Glad Tidings

The eleventh day of Gheorghemas will grace your gleeful existences before the end of the weekend (but not before the release of the new Weeknd), but to tide you over, we've got a story that'll make you want to party like it's 1999, or at Ground Zero. Whatever one does when the world's end is nigh,

We're a deeply unserious people, and most of the time I'm cool with that. Whimsy is our stock in trade, after all. But one would think that we'd be paying more attention to the news that came out of the American Geophysical Union's (AGU) annual meeting in December. (Doesn't help that most Republicans hate unions and science - doubly whammy.)

Researchers presented findings at the AGU suggesting that the Thwaites glacier in Antarctica is deteriorating so rapidly that it might collapse completely as soon as three years from now.

Thwaites, what?

That big bastard is 80 miles wide and over 3,000 meters deep. It's known in scientific circles as the Doomsday Glacier, because of a belief that its demise could set in motion a climatic cycle that might result in the collapse of the entire Antarctic glacial shelf, and with it a radical reshaping of the global climate. Now, researchers from the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration (ITGC) - which is a terrible name for a band - believe that we're irreversibly headed that way.

Among other outcomes, scientists believe that the collapse of Thwaites could raise global sea levels by as much as two feet, which would swamp coastal habitats around the world. And since Thwaites is an influential sort of fella (I assume glaciers are dudes. Hard to really check.) it's possible that it'll drag neighboring glaciers with it as it melts from above and below, which could raise sea levels by as much as ten feet. We'd better get as much OBFT joy in as possible over the next couple of years, and I wouldn't recommend investing in real estate in Miami, if I were you.

It's the end of the world as we know it, friends. And I feel fine, if slightly hungover.

We Had a Good Run

Au contraire, aphorism!

I am, by nature, an optimist. To be more specific, I'm lazy, so I assume most things are likely to work out, so I expect the best. With a few exceptions, mostly concerning things that don't matter all that much in the grand scheme of things, that philosophy has worked for me.

This places me at odds frequently with lawyers who work for my company. I argue on the regular that the risks they're pointing out in customer contracts are extremely unlikely to be made manifest, and regardless, they're risks I'm willing to accept. Out my way, counselor! I've got a business to run.

On that front, I've yet to be caught out. Largely because experience tells me that even if we screw something up with a customer, if we've built a good relationship, we can work it out without running the contract or the company into a ditch.

I say all this as preface to the main point of this essay, which is that our society is fucked because our collective experience doesn't matter at a time when too many of the foundational norms of our body politic have turned to quicksand.

It's been coming for a minute. We were shocked when Newt Gingrich decided to shut down the Federal Government back in the 90s because such a thing was unthinkable. (Whitney was less shocked than really happy for the time off.) Imagine what we'd have said back then if we were told that a sitting Congressman had Tweeted an anime video depicting the murder of a colleague and a threat to the President?

First, we would've said, "what the fuck does 'Tweeted' mean, and what is an anime?". But then after someone explained those post-modern societal features, we'd have not believed such a thing possible. Surely, though, we'd expect such a norm-violator to be roundly and unanimously sanctioned by fellow legislators. 

And just as surely, we'd have been wrong. 207 members of the House of Representatives, all Republican, did not see fit to censure Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) for Tweeting such a video about fellow Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). I understand political opponents strongly disagreeing with Rep. Ocasio-Cortez's policy views, because she's on the leftmost side of the spectrum. I do not for a moment understand how even jokey threats of violence became acceptable political discourse among adherents of one of our two major political parties. For her part, AOC's words are hard to argue with, and fell entirely upon the deafest of ears amongst those who most needed to hear them.

After his censure, Gosar once again Tweeted the offending video. Because he's a toddler meathead fuck.

Outside of the realm of politics, outrage has become one of the surest paths to profit. Alex Jones, Charlie Kirk, Jason Whitlock, Clay Travis, Jack Posobiec, and the retinue of grifting angermongers that queue up alongside them to monetize our divisions are as smart as they are opportunistic. There's gold in them thar clicks. 

Good job, good effort

This reliable group of rage amplifiers team up with shadowy manipulators like the Koch Brothers to drive real outcomes in our world. The wholly specious Critical Race Theory nonsense centered in my county this autumn was birthed by a dude named Christopher Rufo, funded by a Byzantine network of folks who couldn't find Loudoun County on a map, handled poorly by Terry McAuliffe, and deftly exploited by Glenn Youngkin all the way to the Governor's mansion in Richmond.

Tom Nichols, author of The Death of Expertise and a reliable chronicler of the decline of civil engagement assesses things well in an excellent newsletter piece in The Atlantic.

Unfortunately, we’ve become a nation, to steal a line from Peggy Noonan, of “sullen paranoids,” in which millions of us have embraced a toxic combination of fantasy and stupidity. This is more than just the revival of conspiracy theories, which always lurk just beneath the surface of every society. This is far worse. From “microchips in the vaccines” to QAnon, from Venezuelan voting machines to Russian-hacked voting machines, from faked moon landings to “January 6 was antifa or the FBI or maybe both,” too many of our fellow citizens are adrift, lost, freaked-out, and willing to believe almost anything, especially if it helps to support their preexisting political narratives and tribal loyalties.

I could go on, but most readers of this here blog have at least a passing understanding of the things Dr. Nichols and I describe. That's all setup for this punch line.

I don't think there's a way back, at least in my lifetime.

Partisan division was once about policy with a soupcon of racism thrown in. And yes, the Democrats were the racists. Or, to be clear, the more racist party. Now division a cultural touchstone. 59% of Republicans in a recent poll agreed that supporting Donald Trump was a prerequisite to being a member of the GOP. Not supporting a strong military, or lower taxes, or small government. Supporting Donald Trump. To harvest liberal tears, one assumes. A goddamn vaccine, something we give our children 29 times before they're 18 months old, became a symbol of which team you're on. We are a deeply unserious people.

And given the state of legislative gerrymandering, the GOP's generally better organization, the pandemic's continued drag on...well, everything, it's highly likely that the 2022 elections are dismal for Democrats. Which will send us into a deeper spiral of bad governance, rewarding political extremism  and escalating anger on both sides.

It will, my friends, get much worse before it gets better.

Reasonable minds may disagree, and Nichols suggests a path, saying, "But I am convinced (and I’ll return to this theme in the future in this newsletter) that the remedy for saving our corroded public life lies within ourselves rather than through the law and regulation. Turning to someone you know and telling them that the Earth is round, that vaccines work, that JFK Jr. is as dead as Julius Caesar—and that you are not willing to argue about it for three hours—is not an act of hostility. It’s an act of civic virtue, of friendship, even of love. And we need to do more of it."

I hope he's right and I'm wrong. But history suggests I rarely am, at least in matters of Trump-inspired politifuckery.

I'm having a hard time staying optimistic. I hear people in Norway are pretty happy with their lot in life. And if we keep fucking the environment, it'll be a lot easier to get my hygge on with the new climate in my pad in Oslo. Doors always open for you lot.

Better Angels > Shittier Devils

Courtesy of our man in the Outer Banks, a dose of optimism at a time where that particular emotion comes in short supply. It's a nice thought, in any case.

We live in turbulent times. The Big Cantaloupe in the White House shreds norms daily and governs to feed his ego and his wallet. Income inequality grows. Divisions abound. One major political party has chosen power over principle. The other regularly sticks screwdrivers into electrical outlets. Of course, it all may be moot, as a disease that sounds like a euphemism for a hangover may thin the herd considerably.

But I bring encouraging words. Not from me. My life advice pretty much consists of: be kind; stretch and hydrate; get some sleep. No, these are from Jon Meacham, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian. He wrote a book a couple of years back titled The Soul of America, and sub-titled The Battle For Our Better Angels – a nod to Lincoln’s remarks about “the better angels of our nature.” It’s a more eloquent way of saying, “Folks, if you think it’s bad now, we’ve had it worse and somehow made it through.”

Or to put it in Meacham’s words, the book is “a portrait of hours in which the politics of fear were prevalent – a reminder that periods of public dispiritedness are not new and a reassurance that they are survivable.”

Meacham examines different periods of our nation’s existence in the past 160 years: Reconstruction and the rise of the Lost Cause narrative; the decades-long fight for women’s suffrage; the re-emergence of the Ku Klux Klan and Red Scare in the 1920s; the Great Depression; McCarthyism and the Communist scare of the 1950s; the struggle for Civil Rights in the 1950s and ‘60s. The book grew out of an essay that Meacham was asked to write for Time mag in the aftermath of the white supremacist/neo-Nazi assembly in Charlottesville in 2017 in which a woman named Heather Heyer was killed, and President “Very Fine People on Both Sides” made a hash of the entire ordeal.

The book isn’t as imposing as it appears, at least in hardcover. It’s 400-plus pages, but 130 of them are footnotes and attribution. He refers often to the speeches and writings of former presidents. Brief observation: dear lord, even if you didn’t agree with their politics, nearly all of them, or their speechwriters, were remarkably eloquent.

Presidents at times acted nobly during challenging periods, but also reacted to social movement from below. Though opposed to slavery, Lincoln grappled with what to do once it ended, including sending black people back to Africa. Woodrow Wilson was disinterested in, if not downright dismissive of, the women’s voting movement early in his presidency before signing off on it later. Franklin Roosevelt came from a privileged background, but became a champion of the working man and steered the country away from the nationalist fervor that took hold in Europe and produced the likes of Hitler and Mussolini. Harry Truman descended from slaveowners and was openly racist early in adult life, but desegregated the military and the government workforce because he felt for both the underdog and those who fought for the country. Lyndon Johnson came from a segregationist upbringing to push through sweeping Civil Rights legislation because he believed it the right thing to do.

Few believe our current president capable of acting beyond his own self-interest. His own party has shown little inclination to hold him accountable. Which brings us to the end of Meacham’s book, where he offers advice. Among his recommendations: enter the arena, which is to say, pay attention and vote; resist tribalism, as little is accomplished or endures by one group acting alone; respect facts and deploy reason, which seems self-explanatory, but is becoming increasingly difficult; find a critical balance. By that, he means, “Being informed is more than knowing details and arguments. It also entails being humble enough to recognize that only on the rarest of occasions does any single camp have a monopoly on virtue or wisdom.” His last recommendation is, keep history in mind, as it provides, if not a guide, at least perspective beyond the here and now.

Meacham concluded: “For all our darker impulses, for all of our shortcomings, and for all the dreams denied and deferred, the experiment begun so long ago, carried out so imperfectly, is worth the fight. There is, in fact, no struggle more important, and none nobler, than the one we wage in the service of those better angels who, however besieged, are always ready for battle.”

G:TBook Review

Courtesy of our OBX correspondent, a thoughtful review of what appears to be provocative and complex argument about the very future of the human race. My take? We're all fucked, but some of us will pass on in time to not really have to worry about it. That's not sardonic flippancy. It's what I actually believe. Maybe our ancestors will get lucky.

Author and activist Bill McKibben has banged the drum about climate change and inequality for 30 years. He’s stood on glaciers and visited remote villages where electricity is a rumor. He’s met with Silicon Valley executives and with subsistence level farmers.

McKibben’s latest book, Falter, treads familiar ground, but he asks a larger question: Has the human game begun to play itself out? He cites the twin perils of unchecked climate change and artificial intelligence as potentially altering human existence irrevocably moving forward.

He cites science, history, personal reporting and anecdotes and plenty of outside sources. There’s ample gloom and doom, but he also offers suggestions for how we might still walk back from the brink. For its weighty subject matter, it’s an interesting, breezy, almost conversational 256-page read.

As he wrote at the beginning of the book: “A writer doesn’t owe a reader hope – the only obligation is honesty – but I want those who pick up this volume to know that its author lives in a state of engagement, not despair. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have bothered writing what follows.”

Income inequality, McKibben writes, means that increasingly few people are making more and larger decisions about everyone else. Rising seas and expanding areas of drought mean that “the size of the board on which we’re playing will get smaller.”

He writes about a Randian, libertarian streak that has taken over the upper levels of the conservative movement for the past 40 years, from Reagan, Thatcher, the Bush presidencies, the Koch brothers, and now Trump. A triumph of the individual and the idea that a person’s value is measured by what they produce and what they earn, and that society and the collective are for suckers and mooches.

The oil companies, McKibben writes, were doing their own research about the possible damage from increased carbon dioxide levels as far back as the 1970s and essentially buried the findings. “Global warming is the ultimate problem for oil companies,” he writes, “because oil causes it, and it’s the ultimate problem for government haters because without government intervention you can’t solve it. Those twin existential threats, to cash and to worldview, meant that there was never any shortage of resources for the task of denying climate change.”

One of McKibben’s favorite words in the book is “leverage” – the outsized influence a small group of individuals or one industry wields. “The politics of one country for one 50-year period will have rewritten the geological history and crimped the human game,” he writes. “That’s what leverage looks like.”

The end of the human race, or our best hope for the future?
Discuss.

He also worries about artificial intelligence that smarts its way beyond our ability to control it. He writes that we may not be far away from the possibility of producing designer babies, who are smarter and stronger and better. Since that won’t be cheap, he says such a development could exacerbate inequality. And given the rapid rate of technological improvement, wouldn’t each batch of designer humans essentially become second-rate and less after a short time? If outcomes are programmed into people, doesn’t that diminish the human experience?

McKibben also writes that an inordinate number of powerful people in Silicon Valley are freaked out by death (who knew?), or rather obsessed with the idea of prolonging their own lives. There’s no shortage of start-ups involving new drugs or cryogenics or tech implants. An exceptionally smart gent named Ray Kurzweil, who’s the director of engineering at Google and who McKibben is fond of, hopes to live long enough so that nanobots can fix his aging cells and extend his life, or perhaps connect his brain to the cloud so that it may be implanted elsewhere and effectively live forever.

“The technologists at some level value individual humans too much,” he writes, “they value humanness far too little.”

But there’s hope, McKibben writes at the end of the book. It takes the form of solar panels and the non-violent protest movement. Solar panels can produce power cheaply and efficiently, particularly in places where there is none, such as African villages. Solar power can supplement and eventually replace fossil fuels, creating jobs and decreasing costs along the way. McKibben also takes heart from the non-violent movement, which helped turn the tide for women’s suffrage in this country, Indian independence under Gandhi, civil rights and gay marriage.

It won’t be easy, McKibben writes. Much damage has been done and we’re already a long way down the road. Many forces and much money are aligned against changing the status quo. But it’s possible and vital.

“The libertarian ideal of individual autonomy, which to one extent or another every modern human understands and cherishes,” he writes, “runs aground when the stakes get as high as ecological hell or human meaninglessness.”

Regardless of your politics, it’s a worthy read.