 smog episode killed 20 people and saddled some 40 percent of the town’s population with respiratory disease. A third of a century later, the partial meltdown of Unit 2 of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Dauphin County spewed radioactivity into the Harrisburg area.

The state has had multiple mine disasters and the subsequent contamination of nearby fields and streams. As early as 1883, the explorer and adventure travel writer Willard Glazer wrote that Pittsburgh’s industry was “rendered possible by the coal which abounds in measureless quantity in the immediate neighborhood of the city”—and which contributed to the poisoning of many of the area’s waterways and the despoiling of the air. As late as 1940, 81 percent of the city’s dwellings burned coal. The emissions from the steel mills that helped the country win two world wars and build a robust mass-consumer economy only added to the environmental distress.

This duality is part of, defines all of, Pennsylvania’s natural and political history. It is embedded in the origin story of Pennsylvania and reinforced in contemporary history. In the WPA Guide to Pennsylvania, the writers of the New Deal-era product of the Federal Writers Project spoke in 1940 of how the main plant of the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company in Ford City, Pennsylvania, “extends for a mile along Third Avenue in a series of long squat units composed of red brick,” and how the state’s Red Hills were exceeded only in Belgium as “the finest farm section in the world.” Precisely three-quarters of a century ago, in his classic 1947 book, Inside U.S.A., the journalist John Gunther wrote, “To a degree the story of Pennsylvania is the story of iron, coal, and steel. Yet of its 26 million acres, almost half is forest!”

A state known for producing metals and fouling the air is also a state known for hunting grouse, pheasant, deer and bear. A state teeming with factory workers is a state loaded with farmers. A state with two major power centers, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, is a state where elections often are decided in the agricultural “T” between the two. A state known for building belching steel plants is also a state where, this spring, the owners of Fallingwater, the Frank Lloyd Wright masterpiece, announced that they would install solar panels on the iconic house to offset the power used at the site on Bear Run in Fayette County. And when it comes to environmental issues, Pennsylvania is a state where manufacturing and banking interests have enormous influence in the stately Capitol in Harrisburg, and also a state full of climate activists determined to hold industry in check and battle climate change.

“It is particularly difficult in Pennsylvania to come to any agreement on environmental issues because coal and natural gas have countervailing pressure against attempts to deal with climate change,” said Joel A. Tarr, a Carnegie Mellon University historian who studies the effect of technology on the urban environment. “When you tell people that we have a problem with air quality here, their response is that it used to be much worse. This is a place where we won’t have a water-quality solution until we have a cholera epidemic and we won’t address climate change until we have a major catastrophe that brings it home to Pennsylvania.”

Not that there haven’t been efforts. “A generalized good always takes a back seat to a specific interest,” Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, told me in an interview for this article. “We all benefit from a healthy environment, but there are specific interests that are specifically harmed if we do the right thing. Those specific interests have a lot of power in places like Harrisburg.”

The frequent result of these countervailing impulses and competing interests: paralysis on environmental matters, even as the latest United Nations report, published in April, warned that the world was on a path to a rate of global warming more than double the 2.7-degrees Fahrenheit set as the preferred global goal in 2015 in Paris.

U.N. Secretary General António Guterres warned that the result would be “unprecedented heatwaves, terrifying storms, widespread water shortages and the extinction of a million species of plants and animals,” adding, “This is not fiction or exaggeration. It is what science tells us will result from our current energy policies.”

A City (and State) in Crisis

As man proceeds toward his announced goal of the conquest of nature, he has written a depressing record of destruction, directed not only against the earth he inhabits but against the life that shares it with him.

— Rachel Carson, in Silent Spring

In many ways, Pittsburgh—once smoky, still gritty, now proud of its “eds-and-meds” economy, its edgy youth culture and yeasty locavore restaurant scene—stands as a symbol of Pennsylvania’s environmental and climate crisis.

In the past half century, the city’s average temperature has risen by 2.8 degrees, according to figures compiled by Climate Central—a jarring result for a city where the local political grandees like to emphasize how the area has moved beyond its heavy-manufacturing past. Even with the dramatic decline in the steel industry, Pittsburgh remains the 10th worst city in the country in terms of the presence of short-term particulate matter, and the Breathe Meter indicator that monitors the area’s air has found that 88.5 percent of metro areas in the country have cleaner air. Moreover, a study by Community Partners in Asthma Care found that the rate of asthma in Pittsburgh-area school children is nearly three times the national average.

For generations, no essay on the environment of Pennsylvania was complete without citing Charles Dickens’ characterization of mid-19th century Pittsburgh as “hell with the lid lifted,” or Lincoln Steffens’ complaint about the city’s “smoky gloom” and the “volcanic light upon the cloud of mist and smoke” that appeared with the periodic opening of the blast furnaces. When my wife and I bought a house in Pittsburgh two decades ago—when almost the entire steel industry had closed down in the area—we paid thousands of dollars to have a century’s worth of soot blasted from the brick facade.

All of that before the word “fracking” was introduced into the lexicon of the Pennsylvania debate.

“There is gas in the ground and people have been taking it out of the ground since before I was governor,” Wolf said in the interview. “If I could snap my fingers, we would go completely to wind and solar. I haven’t figured out how to do this. The job is to manage the transition to that energy future.”

Republicans in recent years have sought to deregulate the natural gas industry, expand drilling, ease stipulations for gas permits, open state parklands for energy extraction and open new opportunities for gas pipelines, having the state subsidize them.

“These things were not always Republican goals,” said David Hess, who was secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection under Republican Governors Tom Ridge and Mark Schweiker. “Republicans once had environmental issues as a pretty high priority. Only recently have Republicans changed their approach. This issue is no longer bipartisan, and that applies especially to climate change. But the only way we can break the loop we are on is to do something different, and yet industry and their Republican allies want more and more. Putting all the stuff in the air from fossil fuels cannot be good, especially when we have clean alternatives.”

And yet the Keystone State has not been entirely a conscientious objector to environmental initiatives.

At a time when there was so much soot in the air that Pittsburgh kept its street lights on all day long and businessmen were forced to change their soiled shirts after returning from a walk to a lunch appointment, Mayor David Lawrence undertook a dramatic anti-smoke campaign in 1946 that greatly improved the air quality in the city. “I am convinced that our people want clean air,” the mayor said in his first inaugural address. “There is no other single thing which will so dramatically improve the appearance, the health, the pride, the spirit of the city.”

Lawrence was not alone. “The advocates of the Pittsburgh Renaissance conceived of decreased pollution as a means of assisting the transition of the city from a heavy-industry to a service economy by improving, modernizing, and reconstructing its central business district,” Stefano Laconi, who teaches the history of the Americas at the University of Florence, wrote in a 1999 essay in the journal Pennsylvania History. He argued that the initiative provided Lawrence “not only with the foundation of a public-private partnership but also with the basis of a bipartisan political coalition with local Republican moguls like Richard King Mellon.”

Years later, Republican Gov. Ridge, with Democratic support, began his administration with an initiative to clean up and redevelop brownfield sites. At the same time, the legislature won national attention by reorganizing the state’s approach to these issues, creating separate departments of Environmental Protection, which concentrates on protecting the air, water and land from pollution, and Conservation and Natural Resources, focused on state parks and state forests.

“At the beginning of my administration, I issued a challenge to Pennsylvania to become a national leader in finding new ways to protect our environment while promoting economic progress, to provide for the needs of the present without compromising the ability for future generations to meet needs of their own, and to think in terms of sustainability, with both the economy and our environment,” Ridge told me.

The governor was fond of quoting the adage, “We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.” As governor, he said that,“I would often remind myself that the air we breathe and the water we drink should never be taken for granted.”

Much to be Done and an Election That Matters

The fact that a man is to vote forces him to think.

— Jonathan Chapman, known as Johnny Appleseed

Ordinarily, the multi-interest collision of jobs and climate, energy and environment, might be top-shelf issues in a state that ranks second only to Texas in energy production and that had the largest increase in natural-gas production in the last decade. But that collision is a side show rather than the main event.

“All of these candidates need to speak up and tell us what they would do about the energy situation and the climate crisis that is growing more critical by the minute,” said Larry Schweiger, a former president of the National Wildlife Federation, PennFuture and the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy. “It is very frustrating to see candidates for governor and the Senate not making an effort to say how they would address these urgent issues. Both parties are guilty of this, and it is a big omission and a big problem.”

Now Democratic Attorney General Josh Shapiro and Republican state Sen. Douglas Mastriano are facing off for governor and Democratic Lt. Gov. John Fetterman and Republican celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz are fighting for the U.S. Senate seat being relinquished by GOP Sen. Patrick Toomey.

The four will face questions about their commitment to climate change with new urgency—and new stakes. And the pressure may well come from a newly critical group of voters: young people.

A Harris Poll survey conducted with 4-H found just fewer than half of teenagers believe political and global leaders are taking meaningful action to protect the environment. There is reason to believe that the top tier of teenagers, eligible to vote, and their older brothers and sisters will be motivated and perhaps mobilized by these issues.

“There’s no question that environmental issues are far more critical for younger voters,” said Steven Farnsworth, the political scientist who is director of University of Mary Washington’s Center for Leadership and Media Studies in Virginia. “This has been going on since the first Earth Day. It has to do with the fact that younger people are going to be on this planet longer than older people.”

The approach that these four nominees bring to these matters is important. “It’s not about issues, it’s about values,” said John Della Volpe, director of polling at Harvard Kennedy School of Government’s Institute of Politics and the author of the newly published How Gen Z is Channeling Their Fear and Passion to Save America. “And the degree to which candidates can connect climate change into values, and display that they are thinking about the future, they could affect the turnout of young people and how they do vote.”

There is much to be done. Pennsylvania ranks 19th among the states in the rate of growth for wind power, according to the PennEnvironment Research and Policy Center, and 23rd among the states in the rate of growth for solar power. The potential is great; if solar units were placed on the roofs of Pennsylvania’s big-box stores, for example, the result could be the annual production of more than 3,000 gigawatt-hours of clean electricity. There are bills in the legislature to require the state’s suppliers of electricity to generate nearly a third of their energy from renewable sources by 2030 and to put the state on a course to having 100 percent of its energy needs provided by wind and solar energy and other sources by the middle of the century.

Much of the emphasis will be on the state level, which is why the gubernatorial race between Shapiro, the Democratic attorney general, and GOP state Sen. Mastriano is so critical.

Shapiro speaks easily about clean energy, says he believes that more electric-vehicle infrastructure investments must be made, and pledges strict monitoring of the state’s utility companies. But he has broken with Gov. Wolf over whether the state should join the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, known as RGGI, which puts a price and descending cap on carbon emissions. With an eye toward the power of the state’s building trades, he believes RGGI will be ineffective and will cause hardship among the state’s energy workers and companies.

As the state’s Democratic Senate candidate, Lt. Gov. Fetterman speaks of the climate issue as an “existential crisis” and argues that the jobs-versus-environment calculus represents a false choice. “We still need to make stuff in this country, you know?” A onetime advocate of a moratorium on new fracking sites, he now sees a rationale for a limited, perhaps temporary, expansion. “I have been steadfastly talking about how important it is that we retain the manufacturing jobs and the energy jobs in Pennsylvania that currently provide our energy security,” he said at a debate at Carnegie Mellon University, but added, “We also must acknowledge and recognize that we have to trend …. away from these.”

The Republican candidates in these two high-profile races take substantially different positions from their Democratic rivals. Oz, the Senate candidate, has abandoned his onetime advocacy of strict environmental regulation and calls for the “freedom to frack.” Mastriano, the Republican gubernatorial nominee, has argued that Wolf’s RGGI plan would “do far more harm than good” and this spring he submitted legislation to ban the federal government from regulating coal and gas extraction in Pennsylvania and to exempt the state’s industrial plants from the federal wastewater and air pollution rules. “We’re going to open up our energy sector like you’ve never seen,” Mastriano said at his victory celebration after he won the GOP primary.

A Monumental Figure

Unless we practice conservation, those who come after us will have to pay the price of misery, degradation, and failure for the progress and prosperity of our day.

— Gifford Pinchot

If there is one symbol of the tensions, perspectives, history and impulses of Pennsylvania in environmental matters it is not the gentle Audubon, who nurtured a love of birds in the heart and mind of the nation, nor the hard-faced leaders of power plants and coal mines. It is not the passionate Carson nor the resolute lobbyists who besiege the legislative chambers in Harrisburg. All are part of the Keystone State culture, but none of them personifies the colliding interests in this vital and emotional area of political conflict.

Only one person does, and that is Gifford Pinchot.

Today, Pinchot is largely a forgotten figure, overshadowed as a conservationist by John Muir, eclipsed as a visionary by Theodore Roosevelt. Today, Gaylord Nelson, the late senator from Wisconsin and the founder of Earth Day, is regarded as the political magus of the conservation movement, a title once plausibly claimed by Pinchot. Today the world regards Wangari Maath, the Kenyan activist who founded the Green Belt Movement and won the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize, as the most celebrated troubadour and warrior for the environment.

All these titles once belonged to Pinchot, a monumental figure who was the 28th governor of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. He served two terms in the Capitol and lived in a family home named Grey Towers, just outside the tourist town of Milford, Pennsylvania. The home is now a National Historic Site and home to the Pinchot Institute for Conservation, dedicated to fashioning innovative responses to conservation and environmental challenges.

Pinchot, who died in 1946, went to his grave with a green-plated resume: First chief of the U.S. Forest Service. Chief of the U.S. Division of Forestry. Head of the Pennsylvania forestry division. At one time, the term “Pinchotism” was derided in Congress by business interests the way “Reaganomics” was criticized by early 1980s Democrats—until Pinchotism, like Reagonomics, was redeemed in the public eye.

And yet Pinchot does not wear an unblemished hero’s halo in history. Until recent damaging disclosures, that belonged to his chief rival, John Muir, his one-time ally and patron, though the shine on Muir was darkened in 2020, when Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club that Muir helped found in 1892, cited him for having “made derogatory comments about Black people and Indigenous peoples that drew on deeply harmful racist stereotypes, though his views evolved later in his life.”

But in the long-ago conflict between Muir and Pinchot that spanned the period 1908 to 1913 and spilled over into later years is a story that captures the conflict at the heart of the environmental issue in the nation—and in Pinchot’s home state.

In the perspective of today, Pinchot had an ability, in the phrasing of his biographer, Char Miller, “to maintain what might seem like contradictory impulses—the desire to live simultaneously and within nature, to exult in its splendors while exploring its resources.” But in his titanic clash with Muir, Pinchot was cast as the bête noire of the movement he plausibly could claim to have helped create.

“Muir was all about preservation and Pinchot was about wise or multiple uses of the land,” Douglas Brinkley, the Rice University historian who wrote about the Pinchot–Muir conflict in his 2010 The Wilderness Warrior, said in an interview. “The dispute was over what was conservation. Muir became a folk hero through the long shadow of the Sierra Club but Pinchot never had a legacy organization group.”

The venue of the clash was the Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park, but its implications extended nationwide and the forces at play continue to collide in Pennsylvania. Pinchot, a close advisor and friend to Theodore Roosevelt, was caught in the vise created by the moral passion of conservationists and the physical thirst of Californians. San Francisco wanted water, early environmentalists worshiped wilderness. There was no middle ground, though Pinchot was caught in the middle of the struggle.

It was, as the Library of Congress would characterize it a century later, “a division between those committed to preserving the wilderness and those more interested in efficient management of its use.” The two combatants had conflicting profiles: Pinchot was an insider, Muir was an outsider. Thus Muir claimed the moral high ground as the protector of the outdoors. The battle between the two men had its origins in Muir’s evolution to a view that, as Miller characterized it in his monumental 2001 Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern Environmentalism, “the practice of forestry and the preservation of wilderness were incompatible, a tentative conclusion that would harden into conviction in the first years of the new century.” The result was temporarily to place Pinchot, politically if not emotionally—and supremely awkwardly—in the same camp as his traditional opponents, business executives with a lust for land and lucre.

Pinchot saw this issue as a struggle between “the extreme desirability of preserving the Hetch Hetchy in its original beauty” against the legitimate water needs of San Francisco and other communities in the Bay area. Muir, in a letter to Pinchot, said the proposal to flood the valley to provide water for “the dear people” was “full of graft,” later characterizing it as a moral outrage and a mortal threat to wilderness values. It was a classic confrontation between a master of the political world and a mystic of the natural world.

The struggle wore on for years. Later Pinchot would tell a congressional hearing that “injury to Hetch Hetchy by substituting a lake for the present swampy shore of the valley…is altogether unimportant when compared with the benefits to be derived from its use from a reservoir.”

In the end, Hetch Hetchy was flooded and, though Pinchot remained prominent in conservation circles—he was advising Franklin Delano Roosevelt on these matters as they related to the future United Nations as late as the World War II years—his reputation was no longer unsullied.

The crosswinds of the Hetch Hetchy controversy—the issues it raised, the passions it ignited, the arguments it prompted—now blow as a gale through Pinchot’s home state. They are the prevailing winds of Pennsylvania.

A Step in the Right Direction

A true conservationist is a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children.

— John J. Audubon

Coal once accounted for 60 percent of all electricity generated in Pennsylvania, a rate that has declined by more than half; today only a handful of large grid-connected coal-fired electric plants operate in the state. That represents a steep decline, though Homer City Generation said this spring that it would not follow through with tentative plans to deactivate its units in Indiana County. “This decreasing dependence on these sorts of plants shows we are going in the right direction in reducing climate-changing emissions from coal-fired plants,” said Hess, the former GOP environmental commissioner. “But it is mostly because of the competition between natural gas and coal. The problem is that we are now getting down to the point in the power sector that we can’t get additional big emission reductions. There aren’t more plants to close to give us those reductions. So we have to adopt other kinds of strategies.”

Pennsylvania has more than 86,000 miles of streams, more than any state in the lower 48. The miles of these waterways that can support brook trout are dwindling, in part because of climate change and in part because the invasion of the hemlock wooly adelgid insect has infected the shoreline hemlock trees that otherwise would provide shade for the streams.

This is only the latest incarnation of the centuries-long decline in the health of the state’s waterways. In the 18th century, the British army captain Harry Gordon pronounced the site of the confluence of Pittsburgh’s three rivers as “the most healthy, the most pleasant, the most commodious, the most fertile spot of Earth known to European people.” A century later, another British observer said that in Pittsburgh, “Man befouled the streams, bedraggled their banks, ripped up the cliffs, hacked down the trees, and dumped refuse in their stead.”

But the environmental crisis is not confined to western Pennsylvania. To take a random reading of air pollution in the state, Pennsylvania’s worst air quality on April 5 was in Mechanicsburg, outside Harrisburg, in the center of the state, followed by New Bloomfield, 23 miles away, according to IQ Air real-time figures. At the same time, Wilkes-Barre, with an average increased temperature of 3.3 degrees since 1970, substantially beats the average national rate of 2.6 degrees. So does State College, at an increase of 3 degrees.

Over the decades, the emphasis has changed from “conservation” to “stopping climate change,” with the threat of neighborhood contamination (the late 1970s), acid rain (the early 1980s), and the ozone hole (the mid 1980s) joined by global warming, a term introduced into the scientific and then the political lexicon when James Hansen, a NASA atmospheric expert warned a Congressional committee in 1988 that he and a set of climate modelers believed they could “confidently state that major greenhouse climate changes are a certainty.” He told the lawmakers that “the global warming predicted in the next 20 years will make the Earth warmer than it has been in the past 100,000 years.”

Opposition from an Unusual Coalition

To contemplate nature, magnificently garbed as it is in this country, is to restore peace to the mind, even if it does make one realize how small and petty and futile the human individual really is.

— Harold Ickes

Many of the political tensions in Pennsylvania were visible in the debate that began last year—and became even more bitter this year—over RGGI. Gov. Wolf made becoming a part of the alliance of 10 New England and Middle Atlantic states—and, as a result reducing Pennsylvania’s greenhouse gas emissions by as many as 227 million tons by 2030—one of the top priorities of his final year in office.

The result was opposition by an unusual coalition of Republicans and labor unions, who argued that the governor’s plan would reduce jobs in the state.

“The ‘jobs-versus-environment’ framework is almost always part of these debates,” said Christopher Borick, a political scientist at Muhlenberg College in Allentown. “Environmental laws are for the public good—to protect the health and well being of individuals—so it is hard to argue against that. So what do you use as your argument? Jobs. It is sometimes a false choice, and often the environmentally sensitive approach can be a good economic choice. But politically, it is very powerful argument even if the reality isn’t the case.”

Last December, the Republican-controlled legislature passed a resolution that would halt the governor’s effort to join RGGI. The governor then exercised his veto, citing technicalities in the resolution and arguing that joining the group “is a vital step for Pennsylvania to reduce carbon emissions and achieve our climate goals.” When a stay issued by the Commonwealth Court expired in late April, the Wolf administration went ahead and published the regulation, and in less than a day the odd-couple coalition of coal unions and coal companies went to court to fight the order, which required operators of power plants fired by coal and natural gas to buy allowances for every ton of carbon dioxide they emitted.

“I want to give $150 million a year to a board headed by organized labor,” the governor, referring to a trust fund to aid individuals displaced by the transition to sustainable energy sources, told Inside Climate News as the controversy raged. “What don’t they like about this?”

In a separate interview, state Sen. Wayne Fontana, the chairman of the chamber’s Democratic Caucus and a member of the Game and Fisheries Committee, described the resistance mounted by Republicans in the legislature as “a wedge to use against the Democratic gubernatorial candidate in the fall.” He said the state has taken substantial steps to address environmental threats, arguing, “We have done a lot with lead in the water, we have beaten up air and water polluters.”

A Lack of Urgency

And so we live in a time when change comes rapidly—a time when much of that change is, at least for long periods, irrevocable. This is what makes our own task so urgent. It is not often that a generation is challenged, as we today are challenged. For what we fail to do—what we let go by default, can perhaps never be done.

— Rachel Carson, accepting the Audubon Medal of the National Audubon Society in 1963

Now the challenge is global warming, which dwarfs the threat from 19th century industrial pollution and 20th century acid rain.

This past year did not have a silent spring when it came to the climate change issue. Indeed, the reports were more dire, the warnings more urgent, the lack of substantial attention more dangerous. The world, and Pennsylvania, face dramatic alternative outcomes from their actions or inaction. One choice might redound to cities underwater or lower energy consumption as a result of the creation of, in the characterization of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, of “compact, walkable cities.” Another might be a continued reliance on private, gasoline-powered automobiles, trucks and buses or the “electrification of transport in combination with low-emission energy sources, and enhanced carbon uptake and storage using nature.”

The April report of the IPCC, the United Nations group that assesses science in relation to global warming, was sobering if not chilling. The bottom line: Net emissions are continuing to rise. “It’s now or never, if we want to limit global warming to 1.5°C [2.7°F] without immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors,” said Jim Skea, co-chair of the working group that produced the latest report, “it will be impossible.”

That will require what the IPCC working group co-chair Priyadarshi Shukla described as “the right policies, infrastructure and technology…to enable changes to our lifestyles and behavior.” And it will require a combination of policies and planning.

“We are opposed to long-term planning here in Pennsylvania,” said Professor Tarr of Carnegie Mellon University. “We react to crises, and we do so inadequately. People here generally have no sense of urgency about these kinds of issues.”

David Shribman served as editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for 16 years and won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on American political culture as Washington bureau chief of The Boston Globe. He now writes a nationally syndicated column, contributes a separate column to The Globe and Mail in Canada, and teaches American politics at both McGill University’s Max Bell School of Public Policy and Carnegie Mellon University.

Countries and Deep Patternings: China

China’s High-Level Equilibrium Trap as a Concept

The Pattern of the Chinese Past
Mark Elvin
Paperback: 348 pages
Publisher: Stanford University Press; 1st edition (June 1, 1973)

The 1973 classic work in Sinology, Mark Elvin’s The Pattern of the Chinese Past gives the student an “exemplum” in the kind of scholarship that might be called “pattern-seeking.” Without such attempts, all of history becomes formless and shapeless and an endless parade of “routs and rallies,” and “crimes and follies and misfortunes” (in Edward Gibbon’s catchphrase).

Professor Elvin renders Chinese history through an economic perspective instead of using the common dynastic classification by attempting to answer three questions:

What contributed to the continuity of the Chinese empire?
Why was the Chinese economy the most advanced in the world from the Song dynasty (960-1279) up until the latter half of the Qing dynasty (mid-1800s)?
Why did China fail to maintain her technological advantage after the mid-fourteenth century while advancing economically?

In the first section of the book, the author elucidates the staying power of the Chinese empire was due to the following factors. The economics of defense in relation to the size of empire and the power of its neighbors never became an extreme burden that it rendered the state impotent for any consecutively long period of time. It was always able to reformulate itself after a short disunity or rule by a foreign power of the whole, which only happened twice within a two thousand year period (Mongol and Manchu rule). Two other factors that contributed to the continuity of the Chinese state include a relatively isolated existence from the rest of the Eurasian landmass and the important placed on cultural unity, beginning with the first emperor’s destruction of local records in order to quell local loyalties (pp. 21-22). Both of these factors had been built up over time through a revolution in communication and transportation.

The second section of the book analyses the causes of the economic revolution that occurred between the 8^th and 12^th centuries and the technological growth that accompanied it. The transformation of agriculture, especially in the south, was the major impetus that fueled the economic growth of this period. This revolution in agriculture had four aspects.

The preparation of soil became more effective as a result of improved or new tools and the extensive use of manure and lime as fertilizer.
Seed improvements allowed for double cropping.
Improvements in hydraulic techniques and irrigation networks.
Specialization in crops other than basic food grains (p.118).

Improvements in transportation and communications were almost as important as agriculture in growing the economy. Water transport saw big gains and led to the golden age of geographic studies and cartography, with envoys traveling as far away as Africa. Money and credit matured during this time helping to expand the economy. Paper money made its first appearance in 1024. Improvements in science, medicine, and technology also occurred during this period. However, despite all these advancements, “this period was the climax and also the end of many preceding centuries of scientific and technical progress” (p. 179). Although the Chinese economy continued to advance from the 14^th century on, albeit on a smaller scale, it was not accompanied by improvements in technology.

The last section deals with this phenomenon, describing the distinctive characteristics of this late traditional period (1300-1800), and then proceeding to point out why technological advancements did not keep pace with the growth in the economy. This period sees a rise of small market towns in the sixteenth century and a decline in contact with the non-Chinese world around the middle of the fifteenth century. Also, by the eighteenth century serfdom disappeared, aiding population growth, which had reached 400 million by the mid-1800s. Elvin interestingly points out that the highly sophisticated metaphysics that evaded Chinese intellectual thought during the Ming and Qing dynasties negated any deep scientific inquiry (p. 233). In the attempt to explain the lack of technological advancement, Elvin disputes a number of conventional explanations. Contrary to popular belief, there was enough capital during this period to finance simple technological advances, also there was minimal political obstacles to economic growth.

In short, Elvin believes “that in late traditional China economic forces developed in such a way as to make profitable invention more and more difficult. With falling surplus in agriculture, and so falling per capita income and per capita demand, with cheapening labor but increasingly expensive resources and capital, with farming and transport technologies so good that no simple improvements could be made, rational strategy for peasants and merchants alike tended in the direction not so much of labor-saving machinery as of economizing on resources and fixed capital. Huge but nearly static markets created no bottlenecks in the production system that might have prompted creativity” (p. 314). This condition is what he terms as a “high-level equilibrium trap.” The term “trap” to describe the condition of late imperial China’s technological advancement in relation to the economy is similar to Escape from Predicament, Thomas Metzger’s analysis of the “predicament” that confronted Chinese intellectual thought from the Song through to the end of the Qing dynasty. Both explanations have at their core the idea of late imperial China not being able to generate real sustainable progress internally, stating that it was the Chinese response to the Western threat in the mid to late 1800s that finally brought the needed change.

Education: Disease, History and Lit

The Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio lived through the plague as it ravaged the city of Florence in 1348. The experience inspired him to write The Decameron.

The Plague of 1665 in England was a major upheaval affecting Isaac Newton’s life.

The 1984 movie, A Passage to India (David Lean) set in 1920s India, has a scene where the ever-present lethal threat of cholera is discussed as Doctor Aziz lies sick of a fever.

The W. Somerset Maugham novel, The Painted Veil (2006 movie) is also about cholera in the Chinese countryside in the 1920s.

Manzoni’s 1827 The Betrothed, the most famous classic novel of Italian literature, centers on the plague to drive the story.

Overview:

Etymologically, the term “pest” derives from the Latin word “pestis” (pest, plague, curse). Hardly any disease had such cultural and historical relevance as the bubonic plague. Throughout the centuries, the plague was the most terrifying infectious contagious disease which generated a series of demographic crises. The plague epidemics influenced the evolution of society biologically and culturally speaking. The Black Death was one of the most devastating pandemics in human history, is estimated to have killed 30%–60% of Europe’s population, reducing the world’s population from an estimated 450 million to between 350 and 375 million in 1400. This has been seen as having created a series of religious, social and economic upheavals, which had profound effects on the course of European history. It took 150 years for Europe’s population to recover.

The plague returned at various times, killing more people, until it left Europe in the 19^th century. Modern epidemiology (Dr. John Snow, London) has its roots in cholera management and water sanitation as well as waste management.

Education involves seeing disease as a major protagonist in all history and not as a footnote.

The classic Plagues and Peoples should accordingly be studied by every student: Plagues and Peoples is a book on epidemiological history by William Hardy McNeill, published in 1976.

It was a critical and popular success, offering a radically new interpretation of the extraordinary impact of infectious disease on cultures and world history itself.