The Endless War

I bet you think this piece is about getting out of Afghanistan. It is not. It is about another war that has been hot and cold since the founding of the United States. Of late it has heated up again, taken on the nuances of the 21st Century, and raged like a forest fire in the Rocky Mountains. Its essence is two conflicting narratives about the direction America needs to take.
One narrative is espoused by environmentalists, liberals, and climate change adherents. It is best encapsulated in the treatise called The Tragedy of the Commons first named and described by Garrett Hardin in 1968. The other narrative embraced by conservatives, free market enthusiasts, and libertarians is probably best articulated in Matt Ridley’s latest book, The Rational Optimist, the thesis of which I would suggest is represented by the phrase The Comedy of the Infinite.
Hardin uses Alfred North Whitehead’s definition of tragedy: “The essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things…This inevitableness of destiny can only be illustrated in terms of human life by incidents which in fact involve unhappiness. For it is only by them that the futility of escape can be made evident in the drama.” I am using a simple literary definition of comedy: a work that ends happily.
Until I had read Ridley’s book, I had never run across a more complete, comprehensive articulation of the conservative perspective on why we should not concern ourselves with so many of the fears that liberals are constantly fussing about, like coal-mining, gas drilling, off shore oil extraction, greenhouse gases, nuclear energy, population bombs, or genetically modified crops. Ridley is not only firmly but absolutely convinced that the combination of technology, free markets, and his perception of human nature will lead the world toward greater prosperity and well being so long as governments and pessimists don’t get in the way. Even Africa will prosper sooner or later.
From the beginning of the book I tried to float along with the flow of his argument as well as I could, leaving all of my usual liberal snags to puncture my raft of hope another day, and by the end of the book I was actually asking myself, what if?…what if Ridley is right? Then I began to have my doubts. My old liberal cautions kicked in, the BP disaster in the Gulf surfaced in my mind once more, and I was back to hosting a panoply of fears I have about the future of the planet and the human race.
Then I recalled Garrett Hardin’s thesis, The Tragedy of the Commons, and realized that it represented one of the most distilled forms of the liberal-environmental perspective. It also stood nearly in direct opposition to the optimism of Ridley. First and foremost, it insists that there are no technical solutions for some problems. He uses the example of the conclusion reached by Wiesner and York about the nuclear arms race: “It is our considered professional judgment that this dilemma has no technical solution.” Hardin then goes on to say that population is one of those problems. He cites Malthus, the finite planet, and the “fact” we must somehow plan to make better use of diminishing finite resources and meanwhile begin to develop sustainable ones.
Ridley, on the other hand, disputes Malthus. Ridley believes that there is sufficient evidence scattered around the planet today that by increasing prosperity through free markets and global economic development we are seeing a leveling off of population growth in countries or regions that have attained a level of prosperity and education well above subsistence. All we have to do is encourage or invest in those regions that have yet to achieve such a level, and all will be well. The big IF for Ridley is getting rid of political corruption that interferes with the natural tendency for people to develop market economies. If governments can be brought to focus primarily on improving infrastructure and avoid interference, then they will literally and figuratively pave the way for progress.
As far as resources are concerned, Ridley has nearly absolute faith in technology. He believes we will develop better sustainable sources of energy in the future, but meanwhile we should continue to drill for gas and oil, mine coal if we can find a way to make it clean, and especially get back in gear with nuclear energy. He believes it is safe, clean, and cheap in the long run. Continued use of all of those resources will buy time for technology to evolve to make solar power efficient. On the other hand, he has little use for ethanol from crops or wind power.
As far as climate change is concerned, Ridley thinks it may very well go the way of acid rain after the 1970’s and 80’s. He also cites the “fact” that polar bear populations are actually increasing. However, he may be confusing actual polar bears with polar bear club membership, and perhaps he himself has taken a few too many dips in frigid water. Nevertheless, his optimism, regardless of the prevailing scientific data, does not have room for fears about climate change. It is at worst a blip on the cosmic screen of inevitable progress.
In The Tragedy of the Commons Hardin cites Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776) as the book that “contributed to a dominant tendency of thought that has ever since interfered with positive action based on rational analysis, namely, the tendency to assume that decisions reached individually will, in fact, be the best decisions for an entire society.” He then goes on to explain his famous tragedy of the commons using cow herdsmen and a common pasture. Sooner or later, as each cow herder grows his herd, the capacity of the common pasture is exceeded. The individual freedom of each herdsman to expand his herd ultimately destroys the commons. “Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.”
The Comedy of the Infinite, on the other hand, presents a different world view. Ridley not only cites Smith as a primary initiator of his thesis but turns to Friedrich Hayek as the author of the defining term which Ridley adopts: catallaxy. Catallaxy is “spontaneous order created by exchange and specialization.” It is this concept on which Ridley and Hayek base their optimism. Ridley insists that “[i]t will be hard to snuff out the flame of innovation, because it is such an evolutionary, bottom-up phenomenon in such a networked world.”
From recalling Hardin and reading Ridley, I am left with the notion that perhaps we should stop being so pessimistic and trust in our capacity as human beings to make the world a better place. We simply need to be smarter about it and not reckless and cavalier. Neither pure self-interest nor pure environmentalism is the rational answer, although both camps claim reason as their guide. Warring camps of ideological purity will get us nowhere. We need the best minds from both sides of this endless debate to work together, not win at all costs. One side by itself will lead us to resource depletion and planet desecration; the other will lead us back to subsistence. Neither alternative is a wise path.
Accepting that Adam Smith’s “guiding hand” that leads self-interest to naturally contribute to the greater good is as comforting to a liberal as asking NFL football players to call penalties on themselves. There need to be referees to make sure unnecessary economic disasters don’t occur because someone cheated or got greedy. The recent debacle on Wall Street is a case in point. There were no actual referees.
On the other hand, too much regulation can stifle economic growth and innovation. There need to be enough rules to keep economies pointed in a positive direction without benefiting the few at the expense of the many as happened on Wall Street in 2008. Keeping the spring of innovation bubbling and the prosperity trickling down is what government should be promoting and often accomplishing by actually getting out of the way.
It seems we should follow the old Quaker proverb: Proceed as the way opens. And we should do as much as we can to anticipate the unintended consequences of our deliberate as well as spontaneous evolution. To err is human, but to evolve is natural. Pointing all of our useful human institutions toward the greater good is the noble task before us.
The concept of sustainable growth is the hybrid term that best describes the ideal merger of environmental and economic principles. Enterprises that pursue genuine sustainable growth are those that will be the fittest and survive in a knowledge-based world. All others will fall away. It is the only path remaining. Sustainable Growth addresses both The Tragedy of the Commons and The Comedy of the Infinite by focusing on long-term large scale thinking rather than short term or selfish thinking. Saying that the market or the individual is enough to bring this about is to throw logic and knowledge under the bus. It does not rule out competition; it does not put growth in the hands of government. It simply says that, as a primary operating principle, sustainability and growth must be symbiotic if the human species is to have a future. Getting everybody to think that way is everybody’s job, not IBM’s or the Government’s. It is taking Adams Smith’s principle of self-interest and simply educating it to have greater reach and scope. It is about always putting long term sustainable growth ahead of short term gain.
Finally, making this ageless debate into a war of conflicting certainties is no way to behave or accomplish anything. Both sides are right to some degree, and wrong to some degree. Neither side has absolute truth in hand. If you think the war in Afghanistan needs to end, this ideological war between the right and the left needs to de-escalate back to a statesman-like debate with each side recognizing the essential goodness in the other’s perspective with the goal of finding common ground.
After all, I am word processing this piece on a Toshiba laptop and not etching it on the side of a smoke-filled cave.