It should be noted that the problem is not confined to the Episcopal church – or to mainstream churches in general. Other organizations or movements – such as the traditional civil right movement – have similar issues though the causes might be quite different.

The question that needs looking at then is what drives the young. This post is not about providing a how-to-do-it list for motivating generation Y – much less about building new structures to involve them. Rather, it is an attempt to provide some basic understanding of generation Y, and the situation they’re in, so that we can think reasonably clearly about possible approaches.

Just as the world is at a unique point in history so is our social environment – and especially that of young people. Situations vary across the globe but a lot of the fundamental drivers stay the same. Let’s look at three areas for some insight: violence in the Muslim world, the retreat to fantasy worlds, and our society’s disconnect from the world of nature.

First Scott Atran, an anthropologist, just gave a statement to the Senate titled “Pathways to and From Violent Extremism.” Some important points, mostly as summarized by John Robb (blog: Global Guerrillas):

• The threat today is from a Qaeda –inspired viral social and political movement, which is particularly contagious among Muslim youth who are increasingly marginalized — economically, socially, politically — and are in transition stages in their lives, such as immigrants, students, and those in search of friends, mates and jobs.
• Economic globalization, which has led to greater access by humankind to material opportunity, has also led to a crisis, even collapse, of cultures, as people unmoored from millennial traditions flail about in search of a social identity. Today’s most virulent terrorism is rooted in rootlessness and restlessness.
• Individuals now mostly radicalize horizontally with their peers, rather than vertically through institutional leaders or organizational hierarchies. They do so mostly in small groups of friends — from the same neighborhood or social network — or even as loners who find common cause with a virtual internet community.
• Entry into the jihadi brotherhood is from the bottom up: from alienated and marginalized youth seeking out companionship, esteem, and meaning, but also the thrill of action, sense of empowerment, and glory in fighting the world’s most powerful nation and army.
• The boundaries of the newer terrorist networks are very loose and fluid, and the internet now allows anyone who wishes to become a terrorist to become one, anywhere, anytime.
• More and more, terror networks are intertwined with petty criminal networks: drug trafficking, stolen cars, credit card fraud, and the like.
• Although lack of economic opportunity often leads to criminality, it turns out that some criminal youth really don’t want to be criminals after all. Given half a chance to take up a moral cause, they can be even more altruistically prone than others to give up their lives for their comrades and cause.
• This is one indication — and our research reveals others — that economic opportunities alone may not turn people away from the path to political violence. (Indeed, material incentives, whether “carrots” or “sticks,” can even backfire when they threaten core values, as our recent research has shown for Israel, Palestine, Indonesia, and Iran). Rather, youth must be given hopes and dreams of achievement, and plausible means to realize such hopes and dreams.

As our economy stumbles along things may get a little better for a while. Not too many years ago there were good jobs – or perhaps more accurately jobs for people with limited skills – that payed decent wages. Mostly they were the union jobs, the factory jobs. Globalization will make sure that they’re not coming back! As we move further and further into economic disintegration, young people will be faced with an increasingly bleak future, a future that – especially in the US – they have not been prepared for. For them expect tomorrow’s conditions will be more like those in today’s Muslim world.

One response that can be expected is an increase in violence. We already saw flash mobs in Philadelphia, booby traps for the police in Hemet, CA, and then Hutaree came along (“Christian” Warriors building IEDs to kill cops at funeral processions for cops they’ve already killed). Read comments in the Reminder or listen to the tea partyers talk and you’ll find lots of anger. A lot – but not all of the anger and violence — is by an older generation. Given a suitable trigger, that anger can fuel the spread of a great deal more violence.

However, at this time a retreat from reality is the major escape route for many of the world’s young people. Thanks again to Global Guerrillas for some statistics and insightful observations:

“We’re witnessing what amounts to no less than a mass exodus to virtual worlds and online game environments.” Edward Castronova (an economist who studies online games)

• Active online gamers spend 10,000 hours of play by the time they are 21 (almost as much as the time spent in school).
• There are 500 million active online gamers worldwide (that will grow to 1.5 billion in the next 10 years).
• 3 billion hours a week are spent playing online games.

Here’s the big idea. For active online gamers real life is broken. It doesn’t make any sense. Effort isn’t connected to reward. The path forward is confused, convoluted, and contradictory. Worse, there’s a growing sense that the entire game is being corrupted to ensure failure. So, why play it?

They don’t. They retreat to online games. Why? Online games provide an environment that connects what you do (work, problem solving, effort, motivation level, merit) in the game to rewards (status, capabilities, etc.). These games also make it simple to get better (learn, skill up, etc.) through an intuitive just-in-time training system. The problem is that this is virtual fantasy.

John Robb has some ideas:

So the really big idea isn’t figuring out how to USE online gamers for real world purposes (as in the dirty word: crowdsourcing — the act of other people to do work for you for FREE — blech!). Instead, it’s about finding a way to use online games to make real life better for the gamers. In short, turn games into economic darknets that work in parallel and better than the broken status quo systems. As in: economic games that connect effort with reward. n Economic games with transparent rules that tangibly improve the lives of all of the players in the REAL WORLD.

This isn’t tech utopian. It’s reality. The global electronic marketplace and the political system that currently dominates our lives is at root a game but with hidden rule sets. As a result, it’s a game that being run for the benefit of the game designers to the detriment of the players. The reason we keep playing is that we don’t have any choice. Let’s invent something better and compete with it. Let’s provide people with a choice.

A NY Times piece on web use in China reached rather similar conclusions. For China’s young, the web is their escape and their primary form of entertainment – though games are just a part of the mix.

Another factor to consider is our disconnect from nature and the resulting search for authenticity. The theory here is that our society’s disconnect from nature has left a void that people are trying to bridge via a search for the authentic. [There's a book on the subject (Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want). Lots of 5 star reviews. It seems to mostly be about marketing techniques that convey a sense of authenticity and therefore have lots of customers. The conclusion seems to be that the best way to appear authentic is to be authentic – which actually is not possible for a corporation within a corporate capitalist framework.]

I have no idea on whether this is a stronger or weaker effect among young people but definitely would expect it to be significant. Certainly, by the directions our society has taken, young people today are more disconnected from nature than previous generations were. Rebuilding the connection is critical to any movement towards a just and sustainable future.

Some thoughts on connecting with generation Y:

• Try to catch them at transition stages in their lives, before their troubles get too big, and before they take a plunge into violent or other destructive paths.
• Offer a believable better future – especially to the marginalized or about to be marginalized.
• An approach has to become a viral movement to become widespread (but how do you predict whether an approach has that potential?)
• It has to be bottom up, not top down, and if it works, spread will be in a horizontal not vertical path, with essentially peer to peer connections.
• A strong web component will be necessary and it must be consistent with the way gen Y uses the web (which changes regularly).
• Somehow, somewhere it must include at least the possibility of reconnection to the natural world.
• It should provide:

worthwhile non-material rewards,

some form of community that allows the development of roots,

opportunity for learning/growth/advancement.

• It must be:

transparent

honest

just

non-hierarchal

have a fluid, nonrigid structure

One possible model to look at for inspiration is the open source community: Large, much more powerful than generally acknowledged, growing rapidly. There are lots of different kinds of open source communities ranging from web based to warfare. Obviously, not all of them are good neighbors!

I’m thinking now of the web based open source movement that gives us creativity – eg the Wiki and Wikipedia – as well as powerful alternatives to Microsoft and Apple. This community represent a relatively young demographic. Creativity and hard work are valued as is sharing, openness, support for others. These virtues are rewarded with respect and a chance of making a living doing what you enjoy (but hardly a path to riches).

From the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) 2007 Assessment summary: “During the past 50 years, the sum of solar and volcanic forcings would likely have produced cooling. Observed patterns of warming and their changes are simulated only by models that include anthropogenic (us) forcings. IPCC is a real, credible, science based organization – not a bunch of hacks for sale to the highest bidder! It’s conclusions are based on peer reviewed results from a wide range of related disciplines. In fact, it’s just this wide range of data sources that makes their results so credible.

Look at greenhouse gases. Again from IPCC, “Atmospheric concentrations of CO2 (379ppm) and CH4 (1774ppb) in 2005 exceed by far the natural range over the last 650,000 years.” That’s a very powerful piece of data! I’m not a climate scientist but I do have a background in subjects such as thermodynamics and heat transfer. Maybe sunspots or other mechanism are at work in warming but I can assure you that CO2 and CH4 really are greenhouse gases (basic physics). They will have at least some warming effect – and with those numbers you are going to have a hard time convincing me that their effect won’t be significant.

Climate vs weather

There’s a big difference between predicting weather and predicting climate. To predict weather you need to analyze the effect of all kinds of forces that are varying all over the world while at the same time interacting and changing rapidly with time. The nature of the governing equations is such that the results are extremely dependent on initial conditions (chaos in the mathematical sense). Therefore, no matter how powerful your computers get you still won’t be able to predict complex weather more than a few days into the future.

Where weather prediction looks at the details, climate projections look at the big picture: basically they do an energy balance for the earth (energy in – energy out = energy gain). This still a VERY complex problem – energy flows and the earth’s response are not easy to quantify with a high degree of accuracy. However, you’re looking at the big picture, averages, long term trends – not whether the sun will shine on your house tomorrow – and the weather predictability limit of extreme dependence on initial conditions is not a factor.

Nothing is guaranteed

Predicting the future has its risks – there’s always the possibility of a black swan event that would shift the direction form global warming to cooling. Massive volcanic eruptions or a collision with an asteroid could send up enough dust to do it. Then there’s always the possibility of nuclear winter…..

Who do you believe

There is a solid consensus among climate scientists and people in related disciplines that global warming is occurring and that human activities are a significant cause. These people do not get their income by producing the results someone with funds is looking for. In general, support is going to go to people who get their work published in peer reviewed journals. Now I will be the first to agree that in science and science publishing there tends to be a bias towards work that fits in with generally accepted theories. However, this is just a bias, and good solid work that is outside of the mainstream will get through sooner or later. In this case the consistency of data from so many different sources has convinced me that this kind of bias is not a significant problem. An extensive review of the climate change skeptics side is here.

While there are real scientists on the denier side, most of what I’ve come across is disinformation and deliberate lies paid for by assorted corporate energy interests. To illustrate: James Hansen, a rather outspoken climatologist, was sort of a Paul Revere of global warming. His early work on the subject showed projections that were pretty accurate. He became a target for attacks (apparently funded by various energy interests) that attempted to discredit his work by any available means – including deliberate distortion. To this end Patrick Michaels, in Senate testimony and various presentations, showed a chart from a Hansen paper; only the chart had been modified to make Hansen’s projections look too high by creatively erasing part of it. The story, as determined by Paul Krugman of the NY Times, is here. Some background on Michaels is here.

Hansen has been criticized by some legitimate scientists. Data always is subject to interpretation and Hansen may have a tendency to reach a more dismal conclusion on a projection than other qualified scientists – but that’s a matter of data interpretation, not data falsifying! What probably gets him into the most trouble is his activism. Hansen is convinced that very bad things are happening to our planet, things that need to be stopped before it’s too late, and so he has plunged into the public and political arena. His activism doesn’t sit well with some of his colleagues. But given what he believes science is telling us isn’t his activism the proper moral choice? More details on Hansen are here.

Another example: A while back I received a fat envelope in the mail. Among other things, it contained a very nicely printed, glossy12 page reprint of an article from the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons titled “Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide.” The purpose of this mailing was to get me to sign an anti global warming petition. This letter apparently was sent to people with technical backgrounds in fields other than climate studies. They must have been a rather extensive mailing – I got two copies. Somebody spent a lot of money on it….

Papers published in obscure journals from totally unrelated fields simply are not believable. I didn’t investigate the report’s claims but others have. Check here and here for more. The more you look, the more you see a collection of people and organizations with highly questionable motivation and little if any scientific background in relevant fields.

Tipping point

From Wikipedia: “A climate tipping point is a point when global climate changes from one stable state to another stable state, in a similar manner to a wine glass tipping over.” Whether this is a useful or meaningful concept is debatable. However, it is pretty clear that global warming has had and will continue to have irreversible effects on planet earth.

Excessive greenhouse gas emissions will continue for years because it would take a really dramatic (and definitely traumatic) effort to make a significant difference. Cap and Trade is just a gift to Wall Street – it’ll do a lot more for Goldman Sachs than for climate. Realistically, the likelihood of major reductions in carbon emissions anytime soon is negligible. From the 2009 BP Statistical Review: for 2008, oil down 0.6%, natural gas up 2.5%, coal – the fastest growing for the last 6 years – up 3.1%. Coal being the growth fuel makes this particularly disturbing. From mining to burning there’s no such thing as clean coal and carbon capture and storage as a real mitigating technology is a long way off. Furthermore, even if we stopped adding carbon to the atmosphere, the CO2 we’ve already sent there is not going to come back down for many years to come.

Predicting the effect of climate change – who wins, who loses – is more difficult than predicting the climate change itself so there is a great deal of uncertainty in trying to assess the effects. Certainly, the movement of climate zones towards the pole and towards higher altitude is happening much too rapidly for ecosystems to adapt without severe damage. Warming, in combination with human activities such as industrial agriculture and rain forest clearing (which themselves contribute directly to warming), certainly will continue to result in major species extinctions – another “great dying”.

We humans and our technology always have been hard on the environment. Back about 13,000 years ago, in America, the Clovis people developed a way of making very effective spears for hunting mammoths. In a span of at most 450 years these huge mammoths became extinct.  Whether Clovis hunting was the prime cause can be debated – but it certainly made at least a contribution to the demise of the mammoth – and a number of other species (Wikipedia: “Mammoth is only a small part of the Clovis diet; extinct bison, mastodon, sloths, tapir, palaeolama, horse and a host of smaller animals have also been found in Clovis sites where they were killed and eaten”).  The now useless spear technology was abandoned – as was the Clovis culture.

By now we have grown so powerful, and so numerous, and so unconcerned with the long term implications of our actions that we have become a plague species. No corner of the globe is immune from our trash, pollution, and destruction. Rain forests, coral reefs, and Appalachian mountains gone, fish stocks badly depleted, vanished species, our mark is everywhere. To quote E.O. Wilson, “If current deterioration of the environment by human activity continues unabated, best estimates are that half of Earth’s surviving species of plants and animals will be extinguished or critically endangered by the end of the century.”

There now are over a billion hungry people on the planet – and the number is growing rapidly –  hungry people do not have the health of the environment as their top priority!  Desperation and the need for short term survival provide a recipe for maximum damage.

Before human times there were five periods of “great dying.” The “greatest dying” was 250 million years ago:  Over 90% of the world’s species lost, 10 million+ years to recover, cause unknown.  We now are in the sixth great dying – and this time we’re the cause.  Besides our direct involvement in species loss, our environmental actions make a major contribution.  Habitat destruction and climate change are happening at a rate far higher than many species can move from or adapt to.  Our tall grass prairies are long gone, mostly in exchange for a mono culture of corn, grain and soy; rain forests with their enormous diversity are exchanged for palm oil plantations, sugar, soy and beef.  The list of lost diversity goes on and on.

An instructive take on our situation, from the perspective of both scientists and evangelicals, is in “An Urgent Call to Action: Scientists and Evangelicals Unite to Protect Creation.”

Shifting to my fire and brimstone preaching mode:  We humans have done serious and irreversible damage to creation. We will continue to do even more and even worse damage until the time comes when we either confess our sins and change our sinful ways – or the power is taken away from us. Expect retribution! There may be forgiveness of sins but there is no release from the consequences of sin. We do not know all of the forms that retribution will take, when and how it will come, but it will come. Violence, hunger, disease are some forms that are happening now. Unfortunately, it’s mostly the poor and vulnerable and the nonhuman sector of creation that are paying the price. That won’t always be the case!

….do I see some strange looking figures coming up behind us? They’re still a ways off but could it be four horsemen?

Wikipedia on Revelation:  “The first horseman to appear is Pestilence, who rides upon a white horse. Pestilence conquers the nations of the world, subjugating them to demonic powers of the world. In the wake of Pestilence comes War, riding a large, wild red horse and wielding a tremendous sword symbolizing continuing war over the domination of the world, killing millions in his path with his sword. In the wake of War, due to immense destruction because of War and Pestilence, is Famine. Famine is portly – riding upon a black, sickly horse – representing gluttony and hunger. And in the wake of Famine, comes the pale rider, Death. His horse is stark pale. He is followed by Hades and carries the remaining souls to their final destinations.”

]]> http://blogs.stpaulswillimantic.org/2009/07/07/us-vs-the-environment/feed/ 0 http://blogs.stpaulswillimantic.org/2009/05/18/the-world-in-transformation-i/ http://blogs.stpaulswillimantic.org/2009/05/18/the-world-in-transformation-i/#comments Mon, 18 May 2009 17:33:06 +0000 aleggen http://blogs.stpaulswillimantic.org/?p=86 What we do today – as an individual, as the church, as our society, as our species – will have an effect on tomorrows world.  We leave our footprints; some will fade with time, others won’t.  It can take hundreds of years to replenish an over pumped ancient aquifer, thousands to restore a heavily damaged ecosystem – if it can be restored at all.  The crude oil converted to the gasoline that we’ll convert to carbon dioxide and water vapor is gone forever.  Every species that becomes extinct will diminish creation forever.  Therefore, though it’s difficult, we are obligated to think about the future and how our present lives will influence it.

Of course in the vast majority of cases our footprints will merge with millions of others and whatever we can do will have a negligible influence on the larger future.  However, there are those rare and unpredictable cases where some tiny step leads to another and another and in the end a major change occurs.  Chaos theory (also see) provides some very necessary insights into any consideration of the future.

God works through chaos.  Most real world dynamic systems (weather, the stock market, where we live, how a tree branches, the shape of a coastline, etc, etc) are chaotic.  Chaotic systems, though they may look random, are not.  They are fully determined, but their path is extremely dependent on initial conditions.  As a result of this dependence, our ability to predict the details of the future is very limited – no matter how powerful our computers get!  It’s the very often  misinterpreted butterfly effect: “Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?”  Basically, very small actions can trigger changes that over time result result in major – but totally unpredictable -  changes and a dramatically different outcome.  Do you set off the tornado or stop it?

Though the future is not predictable, sometimes, for long time periods, it can be reasonably safe to assume that the future will be defined by an extension of the present or the recent past.  Obviously, this is not always the case.  Civilizations eventually collapse and sometimes populations crash.  However, there are lots of known forces at work, and though they can’t tell us the future, they can tell us a lot about limitations and possible directions.

I can envision little pieces of a future that is just and sustainable – and a lot different from today’s world.  I’ve also experienced little bits of that possible future.  The visions I’ve had or seen are not and cannot be universal – they are limited to particular regions, situations, and population density.  However, the biggest stumbling block I see is not where we’re going but how can we get there in the least painful and most loving and just way!

Some problems that come to mind:

• Hunger – by UN estimates one billion undernourished people before the year is out
• Energy limitations (peak oil, natural gas not too far behind) -
• Rapid climate change
• All kinds of water related issues
• Major irreversible degradation of the environment
• It takes a lot of time and money to build large energy, infrastructure, etc, projects
• Without force it takes a lot of time to change people’s habits
• Conflict with deep rooted causes
• A fundamentally unsustainable greed based global economic system

The first thing to keep in mind is a fact usually ignored: everything is related. There are no independent variables in the real world – you can’t separate consideration of oil from energy, from transportation, from food, from climate, from environmental degradation, from geopolitics, etc, etc, etc. – they’re all related, they all affect each other. Similarly, all life is related, and no living thing can exist except through a huge number of cooperative relationships with other lifeforms.

Looking at the problem list makes it hard to avoid the conclusion that there are just too many people on earth. Certainly that problem list gets much easier to deal with if there were a lot less of us around. However, it really looks to be much worse than just a few too many people, it looks like population overshoot.  Overshoot happens when a population grows larger than the long term carrying capacity of its environment. In our case this was enabled by using up stores of oil, natural gas, water in ancient aquifers, deep, fertile old soils, etc, etc.

Populations that go into overshoot eventually crash – a very painful process. Their attempts to survive cause them to do maximum damage to their environment thereby lowering its carrying capacity well below what it originally was. As a result, they usually end up at population levels very much lower than they were at their peak.

The earth now is supporting almost 7 billion people – but how many of us can it support in the long run? Lots of estimates out there – an interesting one, the Earth Manifesto, makes a good case for one billion or less. But how would we get there?  To be continued….

The usual argument for the first is that it is necessary to prevent some potential major attack and loss of life.  Even if this were true – and in the real world it’s not – the use of torture is still immoral.  Actually, it’s been shown quite conclusively that torture is not an effective technique for obtaining information.  Lots of info, some good and useful, some bad, and no way to tell the difference; lots of innocent people tortured; lots more people hate you.  At one time Israel engaged in torture – but then gave it up as not effective.  Israel is pretty efficient in this sort of thing and isn’t particularly concerned with what the rest of the world thinks so this is a pretty good indication of tortures lack of utility.

This of course brings up the question of WHY?  Why did Cheney and Bush and the CIA people go this way?  The ineffectiveness of torture as a means for gathering information has been widely acknowledged for a good long time so why do it?  What  do you expect to gain?  Are you just looking for statements to justify a course of action that can’t be justified by honest and rational means?

The second use of torture (and some of the specific techniques) has a long history.  It seems the Romans had a rule that you couldn’t execute someone for a crime unless they confessed….  Later, during the Inquisition, the church used some very brutal techniques (including a variation on waterboarding) to get confessions from witches and Jews (some history here).  In more recent times the Soviets used techniques such as sleep deprivation to get people to confess to “crimes.”  With these techniques you can break any person so that they’ll confess to anything – even if they know that their confession is a death sentence;  implicate anyone; in the end even believe in their own guilt.

Subtle forms of these techniques are not unknown in our enlightened society.  For example, police have been known to make up their mind that a person is guilty of a crime and then work very hard at obtaining a confession.  For example, here in Connecticut Richard Lapointe has been in prison since 1989 for a murder he probably did not commit.  Lapointe has mental issues, is gullible and wants to please authority; in a 9 hour unrecorded interrogation he gave the police and prosecutors the confession they wanted.  Unfortunately, police and prosecutors do not like to admit their mistakes….

If conditions designed to destroy someone mentally break someone’s mind are considered torture then add Supermax prisons to the list of instruments of torture.

What got me thinking about this dismal subject was a depressing piece by David Ignatius, “How Obama’s Decision Hurt the CIA.”  The main point seems to be that the poor CIA guys can’t do their job effectively because they’re too busy trying to cover their butts.   Stuff like

“One former officer told me he declined the job, not because he thought the program was wrong, but because he knew it would blow up. “We all knew the political wind would change eventually,” he recalled. Other officers who didn’t make that cynical but correct calculation are now “broken and bewildered,” says the former operative.”

Ignatius is even worried that our allies in torture, Egypt and Jordan, won’t want to handle our torture outsourcing anymore,

“risk is too high to do the things with America they’ve done in the past.”

The comments that go along with the piece mostly are as bad or worse.

Depressing.  The moral issues seem to be considered too irrelevant to even mention.  But morality does matter and it does have some very clear commandments – one of them is thou shalt not torture!  International law also is very clear – torture is illegal;  the order to torture is an illegal order.  Both are subject to prosecution.  The Nuremberg Defense – “I was only following orders” – is not a valid defense.

Morality certainly is an issues in the Muslim world and the perceived immorality of the West is a major driving force in Muslim anger.  That the US both practiced and outsourced torture is not exactly news to most of the world.  The question now is what next?  Should there be prosecution – after all serious crimes usually are punished?  Or should we just forget the whole thing and promise that we’ll play nice from now on?  Perhaps the “truth and reconciliation” approach?  However, that requires the admission of guilt and the desire for forgiveness;  hard to picture Cheney in that role!

John Robb just posted “TORTURE AND MORAL ISOLATION” on his in Global Guerrillas blog.  He makes the point that morality is important for very practical reasons.

“In short, a primary objective of US grand strategy should be to increase its connectivity within the moral sphere. The embrace of torture does exactly the opposite.  It self-inflicts moral isolation on the US by violating codes of conduct we profess to uphold.  This moral isolation creates an internal dialogue plagued by mistrust, menace, and uncertainty.”