Plato's revenge
Provides a wide-ranging review of history, philosophy, science, and political economy in search of natural law and objective value by which to replenish the "lode of fossil virtue and belief" inherited from the premodern era and depleted by modern nihilism.
Stats for nerds
3recommend
15mentions
3people
2015–2024years
73% recommend27% neutral
Mentions per year
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- Origin - A genetic history of the Americas by Jennifer Raff. Recent evidence of how humans came to the Americas; it's a significantly different story than our conventional wisdom account.
Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches by Marvin Harris. How cultural norms establish collective behavior.
The Extermination of the American Bison. Written in the late 1800s as the tragedy was unfolding. Lots on great detail on how and why we decimated a keystone species in a matter of a few decades.
Plato's Revenge by William Ophuls. A concise manifesto on societal change. Lays out a vision for a new post-growth, post-oil, ecological consciousness that incorporates modern science, religion and philosophy.
Four Thousand Weeks. Far from a self-help time-management book, this is more a philosophy book on human's relationship with time. Delightful read.
Breath by James Nestor. Modern humans are breathing incorrectly due to factors of modern life. An exploration of the science and art of breathing properly.
Bernoulli's Fallacy by Aubrey Clayton. In the statistical wars, this book takes a strong stance: Bayesian is unequivocally better. He exploses the racist/colonial history of frequentist statistics, as well as the fundamental flaws in their math. Posits that mis-applied frequentist methods are to blame for the reproducibility crisis in science.
How the World Really Works by Vaclav Smil. A no-nonsense, factual account of the systems that keep our modern globalized society running.
Elements of Clojure by Zach Tellman. A concise, high-level philosophy about how we build and compose abstractions. One of those books where every sentence is gold. My only wish that the book wasn't tied to Clojure (most of the book is applicable to any language, despite the title).
Tidy First? by Kent Beck. How and when to make structural changes (refactoring, architecture, paying down tech debt) vs behavioral changes (new features, bug fixes). You need both, and you can use economic theory as a guide for when to invest in one or the other. But you need to treat them differently.
Numerical Linear Algebra for Programmers by Dragan Djuric. A code-centric introduction to common linear algrebra routines, Using Clojure and the neaderthal library - a high-level API for fast math optimized for CPU and GPU hardware.
- Framing degrowth as a choice (against continued economic growth / business as usual (BAU)), rather than as a planned de-escallation as an alternative to an unplanned catastrophic collapse and/or descent into some post-prosperity feudalistic gilded era in which a vanishingly small fraction of global haves might enjoy something approximating present high-consumption lifestyles but the overwhelming majority do not and never will ... is ignoring the fundamental reality of the degrowth / steady state argument which is that planetary boundaries exist. There are limits to resource availability, as we've known for a long time, as well as to sink capacities --- the ability of the environment to absorb the effluvia of our activities without undergoing a catastrophic shift.
There are also quite probably systemic responses, including (though I'd suggest not limited to) the emergence of global epidemics and pandemics of disease and dysfunction. Kyle Harper's recent book, The Fate of Rome, advances the case that diseases co-evolve with civilisation. This itself becomes an interesting counterpoint to the well-worn argument that science, technology, and progress have relieved humans of the evils of infectious disease. It was progress, population growth, commerce, and urbanisation which created those plagues in the first place. As Jarred Diamond noted in Guns, Germs, and Steel, it was the Old World with its crowded cities and vast commercial networks which introduced plagues to the New (with a very few possible exceptions, and those largely very slow-moving insults).
Though of course, diseases of the tropics were well-known. Those however are overwhelmingly zoonotic and parasite-based rather than trasmitting directly between humans, and reflect the same dynamics (huge populations and intense intercourse) though of other species, typically insects. Diseases of sanitation and hygiene, notably cholera, would be the other principle exception, though that was introduced to Europe largely from the Indian subcontinent.
Again, the point isn't that degrowth is an option to BAU, it's an option to a far worse collapse or oppressive wealth concentration with massive disenfranchisement. The fact that discussing the issue in these terms an on this basis is so readily derailed is itself among the profound challenges in achieving a non-worst-case outcome. I've pointed before to the work of William Ophuls (Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity, Plato's Revenge) and Thomas Homer-Dixon (various) before, I'll recommend them without reservation here again.
- An author I discovered only in the past decade, though he's been active since the 1970s, is William Ophuls.
He was amongst the first to write of the political dimension of addressing global catastrophic risks. Initially, that was largely focused on the concept of resource limits. Global warming isn't unrelated, though it's a sink limit: boundaries on the ability of the environment to absorb the consequences of human activity without making that human activity itself untenable.
What Ophuls realised, and what I'm increasingly convinced of, is that it's not the technical element, but rather the political, social, cultural, and economic (commerce, finance, trade, power) aspects which will prove the most challenging. And he seems to have been correct.
I strongly recommend all his work, though Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity (first published in 1977, revised ~1994) and Plato's Revenge (2011) are probably the best starting points.
https://www.worldcat.org/title/ecology-and-the-politics-of-s...
https://www.worldcat.org/title/ecology-and-the-politics-of-s...
https://www.worldcat.org/title/platos-revenge-politics-in-th...
Also available via Archive Org:
https://archive.org/search.php?query=william%20ophuls
Ophuls has a website with more recent writings:
https://web.archive.org/web/20190311104851/https://ophuls.or...
As he's on in years, I've looked for others who are carrying on his tradition. Canadian political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon is referenced by Ophuls several times and seems closest:
- Embrace limits.
There's a limited energy budget at Earth's surface.
Humans have benefitted by ransacking a treasure store of energy which accumulated over 100--300 million years, and will quiet possibly not be recharged in the remaining span of habitable life on Earth (about another 800 million -- 1 billion years). Even absent energy concerns, we've also been ransacking rich mineral deposits some dating to the earliest eras of life on the planet (banded iron formations, the result of blue-green algae growing 3 billion years ago). Absent ore-formation through minerological and biological processes which concentrate minerals to levels which make further extractuion and purification viable, we'd be stuck with far fewer choices for materials.
The largest challenges in degrowth are not technological but political, cultural, economic, fiscal, and ultimately about shared beliefs, values, and vision.
Over nearly 50 years of awareness of, reading on, and researching this problem, that's become abundantly clear, and hopes of a successful negotiation of this particular transition are not high.
The energy landscape is largely known and has been for the past 70-150 years. Solar, wind, hydroelectric, geothermal, and biomass.
We're already making use of much or all the available biomass (as food, with considerable fossil inputs), hydro, and goethermal resources. Solar can be ramped up, as can wind. Both produce power of a different scope, cost, and quality (availability, variability) than what advanced technological countries have come to rely on.
Nuclear is an option but faces its own issues: limite fuel (uranium and plutonium, possibly not so much in the case of thorium), major political and social-organisation risks, and of course a very long-tail disposal risk extending beyond the span not only of all our social institutions but of civilisation itself --- tens of thousands of years.
William Ophuls and Thomas Homer-Dixon are two authors in particular who have been looking at the political challenges of adapting to ecological limits.
I strongly recommend all Ophuls' work, though Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity (first published in 1977, revised ~1994) and Plato’s Revenge (2011) are probably the best starting points. The first secion of Ecology in particular makes one of the most cogent arguments for the Limits to Growth premise I’ve found anywhere.
At Worldcat:
https://www.worldcat.org/title/ecology-and-the-politics-of-s...
https://www.worldcat.org/title/ecology-and-the-politics-of-s...
https://www.worldcat.org/title/platos-revenge-politics-in-th...
Also available via Archive Org:
https://archive.org/search.php?query=william ophuls
Ophuls has a website with more recent writings, though the essays are missing from the present-online version:
https://web.archive.org/web/20190311104851/https://ophuls.or...
Thomas Homer-Dixon is referenced by Ophuls several times and seems closest in spirit to his work:
- "If a thing can’t go on forever, it will eventually stop."
— Herbert Stein
The article is an exerpt from Vaclav Smil's latest book (he has many[2]), How the World Really Works, excerpts, reviews, and interviews of which are appearing in multiple publications.
In a world often divided into technological optimists and pessimists, Smil is someone I consider a technological realist. He focuses on what technology has wrought, here focusing on four specific material contributions, steel, concrete, ammonia fertiliser, and plastics. And a clear message is that if these are solely dependent on fossil fuels then we cannot continue in the same path as we have been without them.
And in a world where we're unable to continue exploiting fossil fuels, whether due to the environmental impacts of their waste, or the lack of future supplies, the present mode of operation will end.
What that means in terms of the set of factors affecting human impacts on the planet --- per-capita wealth and total population --- one or both factors must move.
I've been looking at this question reasonably intensely for about a decade, and in a more general sense since the 1970s, when I first became aware of concerns over energy, pollution, and population in the Zeitgeist of that era. One fact I've become uncomfortably familiar with is that there's a great deal about the issue which has not changed appreciably, most especially as concerns the set of options for energy and resources, though there's been some specific progress in areas: computing and communications capacity, solar PV and LED costs, battery technology, and easing of food/population concerns have been among the largest.
A chief concern though is that political barriers to effectively addressing the problematique in a manner that avoids catastrophic outcomes seem extraordinarily stubborn. I strongly recommend the works of William Ophusl, notably Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity (1977, 1994) and Plato's Revenge (2011).[2] Thomas Homer-Dixon is a political science scholar who seems to be continuing the work: https://homerdixon.com/
Global responses over the past two years and counting to a known threat for which well-established response plans existed have made me increasingly pessimistic over how well-prepared we are for the future obligations of a post-carbon age, or its alternatve, a greatly-warmed world.
My own background is a mix of physics, environmental studies, urban economics and planning, and economics. That's given me an awareness of capabilities and constraints, but also of what how economics operates. In particular, economic interactions are largely driven by the relative apparent costs between inputs and options. As fuel-based energy has become vastly less expensive than in previous phases of human development, most especially over the past 200 years, energy has replaced other inputs, and made possible and viable practices, applications, and knowledge, that were previously unattainable. As those energy sources increase in costs, including both sourcing and consequence costs, those economics will change in an absolutely dramatic fashion.
One of Smil's earlier works, Energy and World History, is among a handful of books which looks at history through the lens of energy sources. Smil (and other authors) divide human time into four periods: hunter-gatherer, agricultural, fossil fuels, and post-fossil fuels. Each is a strongly distinct period, with what are effectively singularity-transitions between them. Changes in energy regimes have effects greater than all but the most cataclysmic astronomical events --- both on the way up and down.
In his introduction, Smil writes:
This book is an attempt to reduce the comprehension deficit, to explain some of the most fundamental ruling realities governing our survival and our prosperity. My goal is not to forecast, not to outline either stunning or depressing scenarios of what is to come. There is no need to extend this popular --- but consistently failing --- genre: in the long run, there are too many unexpected developments and too many complex interactions that no individual or collective effort can anticipate. Nor will I advocate any specific (biased) interpretations of reality, either as a source of despair or of boundless expectations. I am neither a pessimist nor an optimist; I am a scientist trying to explain how the world really workds, and I will use that understanding in order to make us better realize our future limits an opportunities.
If you can handle the truth, or don't have access to its alternatives, read this book.
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Notes:
1. https://www.worldcat.org/search?qt=worldcat_org_all&q=au%3As...
2. https://www.worldcat.org/title/ecology-and-the-politics-of-s... https://www.worldcat.org/title/platos-revenge-politics-in-th... Also available at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/search.php?query=william%20ophuls
- Not OP, but most discussions focus on the sustainability of an advanced technological society, usually paired with something resembling a liberal democratic political system.
I very much recommend William Ophuls, Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity (1977) and Plato's Revenge (2004). He delivers the essential message of Limits to Growth in a chapter (TL;DR: there are limits to growth, get used to it), and explores the rather more interesting elements of the political dynamics of this.
Yes, life on earth has existed. Actually, for closer to 4 billion years. For the first 3.5 billion of those, there was little more complex than a single-celled organism, and those managed to just about destory the place (Great Oxygenation Event, Snowball Earth). The cycle's been repeated a few times since.
Humans are accelerating that process greatly this go-round.
http://www.worldcat.org/title/ecology-and-the-politics-of-sc...
http://www.worldcat.org/title/platos-revenge-politics-in-the...
