The Old Story: Economic Globalization, the Market Consensus, and the New State Religion

The new york times editorial page attributed the lack of regulation that resulted in the meltdown of the financial markets in 2008 to the “Bush administration’s magical belief that the market, with its invisible hand, works best when it is left alone to self regulate and self correct.” But what the editorial failed to mention is that the Bush administration’s $700 billion economic stimulus plan and the Obama administration’s $789 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act were both predicated on this magical belief. The fundamental assumption in these plans was that the meltdown occurred because the self-correcting and self-regulating dynamics associated with the invisible hand ceased to function properly. And the intent of the plans was to create market conditions in which these dynamics could begin to function properly with a massive infusion of capital generated by deficit spending. This meltdown began after the collapse of the markets for derivative contracts that allow buyers to hedge against economic gains or losses. In the parlance of mainstream economists, a derivative is an agreement between two parties that the value of something is determined by the price movement of something else, and hedging allows a buyer or seller to protect assets or incomes against future rises in prices. In derivatives markets, debt is used to generate surplus capital, and this surplus is used to borrow increasingly larger sums of money in a process economists call financial leveraging. Traditional derivative trading was in commodity-related futures contracts, and the amount of debt that could be used as financial leverage was highly regulated. In these markets, buyers could hedge against unpredictable changes in the prices of real assets, such as wheat or cotton, and each commodity was traded separately. But this situation changed dramatically after December 2000, when the U.S. Congress banned the regulation of derivatives by passing the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. The rationale for passing this bill, which was largely written by representatives of the investment banks that would later make enormous profits in derivatives trading, appealed to two assumptions in neoclassical economic theory.

The Old Story: Sovereign Nation-States and Myths of National Identity

When members of a society coordinate their activities based on a broadly disseminated and reinforced set of dogmatic beliefs in their mythological or religious traditions, anthropologists refer to these beliefs as useful myths. The aim of this chapter is to reveal that the dogmatic beliefs associated with the construct of the sovereign nation-state are useful myths that can no longer be viewed as useful because they are effectively undermining efforts to resolve the environmental crisis. This situation is greatly complicated by the fact that the sovereign nation-state is a normative construct, or a construct that is assumed to be a taken-for-granted and indelible aspect of geopolitical reality. The large problem here is that this normative construct constitutes one of the greatest conceptual barriers to resolving the environment crisis. This brief account of the origins and transformations of the construct of the sovereign nation-state is intended to accomplish four objectives. The first is to demonstrate that the construct of the sovereign nation-state emerged in Europe from the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries in a series of narratives that transferred the God-given power and authority of sovereign monarchs to the states governed by these monarchs. The second is to reveal that the narratives about nationalism and national identity that emerged during and after the Protestant Reformation abused the truths of religion in an effort to convince core populations living within the borders of particular nation-states that they were a chosen people possessing superior cultural values and personal qualities. The third is to show that the dogmatic beliefs legitimated and perpetuated by these narratives eventually resulted in the creation of churches of state with sacred symbols, rites, and rituals similar to those in Protestant and Catholic churches. And the fourth objective is to provide a basis for understanding how these dogmatic beliefs eventually became foundational to a system of international government, the United Nations, predicated on the construct of the sovereign nation-state. The history of this construct is much more complex and far more detailed than the brief account in this chapter suggests.

The Old Story: Metaphysics, Newtonian Physics, and Classical Economics

The causes of the environmental crisis may be staggeringly complex, but the most effective way to deal with it in economic terms seems rather obvious. We must begin very soon to implement scientifically viable economic solutions for what is now a large number of very menacing environmental problems. If this could be accomplished within the framework of the theory that now serves as the basis for coordinating global economic activities, neoclassical economics, political leaders, economic planners, and environmental scientists could work together in harmony to implement these solutions. Unfortunately, this cannot happen because neoclassical economic theory is predicated on unscientific assumptions about the dynamics of market systems that effectively preclude the prospect of implementing scientifically viable economic solutions for environmental problems. These assumptions were articulated in their original form by eighteenth century moral philosophers Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, and David Ricardo who were members of and greatly influenced by a widespread philosophical and religious movement known as deism. The fundamental impulse in this movement was to make belief in the existence of the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition consistent with the implications of the mechanistic worldview of Newtonian physics. Because physical laws in this physics completely determine the future state of physical systems, the deists concluded that the universe does not require, or even permit, active intervention by God after the first moment of creation. They then imaged God as a clockmaker and the universe as a clock regulated and maintained after its creation by physical laws. The moral philosophers we now call classical economists assumed that this deistic god created two sets of laws to govern the workings of the clockwork universe—the laws of Newtonian physics and the natural laws of economics. Based on this assumption, they argued that the forces associated with the natural laws of economics determine the movement and interactions of economic actors in much the same way that forces associated with Newton’s laws of gravity determine the movements and interactions of material objects.

The New Story of Humanity : Brains, Minds, and the Environmental Crisis

While sitting in a window seat during a flight from San Francisco to Washington, D.C. about twenty years ago, I had an experience that changed the course of my life. On the ground below, vast numbers of trucks and mile-long strings of railroad cars were moving along extensive networks of highways and tracks that threaded out in all directions, like a circulator system in some giant organism. Products from factories and farms were flowing through these arteries toward distant cities and coastal ports, and raw materials were flowing in the other direction to processing and manufacturing plants. In my mind’s eye, the web-like connections between electric power plants, transformers, cables, lines, phones, radios, televisions, and computers resembled the spine and branches of a central nervous system, and the centers of production, distribution, and exchange and all connections between them within the global economy. This conjured up the image of a superorganism feeding off the living system of the planet and extending its bodily organization and functions into every ecological niche. I realized, of course, that the global economic system is not an organism. It is a vast network of technological products and processes that members of our species created in an effort to enhance their material well-being. But this system does in ecological terms feed off the system of life on this planet and extend its organization into every ecological niche. After my plane landed at Dulles International Airport, I asked a simple question that required years of research to adequately answer. How did members of one species among the millions of species that have existed on this planet manage to increase their numbers and the scope and scale of their activities to the point where the capacity of the system of life on an entire planet to support their existence is being undermined? The answer is that our species, fully modern humans, evolved against all odds the capacity to acquire and use fully complex language systems.

Rebirth of the Sacred : Science, Religion, and the New Environmental Ethos

In the dream of earth, Thomas Berry makes the following comment about the environmental crisis: “It’s all a question of story. We are in trouble now because we do not have a good story. We are in between stories. The old story, the account of how the world came to be and how we fit into it, is no longer effective.” The intent in this book is to tell the new story that could greatly enhance the prospect of resolving the environmental crisis. One of the frame tales for this story is science. On the most obvious level, scientific knowledge has gifted us with an understanding of the causes of this crisis and how it can be resolved. What is not so obvious is that this knowledge has also revealed that the old stories about political and economic reality are badly in need of revision. The old story is imaged on the conventional globes that sit in classrooms, government offices, libraries, and home offices like the one in which I am writing this book. On these globes, boundaries between nation-states are marked with dark lines, and the regions or territories governed by these states are painted different primary colors. The parts (nation-states) are separate and discrete entities, the whole (planet earth) is static, and the sum of the parts constitutes the whole. In the geopolitical reality imaged on these globes, seven billion people live within the borders of sovereign nation-states and construct their identities based on diverse cultural narratives about nationalism, ethnicity, political ideology, and religious beliefs and practices. The only source of political power in this reality is the sovereign nation-state, and these states endlessly compete with one another for the capital and scarce natural resources needed to sustain and grow their national economies. The new story is imaged in the digital photographs and videos taken by earth-orbiting satellites that environmental scientists use to study the complex web of interactions between human and environmental systems.

The Dream of This Place with Us: Science, Religion, and the Environmental Crisis

The first color photograph of the whole earth taken by an astronaut aboard the Apollo 11 spacecraft in 1969 appeared in posters, popular magazines and films, and a staggering number of advertising campaigns promoting the sale of an enormous variety of consumer goods and services. Like any iconic visual image repeatedly used in a variety of diverse contexts for different purposes, the image of the blue planet shimmering under the flow of its delicate atmosphere against the backdrop of the interstellar dark seemed, over time, to lose much of its original significance and emotive power. But for some of us, myself included, it still serves as sign and symbol of two astonishing facts: life on earth is a self-organizing and self-perpetuating whole that evolved from a single organism to a level of enormous complexity and incredibly beauty; our species emerged from this evolutionary process as fully conscious and self-aware beings in the vast cosmos. Many scientists are convinced that biological life must have arisen on other planets and that the process of evolution on some of them resulted in the emergence of intelligent life-forms and advanced technological civilizations. The most ardent promoters of this idea are physicists and molecular biologists, and public acceptance of their views resulted in the creation of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project. The intent of those involved in this project, as many Americans learned for the first time after seeing a movie based on the late Carl Sagan’s book Cosmos , is to intercept intragalactic or intergalactic communications between advanced civilizations on other planets. But what the book and movie failed to mention is that many evolutionary biologists are convinced that the odds that these civilizations exist anywhere else in the vast cosmos are slim to none. The skeptics argue that even if life exists on many other planets, this does not mean that the process of evolution on any of them would result in life-forms that have the capacity to acquire and use a complex symbol system like the human language system.

The New Story in Biology: Parts and Wholes in the Web of Life

In July of 1969 the Apollo 11 spacecraft emerged from the dark side of the moon and the on-board camera panned through the vast emptiness of outer space. Against the backdrop of interstellar night hung the great ball of earth, with the intense blue of its oceans and the delicate ochres of its landmasses shimmering beneath the vibrant and translucent layer of its atmosphere. In the shock of this visual moment, distances between us contracted; boundaries and borders ceased to exist. But the impression that sent the adrenaline flowing through my veins was that the teeming billions of organisms writhing about under the protective layer of the atmosphere were not separate—they were interdependent, fluid, and interactive aspects of the one organic dance of the planet’s life. The preceding paragraph, an entry form my diary written a few days after images of the whole earth first appeared on television, cannot be classed as scientific analysis. But it is entirely consistent with what the new story of science has revealed about the relationship between human and environmental systems in biological reality. The large problem here is that the political and economic narratives that now serve as the basis for coordinating global human activities are premised on scientifically outmoded assumptions about this relationship in the old story of classical physics. And this problem is further complicated by the fact that the view of this relationship that is still widely viewed as scientific in Darwin’s theory of evolution is also premised on these scientifically outmoded assumptions. Darwin went public with his theory for the first time in a paper presented to the Linnean Society in 1848. This paper begins with the following sentence: “All nature is at war, one organism with another, or with external nature.” In The Origins of Species , Darwin is more specific about the character of this war: “There must be in every case a struggle for existence, either one individual with another of the same species, or with the individuals of distinct species, or with the physical conditions of life.”

Introduction

In the house that seems embarrassingly large and mostly empty now that our children are grown and have children of their own, there is a screened-in porch adjacent to the family room on the second floor. When my wife and I sit on this porch during the summer, after the leaves on the old growth trees in our back yard open and many varieties of birds magically appear, it seems, for a moment at least, that all is right with the world. Laurel oaks and Virginia pines tower over a landscape covered in a canopy of intense green leaves, and members of two families of gray squirrels perform acrobatic feats in the maze of limbs and branches. American goldfinch with bright yellow bodies and black wings, northern cardinals with red bodies and orange bills, and pileated woodpeckers with large red crests and moustaches are frequent visitors. After evening comes and the sky begins to grow dark, the magical mystery tour continues as deer and the occasional lone fox or coyote pass through the thick foliage in the woods behind the house. But when we sat on this porch during the summer of 2010, it was not possible to feel even for a moment that all was right with the world. The outside temperature was oppressively hot for most of the day, and there were record-breaking heat waves across the United States, Europe, and Asia. The temperature in South Central Pakistan in May was the highest ever recorded in Asia, 128 degrees Fahrenheit, and the average temperature in Moscow in July was an unprecedented 100 degrees Fahrenheit. In August, scientists at the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said that research based on enhanced climate models indicated that global warming was responsible for these much higher than average temperatures. The scientists at WMO also concluded that higher temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean and atmospheric anomalies caused by a La Nina created conditions that resulted in the severe draught in Russia, the flooding and mudslides in western China, and the floods that inundated about one-fifth of the landmass in Pakistan.

The Old Story: Metaphysics, Mid–Nineteenth Century Physics, and Neoclassical Economics

In economics textbooks, the nineteenth century creators of neoclassical economics theory, Stanley Jevons, Léon Walras, Francis Ysidro Edgeworth, and Vilfredo Pareto, are credited with disclosing the dynamics of market systems and transforming the study of economics into a rigorously mathematical scientific discipline. There are, however, no mentions in these textbooks, or in all but a few books on the history of economic thought, of a rather salient fact. Neoclassical economic theory was created by substituting economic constructs derived from classical economics and associated with the invisible hand for physical variables in the equations of a badly conceived and soon-to-be outmoded mid–nineteenth century theory in physics. The theory in physics that the economists used as the template for their theories was developed from the 1840s to the 1860s. During this period, physicists responded to the inability of classical physics to account for the phenomena of heat, light, and electricity with a profusion of hypotheses about matter and forces. In 1847 Hermann-Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz, one of the best known and most widely respected physicists at this time, posited the existence of a vague and ill-defined energy that could unify these phenomena. This served as a catalyst for a movement called energetics, in which physicists attempted to explain very diverse physical phenomena in terms of a unified and protean field of amorphous energy. Because the physicists were unable to specify the actual character of this energy and could not be precise about what was being measured, their theories were not subject to repeatable experiments under controlled conditions. The amorphous character of energy in the physical theories also obliged the physicists to appeal to the law of conservation of energy, which states that the sum of kinetic and potential energy in a closed system is conserved. This appeal was necessary because it was the only means of asserting that the vaguely defined system described in the theory somehow remains the “same” as it undergoes changes and transformations.

The New Story in Physics: Mind, Matter, and the Nonlocal Universe

The capacity to acquire and use fully complex language systems made the members of our species fully conscious and self-aware beings in the vast cosmos. But this enormous privilege came with a price. After our ancestors began to live storied lives in a linguistically based symbolic universe, the world that previous generations experienced as an integrated and undivided whole split into two worlds—an inner world where the self that is aware of its own awareness exists and an outer world in which this self seeks to gratify its needs and establish a meaningful sense of connection with other selves. And this explains why the most fundamental impulse in the storied lives of fully modern humans has always been to close the gap between these inner and outer worlds by integrating all seemingly discordant parts of a symbolic universe into a meaningful and coherent whole. The narrative that has consistently served this function is religion. But during the first scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, another narrative emerged called Newtonian or classical physics that also promised to bridge the gap between self and world by integrating all of the seemingly discordant parts of the physical universe into a coherent and meaningful whole. In this physics, one universal force, gravity, governs the motion, interaction, and blending of indestructible atoms or mass points. And since the laws of gravity were completely deterministic, it was assumed that all events in the cosmos are predetermined by the forces associated with these laws and that the future of any physical system could be predicted with absolute certainty if initial conditions are known. In the worldview of classical physics, human beings were cogs in a giant machine and linked to other parts of this machine in only the most mundane material terms. The knowing self was separate, discrete, and isolated from the physical world, and all the creativity of the cosmos was exhausted in the first instant of creation. As physicist Henry Stapp points out, “Classical physics not only fails to demand the mental, it fails to even provide a rational place for the mental.