Timothy and I have been having an interesting (to me) discussion about the ideas presented in He Needed Killin' (thanks Tim!) - the notion that our gentrified societies have a sordid past and that this may be an unavoidable phase of social development.

It's an unsettling notion, not obviously true but intriguing none the less. That it is factually so for many developed societies, they did have such phases, doesn't prove that it is necessary for all societies. And it's important to emphasize that such behaviors must always be refuted: the acts of individuals in societies in extremis can't be public policy, can't be institutionalized or pardoned, since that road leads to social pathology. Even if they are necessary crimes, they are still crimes that civil society must punish to avoid losing its soul. The relevant quote from the referenced article is that:

Civil society cannot use the instruments of government to stamp out its mortal enemy—for that would be to invalidate and destroy the very principles and legitimacy of that government, and set in place a precedent by which normal political squabbles could in future be settled by genocide or the Gulag. It would be to do what Saddam did to the Kurds, what Turkey did to the Armenians, what the Soviets and Maoists and Khmer Rouge did to their bourgeoisie. . .

It would be The Terror, and lead to collapse rather than providing a foundation for durable social institutions, a crime that echoes through the generations and taints subsequent efforts to establish a just society.

Reasoning in good faith about large ideas given that the evidence is sparse, partial and often mistaken is difficult. Conclusions can only be speculative and tentative. It's the text book example of questions and theories that require the belief test: not can I believe, but must I believe? No, not this time. More thought and evidence is needed. It's an interesting question that has no clear answer.

I mention all this as preamble to another set of ideas with sweeping implications: the unavoidable collapse of European style social democracy resulting from stifled exuberance. The arguments that have been poppng up here and there lately are something like this.

1) Economic growth is reduced. The effects are minor in the short term but compound over time. In not very many years such societies become comparative paupers in the world, a fact which creates internal turmoil. The best and brightest emigrate, societies turn inward, extremist factions on every wing have fertile soil to sow the seeds of discontent.

2) Fertility rates drop, leading to demographic implosion. Societies become more aged, population declines. People are less productive and there are fewer producing even at the lower rate. There are more unproductive people - old and sick - in need of social support.

3) Unemployment rises. Even though production falls many have no jobs. This is a sort of social death. It denies social participation to those who have no place to stand and no hope of finding a place. This creates unrest, pathologies, and in time bifurcates society in ways far more profound than a simple income gap. Working at low wage or demeaning jobs at least keeps people involved in society, and provides a path to greater participation, an incentive to strive and acquire more valuable skills. Not all succeed but enough do so to illuminate the path and provide incentive for others to follow.

Must I believe? No, it's speculative. There is some evidence which can be interpreted to support this view, but a lot is left unexplained, and a few questionable assertions carry much of the argument. It's worth thinking about but certainty is elusive.

This may seem far afield from my usual concerns but there's a connection. The last graf of my last comment in the discussion with Timothy revealed how that subject connects to my core concerns.

For me, this is the same sort of problem the advocates for a war on climate change (and environmentalism in general) are making. They can't grasp the neither/nor aspect to see that giving such broad powers to governments creates a problem worse than the one they seek to cure. This isn't the subject to get deeply into here, but it may shine another light on what I see as a common mental error.

Interest in the failings of social democracy is similarly motivated. The mental error is the same, the desire to institutionalize everything, to stifle society in the hope of preventing all unsocial behavior. The specific connection is the desire to impose emissions controls on a world wide basis even though this would not mitigate the problem used to justify the imposition. It would not halt climate change.

But it would stifle America. Eliminating American economic exuberance would buy time for social democracy. If America had sluggish growth then the comparative decline of social democracies would be reduced or eliminated. The end result would be the same, but delayed. The American approach to climate change would, in contrast, accelerate the comparative decline. Technological development that would provide cheaper, more abundant energy without climate consequences would doom social democracy. Though such technologies would benefit them too, they would not do so to the same extent. They'd be left in the dust by more vibrant societies; not just the Americans but the Chinese and Indians as well.

Brad Allenby's recent column extends this thinking.

. . . consider two of the primary dialogs of our times that, while superficially quite different, are in fact disconcertingly similar in intent and tone. One is the current U.S. Administration's insistence on a continuing and constant threat of ubiquitous and unpredictable terrorism, a campaign which appears designed to (and does) create continuing fear and insecurity in the population (that the cultural animosity underlying whatever anti-US attitudes do exist is to a significant degree a result of Administration choices and policy is either supreme irony, Machiavellian brilliance, or incompetence, depending on who one listens to).

The second is the significant acceleration in stories and publicity regarding predictions of planetary disaster as a result of human activities, especially global warming. At least one of the agendas behind this appears to be a desire to create a sense of fear and even panic that, in turn, can be directed towards the reengineering of developed country societies, especially as regards consumption patterns (directly challenging consumption patterns and pressing for wealth redistribution is politically difficult, which is why positioning the need for such changes as unfortunate but necessary side effects of avoiding "planetary disaster" is much more effective). . .

Details of the catastrophic visions of Islamic terrorism and global warming are obviously different. Nonetheless, it is striking how such visions are being generated by the elites on the right and left to advance their idea of an appropriate society. In the case of the conservative elite behind the terrorism vision, for example, a primary goal seems to be to reengineer society to reflect "social conservatism" and to strengthen the “Christian values” basis of American society, and to institutionalize conservative domination of American politics. In the case of the liberal elite behind the climate change planetary disaster vision, a primary goal seems to be to reengineer society to a more agrarian, egalitarian, and reduced consumption state.

Behind these goals lie quite different teleologies: in the first case, a Golden Age that seems to include in somewhat jumbled order components of American exceptionalism, a relatively unsophisticated Christianity, and a medieval reintegration of religion into all aspects of life. In the second case, the teleology appears to be Edenic, a return to a Golden Age in a much simpler world strongly resembling Rousseau's idyllic state of nature. That both elites should seek instantiation of a Golden Age is not surprising, for the lure of such imaginary pasts is a common human characteristic; that both should choose the vehicle of catastrophic imagining as part of an effort to get there is intriguing.

Haven't we been here before? These aren't so much "two of the primary dialogs of our times" as two of the primary dialogs of all times.

Allenby is mistaken that "the cultural animosity underlying whatever anti-US attitudes do exist is to a significant degree a result of Administration choices and policy". Read a little history and you find that anti-Americanism is as old as America. It began in Europe, of course, but as other parts of the world came in contact with American power and wealth it most often resulted in yet more anti-Americanism. America is a threat to every other community since it is based on an idea rather than blood and soil. It is inherently evangelical.

He is also mistaken that "stories and publicity regarding predictions of planetary disaster as a result of human activities" is novel. This, after all, is Old Testament stuff. And "positioning the need for such changes as unfortunate but necessary side effects of avoiding "planetary disaster" is much not more effective" than "directly challenging consumption patterns and pressing for wealth redistribution". They're about the same. Neither will succeed. They both have a following but it's the same small following.

Curiously, Allenby seems to reach much the same conclusions.

Such catastrophic visioning does appear to work to some extent. But it is a costly tactic: by oversimplifying reality, catastrophic visions encourage adoption of policies and perspectives which are dysfunctional and fragile, rather than contributing to the complicated but stable governance systems appropriate to complex situations (the invasion of Iraq is a good example).

Kyoto is another example of policies and perspectives which are dysfunctional and fragile, though there are far worse policies and perspectives clamoring for public attention and support.

That such policies are broken is bad, but that's not their only harm.

Equally important, they end up undercutting the very interests they purport to be advancing. Thus, the association of anti-terrorism in the United States with loss of liberty and Constitutional protections, not to mention torture, destroys the moral stature of American culture at the very time when that is most critical. Similarly, the single minded focus on catastrophic global warming increasingly turns the complex and multifaceted challenge of environmental management in an increasingly anthropogenic world into a single issue discourse, and one which is increasingly being based on power politics rather than rational dialog. Such oversimplification trivializes their respective discourses.

For the manipulation of these discourses by determined elites does not mean that the underlying phenomena, be they terrorism or global climate change, are not real, or that they should not be of concern. Any viable catastrophic scenario in fact requires a certain core of realism. What it does mean is that a global governance system based on generation and exploitation of oversimplified emotional responses and fear is unlikely to be viable in the long term, and thus undercuts the political process and dialog necessary for real solutions in a highly complex world.

I say it more stongly. This isn't an equally important consequnce, it's the major negative consequence. A bad policy can be improved or simply abandoned, but a world soured on progress is very much harder to reform.

Politics is stupid and this is one of the clearest proofs of that truth.

Update:

A related commentary.

It seems that mere "climate change" was not going to be bad enough, and so now it must be "catastrophic" to be worthy of attention.

The increasing use of this pejorative term - and its bedfellow qualifiers "chaotic", "irreversible", "rapid" - has altered the public discourse around climate change.

This discourse is now characterised by phrases such as "climate change is worse than we thought", that we are approaching "irreversible tipping in the Earth's climate", and that we are "at the point of no return".

I have found myself increasingly chastised by climate change campaigners when my public statements and lectures on climate change have not satisfied their thirst for environmental drama and exaggerated rhetoric.

It seems that it is we, the professional climate scientists, who are now the (catastrophe) sceptics. How the wheel turns.

Mike Hulme, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, U.K., notes the nefarious underpinnings of this behavior.

Why is it not just campaigners, but politicians and scientists too, who are openly confusing the language of fear, terror and disaster with the observable physical reality of climate change, actively ignoring the careful hedging which surrounds science's predictions? . . .

What has pushed the debate between climate change scientists and climate sceptics to now being between climate change scientists and climate alarmists?

I believe there are three factors now at work.

First, the discourse of catastrophe is a campaigning device being mobilised in the context of failing UK and Kyoto Protocol targets to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide.

The signatories to this UN protocol will not deliver on their obligations. This bursting of the campaigning bubble requires a determined reaction to raise the stakes - the language of climate catastrophe nicely fits the bill.

Hence we now have the militancy of the Stop Climate Chaos activists and the megaphone journalism of the Independent newspaper, with supporting rhetoric from the prime minister and senior government scientists.

Others suggest that the sleeping giants of the Gaian Earth system are being roused from their millennia of slumber to wreck havoc on humanity.

Second, the discourse of catastrophe is a political and rhetorical device to change the frame of reference for the emerging negotiations around what happens when the Kyoto Protocol runs out after 2012.

The Exeter conference of February 2005 on "Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change" served the government's purposes of softening-up the G8 Gleneagles summit through a frenzied week of "climate change is worse than we thought" news reporting and group-think.

By stage-managing the new language of catastrophe, the conference itself became a tipping point in the way that climate change is discussed in public.

Third, the discourse of catastrophe allows some space for the retrenchment of science budgets.

It is a short step from claiming these catastrophic risks have physical reality, saliency and are imminent, to implying that one more "big push" of funding will allow science to quantify them objectively.

We need to take a deep breath and pause.

Money honey . . . and politics. My emphasis.

We need to develop sales resistance, an immune response since we are repeatedly exposed to this type of social disease.

Framing climate change as an issue which evokes fear and personal stress becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. By "sexing it up" we exacerbate, through psychological amplifiers, the very risks we are trying to ward off.

The careless (or conspiratorial?) translation of concern about Saddam Hussein's putative military threat into the case for WMD has had major geopolitical repercussions.

We need to make sure the agents and agencies in our society which would seek to amplify climate change risks do not lead us down a similar counter-productive pathway.

The IPCC scenarios of future climate change - warming somewhere between 1.4 and 5.8 Celsius by 2100 - are significant enough without invoking catastrophe and chaos as unguided weapons with which forlornly to threaten society into behavioural change.