Climate change: Karl Marx, Charles Darwin and the Koch brothers.

OK, what do these guys have to do with climate change?  Well, when I thought about it – quite a bit. First, let’s quickly say it and move on: climate change is a FACT, it’s happening, it’s getting really serious and I don’t have time to argue that one anymore. I’ll just refer to former US President Jimmy Carter who in a recent speech referred to climate-change deniers as “nutcases”. I agree sir. 

Our CO2 production is out of control. The levels in the atmosphere started to climb with industrialization which has brought us the modern world. As a result I’m sitting in a warm house typing this on my computer, and looking forward to driving to my mother-in-law’s for Thanksgiving. All those things are pumping CO2 into the atmosphere, except perhaps for a small fraction of my electricity that comes from nuclear and/or wind power. This growing CO2 production is basic to our modern society but is at odds with our survivability. I’m daring to suggest that the solution will need to go far deeper than whether we increase the gas tax or stop the Keystone pipeline. Good first steps but nowhere near addressing the fundamental issue which is the way we run our modern societies and how that simply doesn’t fit either with human nature or the way the planet works. 

I had already begun to think in this radical way (in some parts of this country they’d use a stronger word about me) when, in the December 4^th issue of the New York Review of Books, a review by Elizabeth Kolbert of a new book by Naomi Klein caught my eye. Ms Kolbert’s review was entitled Can Climate Change Cure Capitalism?, and Klein’s new book is This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. So far I’ve only read the review, but this certainly got me thinking.

For decades, particularly in America since WWII, the argument has been ‘Yeah, OK, so some of these big capitalists can be a bit ruthless at times but the wealth they create will keep trickling down and eventually we will all benefit.’  And for a while perhaps it did work fairly well. But now the excess of greed, and the use of these billions to basically buy elections led a recent Princeton University study to declare that the USA now no longer qualifies as a fully democratic society! And there’s been very little trickle down during the last few years of economic recovery while a bunch of billionaires have hugely grown their wealth. And meanwhile, Congress does nothing to curb greenhouse gases. I wonder why?

It used to be said that what was good for General Motors was good for America. At least they make cars for the general public’s use and employ people at fairly reasonable salaries thanks to the UAW. Now it’s what’s good for the Koch brothers who own a large share of the filthy Alberta tar sands, or the Walmart family who pay outrageously low wages.

Put simply: I do not think unfettered capitalism, which is what we have in America now, is sustainable. Not for a democracy where ordinary people need to feel they’re getting a fair deal, and not if we are to avoid a climate disaster, and all that that involves including agricultural collapse in some important regions of this country and other parts of the world. We live on a ball with limited resources, and simple logic should point to the fact that we cannot continue to increase in population and consumption. There is a limit. We need a political and economic system that will work within these constraints, and work because it better fits our human natures, the way we naturally, genetically, are created to relate with one another.

I went on the website capitalism.org and the first thing it presented to me, front and center, was this quote from Ayn Rand: “The moral justification of capitalism does not lie in the altruist claim that it represents the best way to achieve ‘the common good.’ The moral justification of capitalism lies in the fact that it is the only system consonant with man’s rational nature.”  Wrong again lady.

Before you think I’m about to sing the praises of Karl Marx – he got it doubly wrong. Karl bought into the pre-Darwinian, Lamarckian idea that creatures, including humans, were molded by their environment, plus he assumed that pre-civilization people were all well-behaved and we’d only been made brutal by feudalism and then capitalism. To be fair the Communist Manifesto was published eleven years before On the Origin of Species (1859). Karl never read Charles’ book. His colleague Friedrich Engels did and wrote Marx basically saying: ‘We’ve got a problem’. Put simply, Marxist philosophy is unscientific and is out of step with how human nature works.  Not too surprisingly therefore the two great communist (or former communist) countries, Russia and China have nothing to offer in terms of tackling climate change. China has now become the world’s largest polluter constantly building more and more coal-run power-stations, because they have the coal. And dear old Russia, now the second most polluted country, is getting what foreign currency it can from exporting oil and gas. Great! So no solution there.

The industrialists who developed modern capitalism in the late 19^th, early 20^th centuries latched onto the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’, (which does not come from Darwin and which promotes a distortion of Darwin’s theory), in effect saying ‘we’re endowed with more smarts than the masses, (have less foibles about ripping others off), and so we’re ‘fitter’ and therefore deserve a larger portion of the pie’.  This is at least closer to what human nature can be like, but there are some flaws and oversimplifications in this approach as well.

We have to remember that what we’re looking for is a system that is in sync with human nature, and is sustainable both on the large scale – i.e. globally – and on the long term; for several centuries, not just decades, into the future. We can get insights as to how our bodies and minds work best by studying how humans lived for thousands of years in the past. Why? Because we have evolved to fit that environment and we evolve very slowly. Here we learn not only how to live healthily in terms of food and exercise, but how we have learned to live with our neighbors. It’s a good news, bad news story. We can have a tendency to mistrust the stranger, even fear him, because for thousands of years our ancestors lived in relatively small groups, not sure about the strange people the other side of the mountain. But the corollary of this is that humans are intensely social creatures. We love our families, we help our neighbors, we donate blood and even organs, and some even sacrifice their lives for others. This is not that common amongst animals. Altruism is not just a good idea, it is literally in our genes. Ayn Rand was doubly wrong because she claimed that humans were rational and pooh-poohed altruism. We’re not overly rational but we can be altruistic. And this is the good news.

We need to build societies that are sustainable over the long run in terms of consumption, and we need to base them on social systems that encourage the best in us towards each other, that encourages that built-in altruism, working with the way we’re built.  I’m an agnostic, but in each of the religious traditions around the globe there are teachings and communities that bring out the best in people. In the political and economic realm I hesitate to put words to it but ‘social democracy’ or ‘democratic socialism’ come to my mind, and countries such as Denmark which has the least super rich and the least poor of any nation have my interest. We surely can and must find a way of caring for each other and for the planet, and for the future generations. 

Happy Thanksgiving !