You can’t fix a problem you don’t understand correctly. And you can’t begin to understand a problem unless you see it as a problem. And you won’t perceive it as a problem unless it conflicts with some ideal of what you want the world to look like: a vision of the good (not just a vision of a fixed bad). In that spirit, here’s an outline of my ideal society...
Like scientists, medical doctors appreciate their own limitations. Yet they are tasked with making important decisions – possibly life-and-death decisions – despite not knowing for sure they’ve got it right. Wait and see? Try something? Try something else? All the while observing and thinking and investigating further. Doctors need to be willing to act boldly, willing to do nothing, and willing to change their minds.
Ideology is not a collection of beliefs and opinions. Ideology is a system of beliefs and opinions. The parts (beliefs and opinions) are interconnected and form a complex whole. The whole is organized according to some core principles or themes.
So I’ve been wrapping my head around possible ways to achieve the goal of keeping average global temperatures within 2°C of the 2000 level for remainder of 21st century. A huge expansion of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology would help – but how feasible is it? Currently, not very.
At any given moment the spotlight of awareness leaves almost everything in darkness. People vary in where they point their spotlight. Perhaps some people have a wider or more quickly oscillating spotlight, so they see more stuff. Or maybe it only seems so.
“Being” with the flow of thoughts and feelings, and not trying to cut them off through redirection of attention, can generate good things and bad things. Sometimes it helps to “be” with thoughts and feelings, to let them carry one along for awhile, for them to work themselves out, or for us to become desensitized to them, or for us to learn or change through them.
Making it a general principle to “accept, then redirect” thoughts - that is, to accept the initial manifestations of a thought stream and then redirect attention to the “present” – reflects low regard for what thought streams have to offer. The technique of labeling moods and emotions reflects a similar devaluation of emotional life.
Words point to something beyond themselves. When you “accept” a thought, that means you have not resisted an arbitrary stopping point in the potentially endless signifying.
Some patterns of thought are like family. A few words out of their mouths and you know where they’re going.
Summary so far: to keep average global temperatures within 2°C by 2100, we’ll need to be a lot more energy efficient, reproduce less (not exceeding 9 billion by century’s end), and get really good at increasing agricultural productivity so that lots of land can revert back to the wilds. Scenarios associated with RCP2.6 show how this might be possible.
The Ideological Square:
1. Exaggerate Our Good Things: Our vision is good and true
2. Exaggerate Their Bad Things: Their vision is evil and false
3. Minimize Our Bad Things: Our vision has no serious downside
4. Minimize Their Good Things: Their vision has no merit
RCP2.6 is one of the four Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) presented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) a few years ago. A scenario consistent with RCP2 is a global population of 9 billion in 2100, fairly robust global GDP growth, middling reforestation and wild habitat restoration, relatively less oil (and more natural gas) consumption than the other RCPs, and decent advances in carbon capture technologies van Vuuren et al (2011a).
Problem-solving when we’re in a good mood tends to be quick, flexible, creative, and intuitive. Problem-solving when we’re in a bad mood tends to be information-based, detail-oriented, systematic, and cautious. Then there’s problem-solving when we’re on the rebound from feeling bad to feeling good ...
“Rather than talking about the 1% and the 99% as if they were forever fixed, it would make much more sense to talk about the fact that Americans are likely to be exposed to both prosperity and poverty during their lives & to shape our policies accordingly.” - Mark R. Rank, “From Rags to Riches to Rags” New York Times, April 18, 2014
Relative affluence or poverty is less a matter of fixed groups than of lifespan. The young are poor, the middle-aged are gaining traction, the near-retired have peaked, and old age is a long decline - in wealth and income as well as health. When we're young, we're getting educated and sampling jobs - a process that can extend into our 30s.
Inequality is correlated with all sorts of bad things (at least if you look at subsets of the international data, which often includes different countries and time periods and doesn't control for outliers, mediators, moderators, and confounding variables). But we all know correlation is not causation...
The phrase “wandering thoughts” is interesting. Why not call the movement of thoughts “exploring thoughts”? From the outside, exploration may look like wandering. From the outside, you can’t see direction; you can’t see what is being sought. It’s all helter-skelter.
I just don’t see mild –sometimes very mild - stress as “suffering”. Occasional feelings of irritation, guilt, anger, shame, embarrassment, disappointment, frustration, chagrin, boredom, and all the rest of the less-than-positive spectrum of emotion are not a cause for alarm. These are not “toxic” emotions, unless you define them as such.
…the origin of thinking is some perplexity, confusion, or doubt. Thinking is not a case of spontaneous combustion; it does not occur just on "general principles." There is something specific which occasions and evokes it. (Dewey 2010, p 1)
What to do about climate change? Initiate the Process. The first few steps being: define the Problem, then specify what you want to accomplish (the goal) and what you want to avoid.