Bill Totten's Weblog

Monday, April 19, 2010

A Blindness to Systems

by John Michael Greer

The Archdruid Report (April 14 2010)


"I feel my fate in what I cannot fear", poet Theodore Roethke wrote in his most famous poem, "The Waking". He could have been speaking for any of us; as individuals, communities, or societies, it's not the problems we dread but the ones we're unable to take seriously, or fail to recognize as problems at all, that end up dragging us down.

Some of the responses to last week's Archdruid Report post brought that point forcefully home to me. The theme of that post, as regular readers will remember, is that it's meaningless to talk about the efficiency of machines vis-a-vis human beings unless the costs of the whole system needed to produce, maintain, and operate the machines is compared to the costs of the whole system needed to do the same for the human beings. In response to the post, a flurry of critics on and off the comments page of this blog presented arguments that simply ignored the system costs I'd spent the entire post discussing. I would have had no complaints if they'd disagreed with my analysis, or even argued against the inclusion of system costs altogether - the logic of dissensus, the deliberate cultivation of divergent strategies, is as relevant to my work as it is anywhere else - but that's not what they did. Instead, they acted as though the issue of system costs had never been raised at all.


With unnerving predictability, in turn, those who want to dispute my suggestion simply insist that the internet will survive because it's technically feasible in a post-peak world, on the one hand, and desirable on the other. They don't challenge the economic issue; they don't address it at all; they simply raise their voices and talk even more loudly about the technical feasibility and desirability of the internet. What makes this all the more intriguing is that these are not stupid people; one and all, they're bright and, at least by the standards of the present age, well-educated; catch them on this one point, though, and the result is a mental equivalent of the famous Blue Screen of Death.

From a broader perspective, this same inability to think about whole systems pervades contemporary industrial culture. You don't have to go as far as the dwindling community of space-colony fans to find good examples, though that's one I'll be discussing down the road a bit; just notice how many people seem to believe that all the garbage and pollution they generate goes to a mythical place called "Away", or that the Earth will provide us with an infinite supply of crude oil if we just keep drilling holes in her. ("We can't be out of petroleum, we've still got drilling rigs left".) For that matter, the paralogical thinking that drives speculative bubbles - if everybody is going to get rich by investing in the gimmick du jour, what does that suggest will happen to the value of money? - has rarely if ever been as popular as it is in modern America, and it depends as completely on a blindness to the implications of whole systems as any of the points I've mentioned.

I'd like to discuss another example at this point, though, because it bears directly on one of the central themes I've been developing here in recent months. What would you say, dear reader, if I told you that I've come up with a way to eliminate unemployment in the United States - yes, even in the face of the current economic mess? What if I explained that it would also improve the effective standard of living of many American families and decrease their income tax burdens? And that it would also increase our economic resilience and sustainability, and simultaneously cause a significant decrease in the amount of automobile traffic on America's streets and highways? Would you be all for it?

No, dear reader, you wouldn't. Permit me to explain why.

Right now, many two-income families with children in the United States are caught in a very curious economic bind. I haven't been able to find statistics, but I personally know quite a few families for whom the cost of paid child care and one partner's costs for commuting, business clothes, and all the other expenses of employment, approaches or even exceeds the take-home pay of one partner. Factor in the benefits of shifting to a lower tax bracket, and for a great many of these families, becoming a single-income family with one partner staying out of the paid work force would actually result in an increase in disposable income each month.


The difference in each case - and examples like this could be multiplied manyfold - is made by the household economy. Economists like to dismiss the household economy as inefficient, but it's worth remembering that "efficiency" in current economic jargon is defined as labor efficiency - that is an economic process is considered more efficient if it uses less human labor, no matter how wildly inefficent it is in any other sense. Economists also like to dismiss the household economy because it lacks economies of scale, and here they're on firmer ground. Still, there's another factor that more than counterbalances this; much of the value of an employee's labor - as much, as Marxists like to remind us, as the employer can get away with taking - goes to support his employer, while all of the value produced by labor in the household market remains with the family and is used directly, without being mediated through the money economy.



Now of course that touches on one of the most volatile issues touching on the household economy, the politics of gender. For complex cultural reasons, a great many feminists in the 1960s and 1970s came to believe that working for one's family in the household economy was a form of slavery, while working for an employer in the money economy - often under conditions that were even more exploitative - was a form of liberation. Now it's certainly true that assigning people to participation in the household economy by gender was unfair, but it's equally true that assigning them to participation in the money economy on the same basis was no better; for every woman whose talents were wasted in a housewife's role, there was arguably a man whose life would have been much happier and more productive had he had the option of working full time in the household economy.


Let's grant at the outset, therefore, that there's no particular reason why people of one gender ought to be more active in the household economy than people of the other; let's assume that a great many men will make the choice I did, and work full time in the household economy while the women in their lives work full time for a paycheck. On that basis, is there a point to two-income families shifting gears and becoming families that combine one cash income with a productive household economy? Of course there is, and now more than ever.





Let's just say I'm not going to hold my breath. In fact, dear reader, I'm quite confident that even if you belong to that large group of married couples with children who could increase your disposable income by giving up that second job, you won't do it; in fact, you won't even run the numbers to see whether it would work for you - and the reason you won't is that you're so mesmerized by that monthly check of $2000 a month take-home, or whatever it happens to be, that you can't imagine giving it up even if you have to spend $2200 a month to get it. That is to say, dear reader, that if you don't think in terms of whole systems, the fact that the system costs of that second job might just outweigh the benefits will be as incomprehensible to you as a computer would have been to a medieval peasant.

The extraordinary blindness to whole systems that pervades our collective consciousness these days is a fairly recent thing - as recently as the 1970s, talk about system costs got far fewer blank stares and non sequiturs than it does today - and I doubt it will last long in historical terms, if only because the hard edge of Darwinian selection separates adaptive cultural forms from maladaptive ones with the same ruthlessness it applies to genetics. While it remains in place, it will likely cause a great deal of damage, but that in itself will tend to accelerate its replacement with some less dysfunctional habit of thought. Ironically, the Theodore Roethke poem with which I started this post offers a cogent reminder of that. It begins:

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.




Bill Totten


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