Ophulus, W. (2011). Plato's revenge : politics in the age of ecology. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.

Bring together:

• this book - natural law
• component philosophies (Red and Blue)
• world views (risk, views of nature)
• explain why good environmental stewardship may lead to good governance

preface xi - "modern political economies devoted to economic development were on a collision course with laws of nature

"human beings would soon be obliged to renounce continual material growth

x - "The failure to grasp the the root of the disease is not defective public policies but a defective public philosophy ...

xiii - Hobbes philosophy is driving us to a economic and technocratic juggernaut toward increasingly chaotic and dismal future

1- "Since its origin, civilization has been marked by five great ills - ecological exploitation, military aggression, economic inequality, political oppression, and spiritual malaise."

<!-- This is a good opener for ESM 102. Then show how these are all related (in an "everything's connected sense") to the environment. -->

5- "traditional religion was dispensible precisely because they were certain that human reason, once liberated from theology, would soon discover the moral order implicit within the cosmos --"

"The secularization promoted by the Enlightenment took on a logic and momentum of its own."

7 - "Hobbes took the radical step of severing politics from virtue and founding the polity on the self-interested individual, .."

8 - "In this book, I begin by examining the role of law in human society before showing tha tecology, physics, and psychology all agree in pointing us toward a politics of consciousness dedicated to expanding human awareness rahter than extending human dominion."

14 - "Mores, not laws, make us law-abiding and public-spirited."

16 - more laws "do not arrest the moral decay but advance the corruption of the state."

Hobbes said <!-- not quoting Hobbes -->"let individuals follow their own ideals and pursue their own ends with the state acting simply as a referee to prevent injury and harm to others."

"Unfortunately, by making politics instrumental rather than normative, Hobbes and his followers set up a vicious cirlce leading to demoralization."

19 - "the purpose of politics is to facilitate the acquisition of private property and national wealth, along with the power that they confer."

<!-- refer to the mystery of capital, ownership rights allows economic development -->

20 - "The antidote to political corruption and ecological degradation is therefore the same -- a moral order that governs human will and appetite in the name of some higher end than continutal material gratification."

"This leaves only one possible source for a new moral code -- natural law, the law "written on the tablets of eternity."

22 - "By discovering and appreciating the moral order implicit with the natural world, we can derive ethical principles that will serve as a basis for polity and society in the twenty-first century and beyond."

26 - "Those who hold tenaciously to a strict rationalism would argue that it is not possible to live in agreement with nature because there is no scientific way to get from is to ought, from facts to values."

<!-- check out this claim, no scientific way to get from facts to values -->

26 - postmechanical worldview entails a different ethos

27 - "I have tried to discover the metaphors that best convey the philosophical essence of each domain and that most clearly elucidate their moral import in layman's terms."

<!-- this got me thinking that I should revise the multiple perspectives chapter 4 to be patterns and metaphors, and then go from metaphors to frames and from patterns to the likelihood method -->

29 - "But the only real solution is to put an end to the hubris itself by dissolving the dread-driven, neurotic hostility to nature that fuels the urge for domination."

<!-- like Woody Allen, and how he became an abomination ->

"In short, ecology exposes the grand illusion of modern civilization: our apparent abundance is really scarcity in disguise, and our supposed mastery of nature is ultimately a lie."

32 - "Unfortunately, human action works against natural homeostasis. In their natural state, for example, ecosystems respond slowly and minimize throughput, features that promote stability.

"By contrast, economic man favors "profitable" systems" --- that extract

high yield are instrinically unstable

35 - ecosystems tend toward the climax with filled with mutualistic symbioses

39 - "a fundamental principle of classic liberal political philosophy is that individual freedom ends where harm to others begins."

40 - "But if pervasive interdependence makes us inseparatble part of the common stream of life, then the liberal separation collapses."

"humanity's organic embeddedness changes everything"

<!-- if everything is connected, then the liberal separation and hands off approach falls apart -->

Chapter 3: Physics

47 - in the context of recent advances in physics and philosophy "Politics, law, economics, academe, and daily life are dominated by obsolete ideas -- for example, simple-minded empiricism or fixed concepts of space and time -- that science was forced to abandon almost a century ago."

"an outmoded mechanical worldview still prevails."

<!-- my claim: strong environmental stewardship leads to good governance -->

52 - "As Ludwig Wittgenstein sid, language frames our reality so completely that "the limits of my language mean the limts of my world""

53 - "Evolution occurs not by natural selection alone but mostly as an outcome of the dynamics of self-organization."

<!-- self-organization to particular structures -->

54 - "Unfortunately, there is a radical mismatch between complex, self-organizing natural systems and complicated, man-made mechanical systems."

"This mismatch is a fundamental problem for humanity going forward. Self-organizing systems are intrinsically stable and resilient -- but only up to a point."

65 - "This shift to lower-quality resources -- primarily solar energy -- has profound social and political implications. A civilization based on diffuse energy cannot have the same shape as one based on concentrated energy.""

<!-- ESM 102, energy and its relationship to cities -->

Chapter 4: Psychology

74 - "Even schooling cannot entirely eradicate the innate propensity for concreteness in teh human mind." we make abstractions into real things, such as "the market" or "energy"

76 - the human mind is dualistic, right/wrong, fight or flight

"the human mind naturally dichotomizes, creating the common oppositions of "good" and "bad" ...

<!-- avoiding ambiguity, to a fault -->

77 - metaphor is the mind's strength

80 - "So the rationalists who consigned myth to the dustbin of history have been outflanked by the human mind, which so craves a story that it will swallow evil and absurdity rather than go without one."

81 - "The gap between what human beings are cognitively capable of and the prevailing condieions in complex mass societies is therefore enormous."

85 - Jung said "a priori structural forms of the the stuff of consciousness" that determine the manner "in which things can be perceived and conceived" by human beings

"These patterns shape, but do not determine our psychic contents"

86 - "metaphor is the basis of human understanding -- so symbol and stroy, not rational discourse, are the mother tongue of the psyche."

87 - "The psychosomatic illness arises from conflicts between the layers of the psyche ..."

<!-- refer to melancholia -->

89 - "Unlike Freud, for whom nature was an object of dread to be subdued by the rational ego, Jung found that the human animal was sick precisely because he had been uprooted from the soil of instinct by an excessibely rational civilization that systematcially frustrated his arhetypal needs ...
"

Chapter 5: Paideia

101 - "The quintessential task of the new paideia will be to restore beauty to its rightful place in the pantheon of human values."

<!-- see HBL -->

quoting James Buchan about how beauty needs to be reproduced to be exploited to make money, and that ruins beauty

<!-- Scary says beauty begs to be replicated -->

102 - "The human subcortex, the repository of our animal heritage, craves the rich sensual stimulation of the natural world -- that is, the kind of experiences for which the beauty-starved denizens of an artificial world willingly pay thousands of dollars to enjoy on vaction."

"So truth and beauty are psychically inseparable .."

105 - "The second reason that secular education needs to include the arts was addressed in the previous chapter: human understanding depends utterly on metaphor."

113 - quoting Donella Meadows

"The world is a complex, interconnected, finite, ecological-social-psychological-economic syste. We treat it as if it were not, as if it were divisible, separable, simple, and infinite. Our persistent, intractable, global problems areise directly form this mismatch."

then goes on

"Many our our most fundamental dilemmas therefore arise not som much because human beings are egotistical and greedy -- although these and other moral failings certainly do not help matters -- but as a consequence of simple ignorance.

<!-- good set up for ESM102, are we ignorant or evil? -->

114 - systems study of small farms

goal is to preserve small, local farms
bad policy is to subsidize farms (supposedly to help small farmers), leads to big farms
good policy is to place maximum size limit on farms

the solution is counterintuitive, because of all the feedbacks that are involved

<!-- ESM102, value of systems to work out the counterintuitive, unexpected outcomes -->

Chapter 6: Politea

129 - "The polity's role is to govern -- to direct affairs in a way that citizens are encouraged to follow a moral code or are swiftly checked when they fail to do so."

132 - "We require a new moral, legal, and political order that cannot be imposed from the top down but that must instead percolate up as the consequence of an intellectual and moral reformation."

133 - "Politics is not about elections .... It is about the master metaphor that frames the manner of thought and the character of institutions at lower levels."

<!-- see Lakoff and Johnson for some of these metaphors -->

135 - "The essential political struggle of our time is not to pass laws that reduce pollution and conserve energy so taht the machine can keep running until it self-destructs, taking humanity along with it. Instead, it is to fight to make ecology the master science and Gaia the ruling metaphor -- to abandon an ignoble lie and embrace a nobler new fiction that offers the means of long-term survival and the prospect of a further advance in civilization.

according to Donella Meadows, (his words) "the most effective leverage point for changeing a system's behavior is its fundamental mind set or paradigm."

137 - "... we must first respond to the objection that a small-is-beautiful prescription for political salvation is utterly utopian and therefore not worthy of being taken seriously. In fact, what has always been philosophically commendable is about to become pactically obligatory. The manifold pressures of ecological scarcity will soon compel us to live in smaller, simpler communities that are closer to the land than the megacities of industrial civilization."

138 - "Tainter points out, an excess of complexity, usually aggravated by other factors, has spelled the downfall of previous civilizations".

144 - "Mores, says Rousseau, are the "unshakable keystone" of politics"

"If you want citizens to be upright and law-abiding, make your polity small and simple."

146 - "Jefferson's garden or Hamiton's machine"

147 - quoting Jefferson "We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and sevitude." It follws that the goal of economics must be sufficiency rather then affluence and stewardship rather than consumption, .."

151 - "The "constitution" of nature is made up not of structural rules - "Let there be aardfvarks!"--but of design criteria, such as the laws of thermodynamics. Nature ordains certain patterns or templates for life --"

"nature's strategy is teleonomic. Natural systems evolve purposely toward ends that are implicit in their design criteria, but there is no fixed end toward which the system tends. ... By contrast, planning as practiced by humans is normally teleological because it involves movement toward a predetermined outcome."

156 - the West is about substance and the East is about relationships

"two ways to progress past magical thinking --- the Greek way of seeking causes, which results in a mechanical view, and the Chinese way of seeking patterns, which leads to an ecological view

157 - if religion is about a personal God then there will be a conflict with political authority

"The ultimate aim of all religions must be a society like that of Orthodox Judaism or traditional Islam with no separation of sacred and secular.

162 - "But our own theory of politics is equally moribund. The machine metaphor inspiring our political arrangements no longer accords with the epistemology and ontology of modern science, a discontinuity that cannot continue indefinitely."

failure of the machine metaphor leading to discussions

164 - "It is human nature to cling to the devil one knows rather than embrace the angel one doesn't"

<!-- Fox and Tversky ****>

165 - "The essential task of the new politeia is to discover a rule of life that reconciles nature and culture, savagery and civilization. What might be the guiding ideal of such a different mode of politics?"

Chapter 7: A more experienced and wiser savage

167 - "Modern civilization lives on depleting energy and borrowed time.

173 - "when civilization cuts itself off from nature, it becomes false, artificial, immoral, and corrupt. Because cities are the furthest from nature, they are the epitome of corruption: "Cities," said Rosseau, "are the abyss of the human species.""

174 - many propose a way of life that is materially simpler and culturally and spiritually richer including Ghandi,

179 - "The Balinese are a prime example of what anthropologist Clifford Geertz calls involution -- the skillful use of limited resources to make a culture deeper and more complex."

180 - "cultures based on reciprocity and mutuality are "synergistic" because they tend to foster a happiness of the whle that is greater than the sum of the parts."

182 - "When energy becomes scarce and expensive, the sprawling megacities of today will be insupportable. As the discsussion in chapter 3 shows, it will never make ecological or thermodynamic sense to expend vast amounts of energy to concentrate diffuse energy and then ship it off to distant conurbations."

"No amount of "greening" or densification of the modern city can alter this brute fact."

urban future maybe like Paolo Soleri's arcologies

184 - scale and politics, Jefferson and Thoreau for small and simple -- Hobbes and Machiavelli for larger and more complex

186 - frugal - the word derives from fruit and is related to "useful" , such as "usufruct" which is to enjoy resources without damaging the capital

192 - "we can no longer ignore the shadow price of our vaunted freedom: it rests on a kind of slavery -- namely energy slavery, ..."