The most foolish and destructive segment of the political class is that which seeks to develop and promote "visions", narratives that spin a yarn about some cherished future that can be achieved if only extraordinary powers are granted to government. They justify this unseemly behavior with "visions" of doom and crisis. They select negative information about the present and warn of dire futures that will occur if they are not given power.

It has worked in the past, monsters have seized control of societies, but it's getting harder to do.

According to a recent study published in the May issue of SAGE Publications' journal, American Politics Research, researchers conclude that young Americans' political views are negatively impacted by watching the popular The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, which airs late night on Comedy Central as a 'fake-news program.' . .

The study was conducted utilizing video clips from The Daily Show and CBS Evening News, a more mainstream television program that aired coverage of the 2004 presidential candidates, followed by a questionnaire. The results showed that the participants tended to rate both candidates more negatively when exposed to The Daily Show. In addition, their views of the political system as a whole were more cynical.

Politics is not only stupid, it's comic. Pundits worry about "political exhaustion", declining interest in politics and politicians of all stripes, but this misses an important aspect of current reality. It isn't that society is exhausted after having partied heartily for too long, it's that familiarity breeds contempt. When you pay attention to politics, politicians and political approaches to social organization it isn't difficult to see through the glitz and hype to notice that there's no there there, the would be emperors are indeed naked.

This is important to grasp. No matter what our troubles may be, politics and governance have nothing to offer. Politicians and their advisors do not know what is going on, and have no policies that will help. The more attention and resources they consume the worse the problems will be. Consider this case:

Ecology has long been a descriptive science with real but limited links to the policy community. A new science of ecology, however, is emerging to forge the collaborations with social scientists and decision makers needed for a bright green future.

Uh-oh, the dim green dullards are trying a slightly different approach to munging up society. There's nothing new about ecologists seeking to intrude in politics and governance - we have decades of poor policies based on dodgy prescriptions from ill-informed ecologists with childish notions about social systems as evidence of the bankruptcy of this approach. It's old wine in old bottles with amateurish new labels hastily applied and awkwardly skewed.

"Scenarios with positive visions are quite different from projections of environmental disaster..Doom-and-gloom predictions are sometimes needed, and they might sell newspapers, but they do little to inspire people or to evoke proactive forward-looking steps toward a better world. Transformation requires evocative visions of better worlds to compare and evaluate the diverse alternatives available to us ... Although we cannot predict the future, we have much to decide. Better decisions start from better visions, and such visions need ecological perspectives.

This is false. Better decisions come from better information, not better visions. Bad decisions come from visions. Tarting them up with ecological perspectives won't change this invariant truth. Obscuring reality with overlays and filters carefully designed to distort perceptions can't possibly be useful, it's merely a way for charlatans to make a sale, gain power and exploit society.

Ecologists lack useful information. All of the edifices they seek to build crumble because their foundations are made from silly putty. The classic example of this was discussed in the post Habitat Management which told how Paul Ehrlich nearly destroyed the habitat of the butterfly he wanted to protect because he had no useful knowledge of range management ecology. He excluded large grazers (cattle) from the range arguing that they harmed the sward. This in turn altered the species composition of the sward in destructive ways that in the end eliminated the food plants the butterflies lived from. This lack of understanding of complex multi-species interactions is still a defining characteristic of ecologists.

There is a tipping point when the stocking level of herbivores is about 5. Above the tipping point, grassy vegetation disappears and the grazing system collapses. As the tipping point is approached from low levels of herbivores, the standard deviation of grass biomass rises sharply before the tipping point is reached. If the herbivore level is rising slowly enough, the rise in standard deviation could provide advance warning of impending collapse. If the pastoralist was attentive to the warning, sheep numbers could be reduced in time to prevent the collapse.

Reality is no where near that simple. No two days, weeks, years, ranges, herds or graziers are alike but even more importantly no range manager uses "stocking level" to measure impact. It is "grazing intensity" - the combination of stocking rate and duration at a specific time and place - that is used to measure impact. This is a more useful measure because the productivity of the sward is so variable. It depends not just on soil nutrients and moisture but also on photo-period and species mix. Mismanagement at any point alters subsequent productivity of the sward and so the productivity of the grazers and all of the other species in the sward.

Ecologists, especially those entranced by models and computers, mistake precision for accuracy. They may be able to fool careless thinkers who are impressed by authority and nice power point graphs, but not those who have some useful information about the subject.

These precise but inaccurate models are what these politicized ecologists seek to base policy on. It will just make a mess of things. When that happens, again, they will claim to have learned from the experiment and now have a minty fresh version and vision, and since things are now much worse we need them even more. Lather, rinse, repeat.

However ignorant ecologists may be they are still the best we have. Even Ehrlich had some useful information though it was of such a tiny domain that there were no useful policy applications. And the idea of ecologists collaborating with other disciplines makes sense. That's what socio-ecology is about, the realization that human society is part of every ecological system and that failure to include them in analyses guarantees failure. But it must go further to include practitioners and other stake holders. It isn't just that the various academic towers need to collaborate with one another, they need to collaborate with real people with boots on the ground. Academics need to grok that they are profoundly ignorant about critical issues, and that real people know more than they do about some important things.

Once you grasp the reality of the situation the notion of visions, leadership, governance and power politics is obviously nonsense. The "vision" is distributed across all the people and things of the system; embodied in knowledge, methods and culture and so not knowable by any subset of society. The only useful thing that any individual or group can do is to be more honest and mindful, to do better work and communicate their meager knowledge more clearly.

Everyone both produces and consumes knowledge. You must be able to take a lesson as well as give one. What you do with that knowledge is necessarily an individual decision. The messy method of the politicians noted above - make a mess, learn from failure, try again - is only a problem on a large scale. At the individual or group level it is exactly the right thing to do so long as the results of each "experiment" are widely communicated so that others can learn from those mistakes too. Many simultaneous experiments with variable results communicated widely is a learning machine, a discovery machine, the very best method. Though there are failures there are also successes and the net result is as good as can be. Not perfect, not precise, but more accurate.

Governance institutions can make a humble contribution to society by helping to increase the speed and volume of information exchange among the principals and by removing impediments. They can't control or even guide society since they don't - and can't - know what is useful. They can't optimize, they can't even know what to optimize. That can only be seen in hindsight, and even them only partly understood. In this sense Google (and the net in general) is the best governance institution we have or ever have had. Though there is a lot of misinformation and disinformation clogging things up it is the best we can do. Trying to filter the spew at a high level would unavoidably degrade it. We each must develop our own filters and share them around.

Ecologists and other disciplines could become more useful, more helpful, by doing a better job of investigating and reporting. Getting in bed with government is the worst thing they can do. The dim green dullards are the bad example, the cautionary tale about how careers are ruined and resources squandered, harming society. A few may make a living off the hype and grift, but it's a dirty and wasteful industry that needs to green itself up.

Update:

I long for society in which chefs are more important than politicians. This is a sign of progress.