Meeting Demand, or Meeting Production?

Am I a naive, impractical idealist? It’s a question I often ask myself although I rarely come any closer to an answer. But the events of this week may have helped me see a few things more clearly.

One week ago, climate change activists from the group ‘NoDashForGas’ scaled the cooling towers of a new-build gas fired power station in Nottinghamshire, taking with them a week’s supply of food to sustain them for a long-haul protest on their makeshift, but sophisticated high level campsite.

Why? Partly, because the UK’s plans for numerous new fossil-fuel based power plants will lock us into a dependence upon gas imports (the prices of which are both volatile and increasing), and also for the obvious reason that the plans are a huge blow to reducing the UK’s green house gas emissions. Instead, the protesters claim we should be supporting the growth of sustainable renewable technologies, which a decade or so from now are forecasted to become cheaper than gas anyway.

The protest comes at a crucial time, given the feeble attempts to mitigate climate change in most of the industrialised world, despite (for example) increasing droughts and crop failures already hitting the developing world and accelerating ice melt at the pole. The woefully inadequate attention given to climate change is perhaps most outrageous in the USA where, for the first time in two decades, it has been completely absent from the pre-election debates, even in the midst of massive crop failures and ‘super’ storms occurring in their own back-yard.

But despite all these facts, scrolling through comments on the NoDashForGas facebook page (or those on the Guardian reports) reveals an onslaught of critical and often judgemental responses, substantially diluting the encouragement from their supporters.

Predictably, many critics dismiss the protest without much engagement of their brains. They simply throw some sort of generic insult in the activists’ direction, accompanied with the constructive advice of  ‘Get a job!’, based upon a groundless assumption that they currently lack paid work.

But the more thoughtful arguments are perhaps more disheartening, as they demonstrate the absolute condition that so often preside over energy debates: that demand must be met, at any cost. In effect, we’re allowing our extravagant energy demand to preside over the human rights of millions of people in the developing world, who are set to absorb almost the entire hit of climate change related impacts: droughts, floods, famines and numerous other crises.

Likely future impacts of man-made climate change estimated by the IPCC (2007)

Once these facts are digested, the hideous nature of “meeting demand at any cost” is revealed. It’s an argument akin to a serial rapist saying "OK, I realise what I do isn’t good, but it could take me years to find a girlfriend that will let me treat her like that, so until then, how else do you expect me to get my fix?"

Surely, instead of debating upon how we can meet our energy demand, the humanitarian approach would be to deploy renewables to their maximum potential, and then decide how best we can bring our energy demand down to meet sustainable production. Essentially, rather than meeting energy demand, we should be meeting energy production. This is more akin to setting out for a night out on the town hoping to get lucky, but not getting too disappointed if things don’t work out. Under no circumstances should we be committing horrific crimes if we find no mutually consented way to get our kicks.

Unfortunately, the unhumanitarian structure of this argument is all too familiar. It mirrors that which typically arises when any change to more sustainable behaviour is proposed, such as eating less meat and dairy, or travelling overland rather than flying. In these cases too, a spoilt sense of entitlement raises its ugly head.

But figuring out how this attitude can be changed seems, to me, to be hugely problematic. My attempts typically consist of trying to raise awareness amongst individuals in the hope that they may begin to connect their behaviour with its distant impacts, in the same way I have been encouraged to do so myself by others.

However, the situation imposes upon us by society continuously pushes our attitudes in the opposite direction. Politicians tell us how much we’re entitled to and promise us they will bring us what we deserve to secure their votes, and the advertisements we’re relentlessly exposed to not only encourage us to consume more but embed within us a sense that this is the customary way to behave. Therefore, if it is these structures in society that are the problem, should bringing these down perhaps be the focus rather than encouraging individual behavioural change? I certainly don’t know the answer to that.

So back to my original question, am I a naive, impractical idealist? Considering this last week, I guess my current answer is both yes and no:

No, because I would never expect that war, famine, disease, rape, murder and exploitation etc. could be eliminated, but I see no reason why exploitation on the scale of nations, whose populations are mostly too distant from their impacts to really appreciate them, should exist. I can’t accept that an absentmindedly exploitative society is normal, and that a generally fair and respectful society is a utopian dream.

Yes, because given the concentration of power and social control currently exercised in the West, our doctrine of economic growth that magnifies our individual and collective selfishness, and the shear complexity of the forms of exploitation that have developed, the radical change we need eliminate this nation-scale exploitation may well be an impractical ideal.

Cheating and Consumerism: Well at least I Haven’t Murdered Anyone, Right?

What’s your ‘personal fudge factor’? Whatever it is you’re probably happy with it, otherwise you’d instinctively make it smaller. At least, this is my interpretation of the behavioural trait which Dan Ariely suggested following his experiments on dishonesty.

The ‘personal fudge factor’ is the term he uses to refer to the little bit of cheating that we allow ourselves to commit, or the limit that we impose on our dishonesty in order for us to still be able to look in the mirror and feel like a good person. Furthermore, it seems we can be quite devious with our means of rationalising immoral behaviour so that it slips ‘under the radar’, i.e. our own radar, and we can retain a positive perception of ourselves.

Unfortunately however, this behaviour can become dangerous, as when a large number of people are engaged in a potentially harmful activity then the cumulative effect of all these little bits of cheating and dishonesty can be highly destructive.

So there is an obvious question to be asked: why do we allow ourselves these ‘fudge factors’ at all? Is it part of our nature, a product of some aspect of our culture, or a combination of both?

First, it’s possible to examine this question from an evolutionary perspective by considering the following quote made famous by David Wilson and Edward Wilson:

“Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary”.

In other words, on the one hand it’s advantageous for people to cooperate and behave altruistically within their group as it makes the group stronger, but it’s often of individual benefit (at least in an immediate sense) to behave selfishly. As a result of this —and whether you believe in group selection or not (see Steven Pinker’s essay for compelling arguments against the theory)— groups containing too many people behaving too selfishly become weakened, and at risk of dying out, unless altruistic behaviour and cooperation can be increased.

Clearly however, this mechanism is faced with some problems in the hugely complex interwoven society we now live in. In particular, the breakdown of strong communities in much of the West makes it very difficult to define one’s own group. This is summarised well by Jonathan Haidt, who likens us to lost, confused bees frantically buzzing around trying to find our hive. Left in the aftermath of this cultural shift appears to be an overwhelmingly individualistic society, and it seems to me that we are now in a situation where ‘selfishness beats altruism, and groups rarely exist.’ In this case is it at all surprising that we allow ourselves to cheat a little to get out ahead?

On the other hand, a more encouraging outcome of this connectedness of the world’s population is that a vast number of us appear to consider the whole of humanity, or even all sentient beings, as our ‘group’. The existence of charities for global development and animal welfare offer strong evidence for this.

So if this is the case, why do we still consider the little bits of immorality and dishonesty in our behaviour —i.e. our personal fudge factors— to be acceptable when they accumulate to cause such extensive harm in the world?

Clearly there are a number of explanations for this, such as the separation of our behaviour from its impacts in both space and time, and our knack for ‘moral self licensing’ (see my first post). But could there be other aspects of our culture that act as catalysts for our personal fudge factors?

I’m going to suggest one potential factor that I think maybe of some significance here, namely the media.

Take the Daily Mail Online as an example: on any given day of the week the front page will be overflowing with reports of murder, rape, and corruption, and a general message that all the world’s problems are due to these few villains scattered around the globe. Manmade Climate change seems to be perhaps the only example of a major issue for which the mainstream media regularly tells us that we’re all partially responsible for (although the Daily Mail don’t join in with this as they have their own way of interpreting the science).

This focus on major crimes gives a highly unbalanced view of the world, potentially shifting our moral frame of reference allowing us to more easily excuse our own seemingly insignificant sins.

After all, surely if we can look into our computers and televisions and see murderers, rapists, and other villains blamed for most of the world’s problems this makes it easier for us to look into the mirror and feel good about ourselves, even if we do knowingly play our small parts in an exploitative society? 

Now this may not be a proper real world example, but in contrast to the view painted by the media, Dan Ariely’s researchers found that the cumulative impact of the large number of people who permitted themselves a small, limited amount of cheating was far greater than the impact of the very few ‘bad apples’ they encountered in their sample groups of people, i.e. the 0.6% of people who they observed to cheat as much as the test allowed.

It seems to me that if we want to regard the whole of humanity (or even all sentient beings) as our ‘group’ —and I desperately hope that we do— then we need to recognise that the cumulative effect of all our little bits of cheating and immorality can very often cause more destruction than the acts of the few ‘villains’. If we can’t succeed in this then the world may well be preserved in its tragically unjust social state, and on its course of environmental destruction.

Notes:

http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_on_our_buggy_moral_code.html

Nina Mazar, On Amir, and Dan Ariely, The Dishonesty of Honest People: A Theory of Self-Concept Maintenance

David Wilson and Edward Wilson. Rethinking the Theoretical Foundation of Sociobiology

Steven Pinker Essay: http://edge.org/conversation/the-false-allure-of-group-selection

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/jonathan_haidt_humanity_s_stairway_to_self_transcendence.html

Cheating and Consumerism: Thou Shalt not Steal Money, but other things are OK

Cheating is OK, provided that it doesn’t directly involve money, at least one of our friends is doing it, and we can still look in the mirror and feel good about ourselves. Also, whether we believe in God or not, cheating is even more acceptable if we can successfully keep the 10 commandments from entering our minds.

These are a few of the conclusions Dan Ariely’s team made from their experiments on the subject of cheating, but just in case my paraphrasing has distorted them slightly I’ll now be a little more specific

The experiments involved measuring the tendency of people to cheat in a test consisting of 20 maths questions that were simple enough that everybody would be expected to be capable of solving them. The difficulty was that the time limit wasn’t enough to complete them all. At the end of the test, each person went to the examiner, reported how many questions they’d answered correctly, and received a dollar for every correct answer. This test was used as a method to explore people’s tendency to cheat and how this varied with the external conditions.

Some unexpected patterns emerged. For example: it was found that a lot of people cheated a little rather than there being a few ‘bad apples’ that cheated a lot, and, surprisingly, the likelihood of getting caught cheating seemed to have no effect upon people’s tendency to cheat.

This led the researchers to ask themselves: ’If having more chance of getting away with cheating doesn’t increase people’s inclination to cheat, then what does?’ They then dug a little deeper and made some quite strange discoveries.

When a group were asked to attempt to recite the 10 commandments prior to the test they stopped cheating completely, even the self-proclaimed atheists. When actors placed within other groups clearly and publicly cheated in the tests ‒and got away it‒ the cheating in the rest of the group increased when the actor was wearing a jumper from their university, but decreased dramatically when the actor was displaying the logo of a local, rival university. Finally, when people claimed one token per correct answer from the experimenter, and then walked just 12 feet to collect a dollar for each token at another desk, cheating in the group doubled.

In his lecture, Dan Ariely points out the worrying implications of this research for the current form stock market. Traders generally don’t deal with money directly but rather with stock options or derivatives, and, if they all cheat just a little then the boundaries of what is considered to be acceptable may slide, the consequences of which can be catastrophic. Additionally, it’s doubtful that they’re asked to recite the 10 commandments on their way into Wall Street.

But the results of this research are also applicable to other areas of society, as they reveal how easily and frequently we let our morals slide. When they’re applied to consumer culture, the implications are particularly disturbing.

Firstly, the fact that we can use the behaviour of other people in our ‘group’ as an excuse for loosening our morals is clearly a recipe for disaster when it comes to unethical consumption which is so widespread. Furthermore, as the most dedicated ethical consumers are often in groups quite detached from mainstream society, their ability to influence the rest of the population may be limited.

Another obvious point is that if being only one stage removed from money ‒and just 12 feet removed from our cheating‒ allows us to slacken our morals, then what hope do we have of being ethical with our consumption in globalised markets? Here we’re confronted with many complex stages of separation as well as the vast physical distances involved. Consequently, connecting the impacts of our food, clothes and the other ‘necessities’ of the western lifestyle such as electronics, pharmaceuticals and cosmetics can be utterly baffling even for those dedicated to understanding it.

Additionally, there may be a reverse consequence of our tendency to allow ‘pure’ money to strongly moderate our morals: we’re likely to gain considerable moral satisfaction from any monetary charitable donations we make, while our perception of our ‘taking’ in the form of consumer goods (effectively ‘tokens’) may seem far less significant to us. Quite worryingly, considering my last post, this may well further increase our ability to ‘morally self-license’ any of our suspiciously-unethical consuming.

So, given that we look set to remain detached from the impacts of our lifestyles for the foreseeable future, how can we best uphold our personal moral integrity when spending?

Well, the answer to this is likely to depend upon why just one step of separation from money is enough to allow people to cheat more. Do we give ourselves more credit in a cognitive or a moral sense? In other words, does this separation really make it so much harder for us to connect events and recognise the morals of our behaviour? Or does it give our conscience an ‘escape route’ that we can purposely take to sidestep any guilt we may otherwise feel and retain a positive perception of ourselves?

Reading Dan Ariely’s work he seems to suggest the latter. Unfortunately, this puts us in quite a desperate situation when confronting the task of eliminating goods with damaging and exploitative impacts from the market. It appears that even if we can become fully aware of the negative impacts of the things we buy, we’ll always still have some degree of separation which we can use to help evade any significant feelings of guilt.

If we really want to help to improve the world through our personal, day to day behaviour, it looks like we must strive to evaluate our own behaviour mindfully, and try hard not to let our moral judgement be swayed by the behaviour of others, or deceived by the self-interested parts of ourselves. But how this can be achieved on a large-scale is a difficult question.

http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_on_our_buggy_moral_code.html

Nina Mazar, On Amir, and Dan Ariely, The Dishonesty of Honest People: A Theory of Self-Concept Maintenance

Every Little Hurts?

‘Every little helps’— it’s the feeling charities endeavor to leave you with when you donate money to them. Don’t worry if you only have small change, it will still make a difference.

Charity has become a widespread method by which we express our altruism— a characteristic which has evolved to be a valuable aspect of human nature. We give to charities supporting malnourished African children, the terminally ill, the homeless, and abandoned pets, fully aware that we are likely never to meet, or receive anything in return, from any of the people we support.

Why then, if so many of us feel this compassion for the well being of others, do we still wear clothes made by underpaid children, collect stocks of electronic gadgets assembled by poisoned workers, devour industrially farmed meat and guzzle soft drinks from factories that have polluted whole community’s water supplies? As philosopher Slavoj Žižiek puts it, are we not just damaging with one hand while repairing with the other? And, if altruism is built into our nature, why are we so comfortable with this situation?

There are a number of obvious reasons why we do, including the lack of awareness of the impacts of our behaviour, and the financial premiums and inconvenience often attached to more ethical consuming. However we often go ahead with behaviours even when we’re aware that they have unethical impacts, as what miniscule difference does our decision make when so many other people are doing the same thing? Unfortunately, considering the world’s 7 billion and growing population, this appears to be quite a rational attitude.

However, there’s a glaring inconsistency between this attitude and the ‘every little helps’ message associated with charitable donations.

From a rational perspective, If I buy a can of Coca Cola every lunchtime it makes no noticeable difference to their profits, and so neither am I making any noticeable contribution to the dried up, polluted water supplies around their factories in India or the murder of union leaders in Columbia. If I treat myself to a transatlantic flight I’ll be responsible for a few tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions, but they’ll just be added to the vast quantities already up there, and I doubt anyone will be able to detect the increase. And, if I give £25 to Oxfam then it’s simply added to the millions of pounds of other donations and makes a negligible difference to the sum.

The real difference between these cases is that Oxfam will let me know that, because of my £25, an underprivileged family is now the proud owner of a new goat. This is fantastic! Now I can see my donation has had a quantifiable, positive effect. It’s stuck in my memory and I feel good about myself (and even if the goat dies prematurely its highly unlikely I’ll ever find out). As for the fizzy drinks and carbon dioxide, even assuming I’m aware of their adverse effects, I can only really see them in a global sense, which makes it so hard to pick out my individual contribution that I might as well round it down to zero and keep enjoying myself.

So it appears that this inconsistent thinking can result in us vastly underestimating the size of our ‘taking’ hand, while exaggerating the size of our ‘giving’ hand. And, unfortunately this seems a natural consequence of the fact that: (a) companies want us to feel happy buying from them and hence they’ll keep any negative impacts of their activities well concealed, and (b) charities are effectively in competition with each other for our money, so it’s to their advantage to make us feel that it’s had the most impact by giving to them.

Well if this is the case, we should probably aim to correct this problem by independently evaluating our behaviours ourselves.

To start with, we could be far more conscious of our ‘taking’ hand if an attitude of ‘every little hurts’ was routinely associated with unethical consuming. However this may be extremely difficult to achieve unless specific events can be associated with particular behaviours, which very often is a near impossible task. For instance, given all the uncertainties surrounding the impacts of manmade climate change, if I treat myself to a transatlantic flight how could I possibly know if the emissions will eventually cause the failure of an Ethiopian farmers harvest and the death of his goat, cancelling out my £25 donation to Oxfam? 

In this case, we have the other option: thinking more realistically, and globally about our charitable donations— a goat may be very useful to a struggling family, but they’re going to need much more than that to solve their problems, and there are 500 million others in poverty in Africa. And in any case, £25 is a rather meagre proportion of most of our annual disposable incomes anyway.

Well this isn’t so appealing. If we don’t feel good about giving, would we bother at all?

But there may be something more in this, as there is substantial evidence suggesting that performing acts we deem to be moral allows us to ‘morally self-license’ our less desirable behaviours. Therefore, in a sense, any altruistic behaviour within us can effectively ‘run out’ when we feel we’ve done our bit. I saw a memorable example of this phenomenon whilst myself and an ex-girlfriend were working at a homeless shelter and she whispered to me as we walked past a begger on the street, ‘keep going, we don’t have to give him any money now we work at the shelter.’

If this is in fact how we behave, then giving to charity may actually be an overly effective method of satisfying our altruistic urges, which allows us to live the rest of our lives in a guilt-free, business-as-usual manner. So if charity didn’t exist would we simply offer our altruism elsewhere, perhaps even in more involving ways? Would many of us then think more deeply about the effects of our consumption? Maybe even more readily campaign for human rights, or challenge our governments over unjustified wars?

All this is not intended to suggest that charity is a bad thing in itself: there are a great number of charities doing valuable work, and clearly donating money to proficient and effective organizations can help bring about positive change. But, whether or not the existence of charities has a positive effect overall depends upon whether its main function is to access the good in people and help it flourish, or to cheaply satisfy our altruistic urges and alleviate any guilt we accumulate from the unethical behaviours of our daily lives. And in any case, if we continue to overestimate the value of our altruistic behaviors relative to our less desirable behaviours, then the altruistic part of ourselves may remain totally bewildered and its potential to lead to a better society vastly underutilised.

Notes:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19225772.500-survival-of-the-nicest.html?page=1

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn10750-why-altruism-paid-off-for-our-ancestors.html

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19626281.500-evolution-survival-of-the-selfless.html

http://vimeo.com/13852158 (Slavoj Žižiek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce) 

http://www.righttowater.info/ways-to-influence/legal-approaches/case-against-coca-cola-kerala-state-india/

http://www.thecoca-colacase.org/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/feb/20/foxconn-raise-wages-apple-contractor?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487
Anna C. Merritt, Daniel A. Effron, Benoît Monin: Moral Self-Licensing: When Being Good Frees Us to Be Bad