these philosophers, whose hands seem only made to dabble in dirt, and their eyes to pore over the microscope or crucible, have indeed performed miracles. They penetrate into the recesses of nature and show how she works in her hiding-places. They ascend into the heavens; they have discovered how the blood circulates, and the nature of the air we breathe. They have acquired new and almost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its own shadows. - Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein
. . We are participating in experiments. Unprecedented and uncontrolled experiments. We live in the laboratory and take our sustenance and comfort from it. In fact it was designed by our collective actions in seeking to maximize our sustenance and comfort. In fact, we are dependent upon it for our survival.
In this laboratory we are isolated from the moral consequences of our participation in the experiments that take place within it. Many of the unpleasant changes in response to the treatments applied to the objects of the experments have been removed from the laboratory and diffused beyond its walls. This diffusion of and isolation from moral consequences ensures that we will continue our participation without experiencing uncomfortable emotions that might make us seek for a means of escape.
And comfort, convenience, surfeit and safety are difficult things to see as imprisoning. Our collective application of experimental treatments is often monstrous. But it is monstrous at a distance; monstrosities we read about in the news and then forget quickly. And we are all good people. Truly evil, sociopathic, people are a very tiny minority. Death and destruction, especially of the homes and lives of charismatic animals, makes us cry.
One of our collective experiments is killing dolphins, sea turtles and many other living things up and down the food chain, from phytoplankton to sperm whales in the Gulf of Mexico. We are horrified (except, perhaps, for a tiny, sociopathic minority of us) at this death and destruction. But, except for those who live right there, it is a diffused and distant kind of death and destruction. If it were right in our face and by our own hands; if it were, for example, necessary to club and kill an endangered sea turtle before our car would start (imagine a “kill and go” version of the “blow and go”), driving would stop - dramatically and precipitously. None of us would be willing to kill just so we could pick up a beer at the corner store on a rainy day without having to get wet. Yet, in that trip to the corner store, in millions of trips to that corner store, our collective activities certainly involve the death of distant animals we couldn't conceive of killing with our own hands.
Our collective use of petroleum for our sustenance, convenience, comfort and safety designs an experiment:
What happens when large corporations pursue wealth by drilling for oil beneath the sea?
The consequences of that experiment have led to other, subordinate experiments:
What happens when enormous quantities of a mixture of liquefied and gaseous hydrocarbons are released from a hot, pressurized reservoir into the depths of the cold ocean? And then, what if millions of gallons of a dispersant chemical are added into those releasing hydrocarbons?
We didn’t design the laboratory. We didn’t design the parameters of the experiments. We were born into the laboratory that was constructed from the collective actions of those that came before us. Even though we are not personally at fault, we are a necessary and vital part of what is happening. We are the lab animals that push the levers and turn the switches at the same time that we are the experimenters who design the levers and switches. And we are well cared for. Jacques Ellul "The Technological Society"(1954):
The human race is beginning confusedly to understand at last that it is living in a new and unfamiliar universe. The new order was meant to be a buffer between man and nature. Unfortunately, it has evolved autonomously in such a way that man has lost all contact with his natural framework and has to do only with the organized technical intermediary which sustains relations both with the world of life and with the world of brute matter. Enclosed within his artificial creation, man finds that there is 'no exit'; that he cannot pierce the shell of technology to find again the ancient milieu to which he was adapted for hundreds of thousands of years.
Within that "shell of technology" - in the laboratory - many terrible and powerful experiments are being made in our name. When we turn the key in the ignition we may hear on the news - because it is still capturing the attention span of consumers and still selling advertising - about the death of endangered sea turtles, but do we hear anything anymore about Shell Oil in Nigeria or oil exploration in the Amazon ? It is as if a great weight of inertia smothers us all under a blanket of attractive, soothing, manipulative images and we snuggle down under our comfortable lives and continue pulling the levers and flicking the switches. We are well taken care of. We are enticed away from our uneasiness and anxiety, from our grief and despair (Ellul, again, in Propaganda (1962)):
An individual can be influenced by forces such as propaganda only when he is cut off from membership in local groups. Because such groups are organic and have a well-structured material, spiritual, and emotional life, they are not easily penetrated by propaganda...The permanent uncertainty, the social mobility, the absence of sociological protection and of traditional frames of reference - all these inevitably provide propaganda with a malleable environment that can be fed information from the outside and conditioned at will.
And what is the content of this conditioning?
All propaganda must play on the fact that the nation will be industrialized, more will be produced, greater progress is imminent, and so on.
This experiment being carried out in the Gulf is not only an experiment in oceanography; it is also a Constitutional experiment. This Constitutional experiment began long before any of us were born, in 1886 with Bancroft Davis
In a headnote to Santa Clara County v Southern Pacific Railroad he wrote,
The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does.
Prior to 1886 corporations were chartered by state legislatures to serve public purposes like building canals and bridges. The Pennsylvania legislature put it this way
A corporation in law is just what the incorporation act makes it. It is the creature of the law and may be moulded to any shape or for any purpose that the Legislature may deem most conducive for the common good.
The Constitution was written with an outdated conception of the relative power of government over corporations. This outdated conception began to be overturned by the actions of Bancroft Davis and the enthusiastic embracing of the concept of corporate personhood by the court. Mr. Davis participated in designing a new, powerful, uncontrolled experiment in constitutional law:
What happens when you give amoral entities with vast concentrations of wealth, resources and power equal footing under the law with living, breathing citizens?
Some of the contemporary consequence of this experiment were passionately and profoundly laid out in a speech by Sheldon Whitehouse
It is an institutional problem: relentless, remorseless, constantly grasping and insinuating corporate influence; it will never go away; it will only worsen as corporations get bigger and richer and more global; and there has to be an institutional mechanism in place to resist it, so that it no longer takes a catastrophe to call the failure of governance of an American regulator to proper attention. I think this is the right way. If a colleague has a better idea, I'm more than willing to listen. But, one thing I know: after our economic catastrophe and this environmental catastrophe, this much, at least, is clear: we can no longer wait for catastrophes to root out improper corporate influence in our government, in this government of our United States. We have to at long last address the problem of insidious regulatory capture, of agencies of our government captive to the industries they are suppose to regulate.
Senator Whitehouse illuminates another aspect to our monstrous experiment. The Constitutional problem that Madison addressed in Federalist 10,
the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society
has taken on a monstrous life of its own. This new experimental monstrosity is called the "Free Market" without any sense of irony by those who so use it. They like to tie their ideas back to Adam Smith. He would be horrified at such misappropriation of his philosophy. Adam Smith, considered himself primarily a moral philosopher and considered his Theory of Moral Sentiments to be his best work. He said such things as,
No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.
To feel much for others and little for ourselves; to restrain our selfishness and exercise our benevolent affections, constitute the perfection of human nature
He would be horrified to see the behavior of sociopathic trusts engaged in price-fixing, exploitation of labor, and externalizing risks to society linked to his philosophy.
The logical backflips required to force his ideas into the present day experiment in corporate personhood is laughable. This “Free Market” is really nothing but a PR campaign designed to further erode the influence of government upon the amoral activities of massive, global corporations that owe allegiance to no moral philosophy - and to no country or Constitution. The largest corporations in the world are larger economic forces that all but the few largest countries in the world. Wal-Mart, the largest corporation in the world, with revenues of $408,214,000,000 is the 29th largest economy in the world, ranking just above Columbia and well above such countries as Malaysia, Belgium, Sweden, Austria, Switzerland. (This year Exxon/Mobil – the number 2 corporation - fell to 40th, just above Vietnam, Peru and Norway).
The economic influence of these monsters is an unprecedented and uncontrolled experiment in human enterprise. Trying to fit them into a constitutional framework ends up seeming quaint and antiquated. Here’s from the majority opinion in Citizens United
All speakers, including individuals and the media, use money amassed from the economic marketplace to fund their speech. The First Amendment protects the resulting speech, even if it was enabled by economic transactions with persons or entities who disagree with the speaker's ideas.
All speakers – you, me and Exxon - are equal players under the law and therefore the government can't limit our speech. Justice has been served.
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
-Anatole France
Sheldon Whitehouse – as much as I deeply and passionately agree with him – seems to be a small voice crying out in some deserted corner of the laboratory. His statement that “we can no longer wait for catastrophes to root out improper corporate influence in our government” is, I fear, inaccurate: we "can" no longer wait, but we will. There will be more catastrophic monstrosities.
The oceanographic experiment being undertaken in the Gulf of Mexico is subordinate to an even greater one being carried out in the planetary atmosphere. At this time, as far as we can sort out from the BP spin, there are somewhere around 4 million barrels of oil, mixed with millions of gallons of dispersant, in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. (This is a conservative estimate - no one really knows, or is admitting they know, the actual amount. The gov't says now it's 4.9 million.) Taking the total mass of CO2 in the atmosphere at 3,000,000,000,000 tons (3,000 gigatons) and then the estimate that 35% of this is anthropogenic since the beginning of the age of industrialization we get a total of 1,050,000,000,000 tons (1,050 gigatons) “spilled” into the atmosphere by our industrial activities. Taking the average estimate of 7.15 barrels of oil per metric ton this is roughly (yes, oil is a liquid and CO2 is a gas, but mass is mass and weight is weight) equivalent by weight to 7,507,500,000,000 - more than 7 trillion - barrels. This is 2 million times the amount in barrels by weight of the Gulf oil catastrophe. And it is increasing by 26,400,000,000 tons (26.4 gigatons) - 188,760,000,000 barrels - per year.
This is the really monstrous experiment:
What happens when one species of animal drastically increases the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels with unprecedented rapidity?
There have been times (see the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum) when CO2 was perhaps higher than it most likely will be if we continue on with business as usual. But, even so, it is an unprecedented experiment in the history of the earth for one species to burn such vast quantities of fossil fuels in such a short period of time. These are the times and this is the laboratory we live in.
I heard of the division of property, of immense wealth and squalid poverty, of rank, descent, and noble blood.
The words induced me to turn towards myself. I learned that the possessions most esteemed by your fellow creatures were high and unsullied descent united with riches. A man might be respected with only one of these advantages, but without either he was considered, except in very rare instances, as a vagabond and a slave, doomed to waste his powers for the profits of the chosen few! And what was I? Of my creation and creator I was absolutely ignorant, but I knew that I possessed no money, no friends, no kind of property. I was, besides, endued with a figure hideously deformed and loathsome; I was not even of the same nature as man. I was more agile than they and could subsist upon coarser diet; I bore the extremes of heat and cold with less injury to my frame; my stature far exceeded theirs. When I looked around I saw and heard of none like me. Was I, then, a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled and whom all men disowned?
I cannot describe to you the agony that these reflections inflicted upon me; I tried to dispel them, but sorrow only increased with knowledge. Oh, that I had forever remained in my native wood, nor known nor felt beyond the sensations of hunger, thirst, and heat! The monster in Ch. 13 Frankenstein