New year, new life, new paradigms: 

The Existential knick point of 2009

January 3, 2009

Many of today's pundits are quick to reach for low-hanging fruit:  that the year 2009 is actually the philosophical launch of the new century that literally began eight years ago.  And others, just trying to get copy out and head to the beach speak about 2008 as a terrible year, reminding us of Queen Elizabeth's famous characterization of 1992 as annus horribilus.  With the ascension to power of a potentially transformational American president in Barack Obama, the world's economy teetering on the brink of a dramatic collapse, global warming no longer a theory but accepted science, terrorism spawning more practical variants than yoga, and despite the launch of a new Israeli invasion of Gaza, it does not take much imagination to reach either of these conclusions.  In hydrology, a knick point describes a place in the stream channel that marks a change in slope, resulting in a change in flow.  The knick point itself defines neither a fluvial environment nor constant but rather separates two different environments, each with their own hydrologic constancies.  And while the word "point" makes it appear that it is restricted to a single definable position, usually knick points occur across a space, however limited in extent. 

The year 2009 shall be one of turbulence and chaos as the global body politic adapts itself to new currents of thought and steels itself against the dissolution of truths once held as self-evident and immutable.  But just as a river's knick point represents a period of shift and adjustment to a new environment, so shall 2009 provide a philosophical transition to new paradigms that shall make possible the very survival of societies, species, and indeed human life as we know it.  Here are some of the big battlegrounds of 2009.

The Global Economy.  The paradigm of a global economy has been shaken by malfeasance at its pyramidal apex.  As pundits predict the decay of recent trends toward laissez-faire economic liberties championed by the once venerated, now disgraced former Federal Reserve chairman, Alan Greenspan, and his swaggering caudillos of capital concupiscence, the fallacy of state-controlled economies was exposed as an unsustainable canard long before the collapse of the Soviet Union.  Unbridled, unregulated capitalism has proven no more tenable that central planning, and whereas the latter was devastating regionally, the former may ultimately prove to have eliminated greater wealth among more people and may yet prove to have devastating consequences that instead of being isolated to retrogressive or rogue states is spread across the world and shall impact everyone.  While economists urge the vast investment of non-existent money to keep sensitive industries from bankruptcy and the corresponding melt-down of economies as citizens lose jobs and revenues and are no longer able to consume in the fashion needed to turn the wheels of the global economy, this emergency stimulus concept is clearly flawed.  Anybody with any sense can see that you cannot borrow your way out of a fiscal crisis originating in the first place from excessive and unsustainable debt.  It is like fighting alcoholism with a liquor cabinet.  The year 2009 will see the Reverend Jeremiah Wright's famous chickens coming home to roost for all these high-brow genius Wall Street economists.  The year 2009 will reveal the fallacy of Treasury's recourse to the printing of money.  The world is due a new economic paradigm that will evolve from and gradually displace the limping and mortally injured one of unrestrained economic globalism.  It turns out all those fire-bombing, hooded anarchists that have plagued World Bank and IMF meetings in the past fifteen years may have been prescient all along.  Either way, it is going to take a while to segue to the next paradigm, and 2009 is the launch pad of this unhappy new learning curve.

Global Warming and the Carbon Economy.  The collapse in oil prices that has accompanied the implosion in international global markets is, contrary to Joe Six Pack's glee at the pump, and actually because of it, a catastrophe of unfulfilled but looming consequences.  What the United States needs at this point is not $1.50 gasoline, but $8.00--or $10.00 per gallon--gasoline.  America's carbon profligacy is a root cause of the planet's potential climactic demise, and by corollary America can be the root cause of the planet's salvation by kicking its own habit, setting the standard and benchmark for the sustainable economy model, and then do as America does and make movies about it with big stars.  Global warming creeped from beneath the carpet of theory during Dubya's tenure into popular acceptance as fact, not least due to his own admission that global warming was real and manmade.  Beyond the self-flagellating vituperations of a few reactionary mythologists, saurian industrial apologists, and the whole flat-Earth retrogressive community, fundamentalist Christians and all, it is not just scientifically but widely accepted among the average public that the Earth's climate and the health of its insulating atmosphere is directly threatened by anthropogenic emissions originating from internal combustion engines, deforestation, reservoirs, refrigerants, and other processes intended to advance quality of life that introduce particulate and gaseous molecules that adversely impact the atmosphere.  Oil's 80% decline in value in four months should make anybody wonder if there is not something fishy going on.  The price of oil clearly is not behaving in strict obedience to laws of supply and demand.  The year 2009 will mark a period of global introspection over the market of fossil fuels, their means of production, and the costly but environmentally friendly alternatives.  In a way, today's low price of gasoline is not unlike a pusher-man on a street corner giving away free doses of heroin to first time users.  It is more complicated, of course, since globalized societies are already addicted.  So, it would appear that oil-producing nations may have done enough math to figure out that the only way to discourage a planetary migration away from their product to other sources of energy is to reward complacency with economic incentives.  Make it cheap to live high on the hog at the expense of the planet's future.  What 2009 shall observe is a government move toward taxes and artificial variance of the price to suit national values.  In fact, if only one player is playing hardball, the whole game is unstable.  If both sides play hardball, the game becomes more predictable and manageable.  Lower prices makes it more difficult to rationalize shifts to environmentally friendly alternatives.  Lower oil prices make it economically impossible to switch to more expensive green fuels and still compete in a global market.  Yet, the price that we pay for each kilogram of carbon dioxide introduced to the atmosphere is much greater than the cost of buying the fuel combusted to produce that carbon dioxide.  The year 2009 will see a turbulent and emotional battle between those that recognize cheap oil and coal as a protracted form of planetary suicide and those that focus strictly on the near term, in lockstep with the monthly bottom line, oblivious to any ten-year plan, far less a centennial one.  The carbon economy is an issue that if left to markets alone a la Alan Greenspan will result in the eventual destruction of our planet and likely extinction of our specie.  This is an issue that can only be corrected by government and even then can only be corrected by the collusion of governments across the world, and for which there is a ticking clock underway and no more time left for flex and procrastination.  This year will mark the entrenchment of battle lines in the violent and all-important carbon wars that shall predominate foreign and domestic policy for the next five decades. 

Getting Tough on Terrorists.  Today's violence in Gaza is perfectly emblematic of the global challenge posed by asymmetric warfare and terrorism.  Knowing that it can gain an upper hand on Israel only through the court of world opinion and never militarily, Hamas called off its cease-fire recently and resumed its shelling of Israel territory with its militarily juvenile and silly homemade missiles.  As Israel invades Gaza today after a week of air bombardment, stupid, senseless, moronic, witless idiots use such terms as "disproportionate," and lambaste Israel for its response to Hamas's aggressions.  And sure enough, the cheese-eating surrender-monkey contingent has its dander up at "excessive violence" by the Israelis.  Excuse me, but in an existential fight (and any other kind is not really a fight), there is no such thing as proportion and excess, except as defined by the prevailing belligerent.  Let us not hoodwink others nor bedeck ourselves with heliodores of hypocrisy nor citrines of self-righteous indignation about acts of extra-territorial aggression performed on others.  While hate groups associated with al Qaeda and splinter copy-cats kill innocents, the world is coming to terms with the battle lines being drawn.  Perhaps that Hamas would undertake such a suicidal position and hide behind its vulnerable citizenry is an indication that terrorism either works, or is perceived to work.  The year 2009 is likely to mark a continued evolution in how terrorists are conceived, perceived, and fought.  For fierce advocates of freedom, like myself, it is a period of great loss.  Civil liberties in a democratic and free world may have peaked back in the nineties and are likely to be on perennial decline as the battle with the terrorists is re-drawn and the stakes grow higher.  The lessons of the past few years would indicate that neither "war" nor "due process," is appropriate for fighting terrorism.  As hard-hit societies face up to the vulnerability of targets that can simply not be protected without reverting to martial law, a new paradigm will emerge that blends prevention, criminal patrol and investigation methods, commando assaults, widespread invasive surveillance on some innocent as well as some guilty, and economic and social investments into the breeding grounds of terror recruiters, an ideological Marshall Plan to face the scourge of fanatical fundamentalism, whether it is Muslim, Christian, Jewish, animist, criminal, psychotic, or cultic.  We will all concede and contribute and comprise this new paradigm and sustain it until the recourse to asymmetric insurgency is excised in decent society as a recourse to extremists of any stripe.  The world is soon to require its combatants to leave civilians out of the slaughter.  The Islamic faith is itself on the front lines of responsibility, every bit as much as western economic and geopolitical imperialism is on the front lines, no less nor more than despotic tyranny by non-representative governments is on the line, as in Zimbabswe, as sclerotic non-functional states, like Pakistan, are on the line, and where lawless places like the African horn, Yemen, and northwestern Mexico, actually are the line in flux, hot seats of planetary geopolitical volatilty.  Governments unable or unwilling to keep their territories free of the blight of terrorism sponsorship are going to face an increasingly unsympathetic ear in the global market of ideas, and all of this is on 2009's front burner.

The Equality of All People.    The United States has long been a beacon of hope and egalitarianism in a world punctuated by repression, poverty, famine, bias, hatred, conflict, and class struggle.  While the anomalies of institutionalized torture, rejection of Geneva conventions, violation of civil liberties, and imperial aggression of the past eight years have been a departure from global standards of Americanism with which the world has come to associate the United States off and on since the end of World War II, the election of Barack Obama, the nation's first black president, is a return to ideals of Americana so vast and extreme that no nation on Earth can possibly mistake the intention of the American electorate in its reach to restore principles upon which our nation was founded and for which our nation has long been revered by truly freedom loving people everywhere.  By definition the US is now a post-racial nation.  And its social and human rights leadership--or its presumptive and hopefully newly restored leadership--is a development that will permeate all parts of the planet.  The year 2009 will mark transcendental turbulence of thought and action as oppressed minorities everywhere find a reflection of themselves in the most powerful man in the world.  The United States finally got it right for once in the past ten years, and that rightness is going to translate to a long road of progressivism in equality among all people, of both sexes, of all colors, creeds, and religions.  But before this path of equality can be uniformly trod without prejudice by all and for it to seem natural, it will take a long period of push-me, pull-you social unrest and violence as those that are oppressed point to the example of Barack Obama and insist that his pathway be opened toward advancement by merit rather than by the awful cronyism of identity-based classes, castes, aspirational limits, and glass ceilings.

The pundits all decried the year 2008 as an awful year.  What may have gone unrealized is that the awfulness of 2008 was all theoretical and perceptual.  If things fell apart in 2008, the effects of that disintegration are only now beginning to be felt, and 2009 is likely to be a bit of a slog for all.  Yet, it is only through a trial by fire that the most resilient steel is forged, and didn't Nietzche say 'what does not kill me only makes me stronger?' and the planet is long overdue for a period of sincere and meaningful introspection.  I just hope we can get through most of the hard parts of it in a single year.  But I often err on the side of optimism, and 2009 may be only the start of a multi-year knick point.  However long it takes, what stands in the balance is life on the planet itself, so we should not rush headlong toward the answers to existential questions but rather resolve them with the appropriate degree of debate and consideration they warrant.  In 2009 we have the chance to ensure that waters downstream of this turbulent period may flow deep and clear and carry us as befits our power for reason to our anointed and destined sea of eternity.

This is an editorial.  This is only an editorial.  Had this been an actual fact you would have been advised to withdraw to your nearest fact shelter to await further instructions.  We repeat.  This is only an editorial.  If you wish to add your own two cents to this debate, you may mail me here.

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