I'm Responsible for the Gulf Oil Crisis

"This Time Is Different"
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN - NY Times Op-Ed Columnist
Published: June 11, 2010 / Original link

My friend, Mark Mykleby, who works in the Pentagon, shared with me this personal letter to the editor he got published last week in his hometown paper, The Beaufort Gazette in South Carolina. It is the best reaction I’ve seen to the BP oil spill — and also the best advice to President Obama on exactly whom to kick you know where.

“I’d like to join in on the blame game that has come to define our national approach to the ongoing environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. This isn’t BP’s or Transocean’s fault. It’s not the government’s fault. It’s my fault. I’m the one to blame and I’m sorry. It’s my fault because I haven’t digested the world’s in-your-face hints that maybe I ought to think about the future and change the unsustainable way I live my life. If the geopolitical, economic, and technological shifts of the 1990s didn’t do it; if the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 didn’t do it; if the current economic crisis didn’t do it; perhaps this oil spill will be the catalyst for me, as a citizen, to wean myself off of my petroleum-based lifestyle. ‘Citizen’ is the key word. It’s what we do as individuals that count. For those on the left, government regulation will not solve this problem. Government’s role should be to create an environment of opportunity that taps into the innovation and entrepreneurialism that define us as Americans. For those on the right, if you want less government and taxes, then decide what you’ll give up and what you’ll contribute. Here’s the bottom line: If we want to end our oil addiction, we, as citizens, need to pony up: bike to work, plant a garden, do something. So again, the oil spill is my fault. I’m sorry. I haven’t done my part. Now I have to convince my wife to give up her S.U.V." ~Mark Mykleby.

I think Mykleby’s letter gets at something very important: We cannot fix what ails America unless we look honestly at our own roles in creating our own problems. We — both parties — created an awful set of incentives that encouraged our best students to go to Wall Street to create crazy financial instruments instead of to Silicon Valley to create new products that improve people’s lives. We — both parties — created massive tax incentives and cheap money to make home mortgages available to people who really didn’t have the means to sustain them. And we — both parties — sent BP out in the gulf to get us as much oil as possible at the cheapest price. (Of course, we expected them to take care, but when you’re drilling for oil beneath 5,000 feet of water, stuff happens.)

As Pogo would say, we have met the enemy and he is us.

But that means we’re also the solution — if we’re serious. Look, we managed to survive 9/11 without letting it destroy our open society or rule of law. We managed to survive the Wall Street crash without letting it destroy our economy. Hopefully, we will survive the BP oil spill without it destroying our coastal ecosystems. But we dare not press our luck.

Secular Religion - Davidson Loehr

NOTE: I received the following as an email from my friend and colleague, Davidson Loehr, in response to yesterday's post on "The New Atheists Are God's Prophets". He agreed to allow me to post it as a guest blog entry.

Michael; I had some free-associations on your new-theists-as-prophets piece:

A fundamental difference between priests and prophets is that priests are keepers of their community’s status quo—their orthodoxy, rituals, attitudes toward women and homosexuality, etc.  By doing this, they help stabilize their congregation’s way of life.  Prophets don't care about beliefs or rituals; they only care about behavior.  This always pits them against the priests and institutions, since effective prophets only seem to show up when that status quo seems, to the prophet, morally inadequate—like Amos telling the people God didn’t care about their sacrifices, etc.; God only cares about the inadequacy or immorality of their behavior toward others: selling the poor for silver, the needy for a pair of shoes, etc.  Hmmm, this is sounding a lot like what globalization is doing to third world countries.

On the surface, the new atheists are seen as criticizing incoherent belief; I think Bill Maher’s film “Religulous” fits here, as does Brian Flemming’s embarrassing “The God Who Wasn’t There.”   But in Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and Hitchens, I see their anger burning the hottest over the holy wars, persecutions, banning condoms in Africa, valuing an unborn fetus more than they value the mother, etc.  They attack the beliefs because of the behaviors the beliefs have led to.  That’s the sense in which they are functioning like cultural prophets, if not religious ones.

My sense of the prophets in the Hebrew scriptures [i.e., the “old” testament] is that they identified themselves as being in the same broad religious tradition, and were calling “the faithful” to higher and more nuanced levels of actualizing their beliefs.  In this sense, I think Bishop Spong is the closest to a prophet today, as Martin Luther King Jr. was one of Christianity’s greatest prophets of the 20th century.

Voltaire’s sharp aphorism comes to mind:  Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.  If we combine it with James Russell Lowell’s pungent “Time makes ancient good uncouth,” I think we’re very close to the soul of a prophet.  Time can make customary beliefs—about women, gays, foreigners, heretics and those holding to all other beliefs—not only wrong or anachronistic, but simply uncouth.  We’re watching most of these statements of “ancient good” become uncouth all over the world, as people react to the world’s growing pluralism and the relativism of all beliefs.  Christians were once persecuted and killed for being atheists.  We’re all atheists regarding the overwhelming majority of gods of history, as Richard Dawkins has wittily put it.

What I see and feel from these four “atheist” writers—though they don’t put it this way—isn’t that God has died, but that God-talk can no longer frame our most important questions, and will almost certainly saddle us with absurdities and prepare us for atrocities because it's grounded in an ancient worldview that never existed—the three-story universe.

For all their differences, most critics from both inside and outside of religion share a remarkable area of agreement.  Their concerns are both this-worldly (secular) and centered on our moral responsibilities and ultimate concerns.  Taken together, they form a 12-point outline of what I’m calling Secular Religion:

Is This the Meaning of Life? - John Stewart

Editorial Note: Here I re-post a guardian.co-uk science blog by my dear friend and colleague John Stewart, whose distillation of the trajectory of evolution has profoundly shaped my own sense of the patterns in deep-time history—patterns which evoke in me gratitude for the past, inspiration in the present, and realistic hope for the future. John offers that despite the perception that science has stripped the meaning from life, recent developments in evolutionary theory suggest that humans have a central role to play in the future of the universe. Although John's vision of human participation in future evolution inclines toward what our species' intelligence might offer, evolutionists who celebrate the aesthetic and emotional progress of humankind (in finding kinship with all and in expanding one's sense of self and circles of compassion and care) will find commonground in John's portrayal of the fundamental trajectory and forces underlying cosmic, earthly, and cultural evolution. In an infinitely meaningful universe, there are, of course, a multiplicity of ways to find meaning in life. All it requires is being able to imagine how your life fits within a larger, meaningful pattern, or whole—how your story is part of the Great Story. For those interested, my wife Connie and I just launched two new podcast series: Inspiring Naturalism and Evolving Faith, which feature interviews with some of the world's most esteemed scientists and historians (Inspiring Naturalism), and theologians, ministers, and other religious professionals (Evolving Faith) who derive their meaning and inspiration not from mythic, otherworldly beliefs, but from an evidential, science-based, naturalist perspective.

"IS THIS THE MEANING OF LIFE?" by JOHN STEWART

Driving the evolution of intelligence across the universe gives meaning to life.  (Photograph: Corbis)
Original link (March 5, 2010 science blog in guardian.co.uk)

It is often assumed that the science-based worldview implies that life on this planet is a meaningless accident in a universe that is indifferent to our existence. Humans struggle to find purpose within this purely naturalistic understanding of reality, and so they supplement it with beliefs in supernatural processes and entities.

However, recent advances in our understanding of evolution are revealing a bigger picture that can, by itself, give meaning to life. This new worldview locates humanity within a much larger evolutionary process that appears to offer us a meaningful role to play.

This new understanding of evolution is founded on the recognition that evolution is headed somewhere – it has a trajectory. In particular, evolution on Earth has repeatedly gathered small-scale entities into cooperative organisations on a progressively larger and larger scale. Self-replicating molecular processes were organised into the first simple cells. Communities of these simple, prokaryotic cells formed the more complex eukaryotic cell. Collections of these formed multicellular organisms, and organisms were organised into cooperative societies.

A similar sequence appears to have unfolded in human evolution: from family groups, to bands, to tribes, to agricultural communities and city states, to nations, and so on.

This trajectory has applied regardless of whether evolution proceeds by gene-based natural selection or cultural processes. It is driven by the potential at all levels of organisation for cooperative teams united by common goals to be more successful than isolated individuals.

Cooperation trumps selfishness

Mainstream biology has been slow to accept that evolution moves towards increasing cooperation. The view has been that selfishness, rather than cooperation, is favoured by evolution. But this objection has been overcome in the past two decades by a large body of research on the evolution of cooperation. In short, this research shows that complex cooperation will emerge among self-interested individuals if they are organised so that they benefit from their cooperative acts – and if free riders and other non-cooperators are restrained or punished.

Crucially, this removes any conflict between self-interest and cooperation.

(Readers interested in a more detailed discussion of why biologists have been so slow to accept that there is a direction to evolution should read my pre-press article for the journal Foundations of Science.)

Where will evolution go from here? Extrapolating the trajectory into the future is reasonably straightforward, at least initially. The next major transition on Earth would be the emergence of a sustainable and cooperative global society. As with cooperatives at all other levels, the global society would curb internal conflict and destructive competition, including war and pollution. Past transitions demonstrate how this might be organised.

Religion is About Right Relationship with Reality, Not the Supernatural

“The most profound insight in the history of humankind is that we should seek to live in accord with reality. Indeed, living in harmony with reality may be accepted as a formal definition of wisdom. If we live at odds with reality (foolishly), then we will be doomed, but if live in proper relationship with reality (wisely), then we shall be saved. Humans everywhere, and at all times, have had at least a tacit understanding of this fundamental principle. What we are less in agreement about is how we should think about reality and what we should do to bring ourselves into harmony with it.”  — Loyal Rue, Religion is Not About God

Reality is my God and integrity is my religion. By this, I mean that what is real is my ultimate commitment and being in right relationship with reality, and assisting humanity in this process, is my calling and deepest inspiration. To be clear: I am neither a theist nor atheist; I’m a post-theist, an emergentist—a religious naturalist. The concepts of theism and atheism came into use long before we had an evidential (reality-based) understanding of how the world, in fact, came into being and before we learned that the Universe itself is creative. Given what we now know about big history, I no longer find the theist-atheist dichotomy useful. Both presuppose a trivial, unnatural God and a mechanistic Cosmos that is not itself divinely creative.

Coming into right relationship to reality is truly what it's all about in human affairs. How to most effectively do this has been the great work of every age and culture. At each stage in human evolution our understanding of how things are and which things matter—what's real and what's important—must be answered anew. Reality is, of course, experienced differently around the world and at different times in history. Life in a rainforest is different from life in the desert, turdra, or city. Life in a tribe differs from life in a chiefdom, theocracy, or empire. Not surprisingly, reality has been personified, or relationalized, differently throughout the world. Gods and goddesses in lush, tropical regions have very different personalities than those in harsh, difficult regions. Theology is a child of geography and sociology. A culture’s cosmology (how things are/what’s real) and values (which things matter/what’s important) are both derived from their core narrative or creation myth, which includes their various personifications.

All religions facilitate personal wholeness and social coherence. These two, the therapeutic and political functions of religion, together with the need to live in ecological integrity, are the three essential components of right relationship with reality.

As humanity has progressed from clans, to tribes, to chieftains and kingdoms, to theocracies and early nations, to nation states, to social democracies, each advance in complexity required a fresh understanding of what’s real and what’s important, and a new mythic story emerged to expand the in-group and provide mechanisms to ensure trust and cooperation at a wider level than before.