…the birds of the air had fled.
I looked, and lo, the fruitful land was a desert,
and all its cities were laid in ruins
before the Lord, before his fierce anger.
For thus says the Lord: The whole land shall be a desolation…
…for this, put on sackcloth, Lament and wail; For the fierce anger of the Lord Has not turned back from us. "It shall come about in that day," declares the Lord, "that the heart of the king and the heart of the princes will fail; and the priests will be appalled and the prophets will be astounded… (Jeremiah 4: 25-27, 8 – 9)
Let’s substitute “Math” for the “Lord:”
I looked, and lo, the fruitful land was a desert,
and all its cities were laid in ruins
before the Math, before its fierce anger.
the fierce anger of the Math has not turned back from us
For thus says the Math: The whole land shall be a desolation……
The Math is undeniable: it is impossible to sustain exponential growth in a limited system. We can no longer sustain all our carbon burning. Math and physics impose limits. We find ourselves in a predicament between our limitless desires and the hard limits of math and physics. A predicament that involves the unintended consequences of that burning, among other things. It is a multifaceted predicament: a population soon to be nearing 10 billion; degraded land, water, air and oceans; vast inequities in resource use and wealth distribution; social upheaval; it goes on and on.
The IPCC is now like Jeremiah and the consequences of rising CO2 is the “fierce anger” of the Lord. It seems, things have reversed themselves; the wackos and crackpots are now the ones saying everything will be fine. Anticipating apocalypse is for sober minded realists. And in the face of this the hearts of our leaders have failed, our priests and prophets are appalled and the people are not listening; they remain in thrall to the money-changers.
We face the overwhelming fact that our broken system is both mighty and wrong. And the hypocrisy of claims of virtue juxtaposed with the ground truth of the actions of that powerfully misguided, broken system has beaten us down. The dire prophecies of our scientists, the facts of the disastrous consequences of that powerful broken system, lead us to lose sight of a future where our own actions and choices have value or agency. This loss of value and agency is another tragedy perpetrated by our broken system. Here’s Charles Simic (The Age of Ignorance):
An educated, well-informed population, the kind that a functioning democracy requires, would be difficult to lie to, and could not be led by the nose by the various vested interests running amok in this country. Most of our politicians and their political advisers and lobbyists would find themselves unemployed, and so would the gasbags who pass themselves off as our opinion makers. Luckily for them, nothing so catastrophic, even though perfectly well-deserved and widely-welcome, has a remote chance of occurring any time soon. For starters, there’s more money to be made from the ignorant than the enlightened, and deceiving Americans is one of the few growing home industries we still have in this country. A truly educated populace would be bad, both for politicians and for business.
When the ignorant notice, amid the distractions of empty consumerism, the dire mathematics any well-informed person cannot avoid grappling with, it is not at all surprising that they react with vacuous patriotic cheerleading. And when the well-informed notice that political advisors, gasbags, wealthy plutocrats and their like are doing fabulously in this system – and no one else is - its obvious brokenness can easily lead to despair.
This situation isn’t ameliorated by the kind of “hope” peddled by cheerleaders of a team down by 50 points at the end of the fourth quarter. Cheerleading the possibilities of a broken system come off sounding silly to the well-informed and socialistic (or some-other such nonsense) to the ignorant.
So, of course, we ought to vote. It’s the least we can do. But voting isn’t going to fix the brokenness. Believing this will only lead to disillusionment. “Hope and change” is a slogan used to acquire votes, it is not any commitment to healing the brokenness.
Anyway, us humans are fundamentally broken, so any system we devise will reflect this. As James Madison said,
Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.
So how do we repent from our excesses and obey the “fierce anger of the Math?” How do broken people heal the brokenness of a system in which the kind of healing necessary will most likely lead to the demise of the system? With what do we replace it? Will it be any better?
I will have clear and concise answers to these questions soon. At least sometime this century, for sure... stay tuned.