Ayn Rand and threats in our economic and political lives

Bill McKibben, author of “Falter: has the human game begun to play itself out?” writes two somewhat contradictory comments about Ayn Rand.

Sea level rising

On one hand he suggests that the novelist may have been one the most influential influences on the “Money Men” like Alan Greenspan, avatar of neoliberalism and the chief architect of the world’s economy in the years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and on the other hand that Rand might well have written with a crayon.

 Her ideas about the world are simple minded, one dimensional, and poisonous.Rand called her theory “objectivism”. It’s emotional core, channeled by Rand, is simple. Government is bad. Selfishness is good. Watch out for yourself. Solidarity is a trap. Taxes are theft. You are not the boss of me.1

Even without knowing how her influence was spread by people like Greenspan through the Thatcher-Reagan years, and became part of the formation of Paul Ryan, Rex Tillerson, and Mike Pompeo we can see this “philosophy” has permeated much of our political and social attitudes. McKibben comments that Donald Trump told USA Today that Rand’s first novel, “The Fountainhead”, was his favourite book.

Some kinship directions

The need for an attitude to existence not based on selfishness is becoming clearer to us in this time of COVID-19. Our understanding of kinship needs to be expanded to include as “kin” all humanity and indeed all of nature as we address the real threats to species survival where coronavirus stands with devastation of water resources, forced global migration, and climate change as existential threats.

Reference

1McKibben, B. (2020). Falter: has the human game begun to play itself out? New York: Henry Holt and Company. 

Kinship in a “Parallel Polis”

Some people are of the view that when the world emerges from the COVID-19 crisis, our political and social structures will not return to the status quo.

Status Quo?

This may be an opportunity to consider the flaws in our political, economic, and social structures and consider a methodology of change that dates back to the end of the Cold War that involves a “Parallel Polis”. Self isolation practice has opened opportunities to learn by reading and using podcasts. Recently Eleanor Wachtel, host of CBC’s Writers and Company, interviewed Masha Gessen on the nature of power and morality.

 The topic of “Parallel Polis” is discussed on the podcast from  22:22 min to 29:40 min of the 57:58 min of the production. They discuss Václav Havel's Charter 77 that was developed as Czechoslovakia moved away from the Communist model. The power of polis essay written by Havel asserts we can create a parallel society not by splitting off or separation but by conversation across work areas about one change we can make in our economic, political, social, or religious practice.1

Pankaj Mishra, writing for the New Yorker, examines Václav Havel’s lessons on how to create a “Parallel Polis” in the shadow of the Trump Administration disruption of our political processes. A key component in the examples given by Masha Gessen, from Israel and Palestine relations, is to focus on changing one thing in the new community that is formed as a “Parallel Polis”.

 The spontaneous and vigorous opposition to Trump, whether at the women’s marches the day after his Inauguration or at the protests at U.S. airports in support of a viciously demonized people, has already manifested many of the qualities that Havel wished to see in civil society: trust, openness, responsibility, solidarity, and love. Many more people realize, as Havel did, that arbitrary and inhuman power cannot deprive them of the inner freedom to make moral choices, and to make human community meaningful. They are shaping a redemptive politics of dissidence in the free world, nearly three decades after the fall of Communism. To measure the American dissidents’ success in electoral or any other quantifiable terms would be beside the point. For they are creating a “parallel polis”: the vital space where many, over the next four years, will find refuge from our age of anger, and learn to live in truth.2

The desirable moral changes cited by Pankaj Mishra suggest that “kinship” might be a key element in economic and political change in an emerging “Parallel Polis”.

 The problems before humankind, as Havel saw it, were far deeper than the opposition between socialism and capitalism, which were both “thoroughly ideological and often semantically confused categories [that] have long since been beside the point.” The Western system, though materially more successful, also crushed the human individual, inducing feelings of powerlessness, which—as Trump’s victory has shown—can turn politically toxic. In Havel’s analysis, politics in general had become too “machine-like” and unresponsive, degrading flesh-and-blood human beings into “statistical choruses of voters.”
According to Havel, “the sole method of politics is quantifiable success,” which meant that “good and evil” were losing “all absolute meaning.” Long before the George W. Bush Administration went to war in Iraq on a false pretext, Havel identified, in the free as well as the unfree world, “a power grounded in an omnipresent ideological fiction which can rationalize anything without ever having to brush against the truth.” In his view, “ideologies, systems, apparat, bureaucracy, artificial languages and political slogans” had amassed a uniquely maligned power in the modern world, which pressed upon individuals everywhere, depriving “humans—rulers as well as the ruled—of their conscience, of their common sense and natural speech, and thereby, of their actual humanity.”2

This rediscovered “kinship” could be applied to healing right vs left divisions in politics and economics and very relevantly in restoring the “kinship” that is missing in our failure to understand our complex relationship with the species on this planet,

A "kinship" energy source needed

including ourselves, that are endangered by our headlong selfish destruction of life through global warming.

References

1	(2020, March 27). From Soviet Russia to Trump's America, Masha Gessen on the .... Retrieved April 1, 2020, from https://www.cbc.ca/radio/writersandcompany/from-soviet-russia-to-trump-s-america-masha-gessen-on-the-nature-of-power-and-morality-1.5512254
2	(2017, February 8). Václav Havel's Lessons on How to Create a “Parallel Polis .... Retrieved April 1, 2020, from https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/vaclav-havels-lessons-on-how-to-create-a-parallel-polis

Health-care workers need to have frank conversations when death is imminent.

CBC Radio's Dr. Brian Goldman takes listeners through the swinging doors of hospitals

and doctors' offices, behind the curtain where the gurney lies on White Coat, Black Art on CBC Radio We need to talk more about death, says U.K. palliative author and physician Dr. Kathryn Mannix She says health-care workers have to get comfortable with having frank conversations with patients when death is imminent, so they can be prepared.

Workers machines and life of the elderly

These articles about the response of people to the coronavirus epidemic also reflect on larger issues of life ethics, social solidarity, and preparedness for events like this.

https://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/MAHER1-749x562.jpeg

Stephen Maher reflects on his 2,400-km drive back to the sanity of Canada from Florida, where the beaches were open, people filled bars, and many just couldn't seem to grasp 'why everyone is panicking'.

 Canadians are divided, politically and geographically, but compared with our neighbours, our divisions are trifling. I have been impressed with the way governments of different political stripes have handled this crisis in this country. There are disagreements, as is proper in a democracy, about the best course to take, but the virus has not been turned into a political weapon, as it has in the United States, where attitudes about the illness sharply diverge on partisan lines.
I am afraid that partisan division, fuelled by a narcissistic, attention-seeking president, is going to cost the Americans dearly..I think social solidarity is why the curve is so flat in traditionally collectivist East Asian societies, and rising so sharply in the United States...
In South Korea, Taiwan and Japan—modern, free-market democracies—governments and populations quickly pivoted to change behaviour. (Cultural norms around mask wearing and lower levels of obesity are likely also important factors in reducing infection and death rates in Asia.).1

Mr. Russell Moore is the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. He reminds us that Christianity teaches that every single human life is valuable, even during a pandemic and God doesn’t want us to sacrifice the old. He picks up a concern from a generation ago expressed by essayist and novelist Wendell Berry about treating people like machines.

 Vulnerability is not a diminishment of the human experience, but is part of that experience. Those of us in the Christian tradition believe that God molded us from dust and breathed into us the breath of life. Moreover, we bear witness that every human life is fragile. We are, all of us, creatures and not gods. We are in need of air and water and one another.
A generation ago, the essayist and novelist Wendell Berry told us that the great challenge of our time would be whether we would see life as a machine or as a miracle. The same is true now. The value of a human life is not determined on a balance sheet. We cannot coldly make decisions as to how many people we are willing to lose since “we are all going to die of something.”2

Catholic Social Teaching in this century and the last is in agreement with the concept that the object of work is the worker.

Threat to human treatment in the workplace

Maher observes that we are lucky to call this country home, and that we ought to do what we can to make sure it remains the kind of place where people look out for one another.

Where to stop on way home

Jim Abraham @YHZweatherguy has a number of friends returning soon from Florida.

The weather seems manageable for the drive back to Canada.

The Guardian Coronavirus map of the US:1

Folks might think about stopping at "small dot" states for fuel, food, or accommodation.The Guardian Coronavirus map of the US:1 is featured in an article by Niko Kommenda and Pablo Gutiérrez posted Thu 19 Mar 2020 15.53 GMT.

1(2020, March 19). Coronavirus map of the US: latest cases state by state | World .... Retrieved March 19, 2020, from https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2020/mar/18/coronavirus-map-us-latest-cases-state-by-state 

The Intelligence Mar 17

The Intelligence


He has four weeks to form a government, but Binyamin Netanyahu’s rival Benny Gantz is likely to find that the battle lines from three inconclusive elections haven’t moved. As Western factories shift gears to help in the coronavirus response, we ask what they could learn from China’s distillers. And a look back on the economic upheavals wrought by past pandemics.




The Intelligence

Is Natural Gas able to shape a secure and sustainable energy future?

The mission statement of the International Energy Agency is that it works with governments and industry to shape a secure and sustainable energy future for all.

Coal and oil replacement?

A statement by Fatih Birol, Executive Director of the IEA, points to possibilities of growth but cautions about price competitiveness and methane emissions.

 Natural gas can contribute to a cleaner global energy system. But it faces its own challenges, including remaining price competitive in emerging markets and reducing methane emissions along the natural gas supply chain.1

Glenn Wanamaker of CBC News reports on the question of how green is natural gas? In presenting the case for and against Quebec's Énergie Saguenay project promoters face tough questions over claims the $14B pipeline and LNG plant will cut greenhouse gas emissions.

https://i.cbc.ca/1.5316681.1570733043!/fileImage/httpImage/image.JPG_gen/derivatives/original_1180/pat-fiore-energie-saguenay.JPG

 In June, a group of 160 Quebec scientists signed an open letter calling on the federal and Quebec governments to reject the projects because they are "incompatible with the idea of energy transition."
"It is essential to reduce the number of infrastructures linked to fossil fuels and not build more," they wrote, in order to meet the 2050 goal of carbon neutrality.
"The total emissions connected to the project in Canada would be comparable to the total of Quebec's GHG reductions since 1990," concluded the two principal authors of the letter, Université Laval chemistry Prof. Jesse Greener and Université du Québec à Montréal environmental science Prof. Lucie Sauvé.
Proposal to pipe fracked natural gas from Alberta to Saguenay, Que., under scrutinyThat total, the scientists said, doesn't take into account leakage, known as fugitive emissions, along the way.
"Since natural gas is essentially made up of methane, a greenhouse gas that is 84 times more powerful than CO2 over a 20-year period, the contribution of these leaks to planetary warming is enormous," they wrote.
"So it is possible that the total GHG emissions associated with the project will be considerably higher than the best available estimates."2

CBC News reports that Warren Buffett's company is bailing on the Saguenay LNG project. Stéphanie Fortin, head of communications for the company behind the project, GNL Québec, did say, however, that the company lost the investor because of the "current Canadian political context."

 She said with "instability" in the last few weeks, such as ongoing rail blockades, foreign investors are getting nervous.3

Sylvain Gaudreault, the Parti Québécois MNA for the borough of Jonquière in the city of Saguenay, said that he's skeptical of the purported reasons for the investment company's withdrawal. Gaudreault said he thinks it has more to do with economic and environmental concerns, and the unpopularity of what he calls "20th-century" development compared with renewable energy projects.

 Gaudreault has never been a supporter of the project and said, if anything, this news "sends a message that these types of projects are more and more difficult to finance."
He described the loss of a potential investor for GNL Quebec as one that will be hard to replace.
"Financing is a bit like a house of cards. If you take one away, the house collapses," he said. "The house of cards is in the process of falling."3

Responsible funding of energy projects by government includes assessment of the length of time the product will be marketable. Otherwise, justice and hope are destroyed when the jobs so much in need fail to materialize.

References

1	(n.d.). Market Report Series: Gas 2019 – Analysis - IEA. Retrieved March 5, 2020, from http://www.iea.org/reports/market-report-series-gas-2019
2	(2019, October 11). How green is natural gas? The case for and against Quebec's .... Retrieved March 5, 2020, from https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/energie-saguenay-how-green-is-natural-gas-1.5316626
3	(2020, March 5). Warren Buffett's company bails on Saguenay LNG project .... Retrieved March 5, 2020, from https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/saguenay-lng-project-1.5486517