Shall We Give Up and Fiddle While Rome Burns?

In this post I would like to turn to the comment Richard left in reply to the post The Problem is Unilateralism, not Ideology. Richard advances the rather compelling view that the problems of multilateral cooperation are so huge, and so dizzying, that there is really little reason to maintain very much hope. Rather than invest in a futile task, Richard suggests that we might accept our fate and fiddle while Rome burns, concentrating on playing a pretty tune.

I will take his argument even further. First, the timetable is short. Technically, our climate models are not precise enough for us to know just when, if ever, we will deal with a catastrophic change (examples touted include a 14 C increase in global temperature in a single decade which would make unprepared human life unsustainable). So we do not actually know precisely how much time we have. But as we know it is possible that the critical timeframe is short (on the order of fifty years) it might seem prudent to act as if our problems have to be under control in that timeframe, or give up entirely. This is not an airtight argument, but it will do for now. Second, if the US has to take the lead in dealing with climate change, a review of the state of our political environment is not promising. Currently, the far right fringe of the US, a group that might, frighteningly, be as much as one-quarter or even more of the voting electorate, appears to be following religiously the rantings of hate-mongerers such as Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck, who are far more interested in disrupting Obama's White House than in solving problems. (Let me make clear that I am not referring to legitimate conservatives who have a very important role to play in American politics. I remain confused as to why Conservatives have not yet abandoned the GOP, especially after the smirking treatment from GOP leadership dealt out to Ron Paul in the party debates.) Placards being waved around in DC this week reveal that many people, virtually all white, who did not read the 1,017 pages of HR 3200 -- thus joining the outspoken Steny Hoyer, Mitch McConnell, and other congressional representatives who said this week that they don't read bills, either -- are nonetheless convinced (is it by Beck and Limbaugh?) that the Health Reform bill wants to euthanize their grandmothers and drive them into the equivalent of Nazi Youth Parties. Further, and this is partly the fault of the bill writers, one has to read all the way to section 246 of HR 3200 to discover that the bill does not intend to subsidize illegal residents of the US. In section 152, it says that one cannot be discriminated against in the provision of insurance, so for 94 sections, readers dying to know that their hard earned cash isn't going to be used to help sick, undocumented aliens, have to sweat it out. If they don't get to section 246, they remain unhappy. In any case, there are millions of Americans today who think they are being taken for a ride by Obama and his secret plan to serve illegal aliens looking for a health care handout. (The fact that HR 3200 has been criticized by the left as a combination of Romney's health care system with McCain's tax subsidy plan, is not part of this discourse.) As well, people who could not possibly define "Marxist," "Socialist,"or "Communist" are for all appearances nearly rabid in their peculiar accusation that President Obama is all three -- and a racist traitor, to boot. If we tried to bring Limbaugh, Beck, and other influential rightists on board for a collaborative solution to climate change, we would have to first get Al Gore to recant global warming. And even then I am not hopeful.

I am also unclear about Obama's committment to solving climate change. I just don't know if Obama would advocate strongly enough if his hands were not tied by the real or apparent need to screw his courage to the sticking point and try to hold this political maelstrom together -- is secession in the works? (If so, I wonder if we should let the red states go this time.) But as it is, we certainly cannot count on him to do enough. Obama's climate change legislation earlier this year was tepid and there is no sign that more is forthcoming soon. And just this week, Obama chose to impose a tariff on Chinese tire imports -- on the face of it, because tire manufacturers in the US are suffering economically and Chinese tires appear to be cross-subsidized by complex and opaque Chinese economics -- which immediately set off a wave of Chinese Glen Becks on Chinese TV, vociferously slamming the US and demanding that the government dump all its US government securities overnight. I don't even want to think about the repercussions if that were to happen. As I hope to make clear to those who do not yet understand this, cooperating with China on climate change is absolutely essential if we are to succeed. The bottom line here is that I don't think H. sapiens (and many similarly situated species who will live or die with us) can depend on US leadership or on the state of the US - China relationship today.

Finally, we may wish to reflect on a portion of Annie Rhodes' comment in reply to an earlier posting (Skin as Thick as the Bark of a Pine). In that comment, she advances the idea that we have already passed the tipping point, that we cannot avert climate change. We can merely learn how to cope with it (and presumably mitigate it). There is more to Annie's comment relating to the capacity of capitalist systems to solve these problems, but those issues need to be addressed in a later posting.

Nonetheless, despite the heavy burden of the argument, I am going to offer an argument that we should not fiddle while Rome burns. I offer this argument largely for the sake of discussion, but also because of its enormous import.

One, think back on the short-lived but brilliant polymath Blaise Pascal (1623-1662). For the first half of Pascal's life, he made enormous contributions to mathematics. Then, following a religious conversion, he wrote in the fields of philosophy and theology. Apparently, despite his self-proclaimed faith, Pascal was first and foremost a logical fellow. In explaining why everyone should have faith in God, and perhaps so explaining his own turning away from a lucrative career in mathematics, Pascal presented what has been known ever since as Pascal's Gamble. Pascal figured that we all faced a simple choice: you could believe in God, or not. And you could turn out to be right, or wrong.

If you chose to believe in God, and you were right, Pascal thought that the rewards would be significant. Eternal salvation and all that. (Please forgive me for ignoring the important theological niceties here -- I am just trying to convey the Gamble itself.)

If you chose to believe in God and you were wrong, the costs were low (you missed out on a little dishonesty, gluttony, wine and women, perhaps, but compared to what could happen in an infinite afterlife, this wasn't very important).

On the other hand, if you choose not to believe in God, and you were right, the rewards were just those cheap and insubstantial rewards I noted above. (On the other hand, Woody Allen might say that as cheap and insubstantial rewards go, they are some of the best.)

Finally, and this is the biggie, if you choose to not believe in God and you are wrong: watch out! This is expected to be a big, negative payoff. In fact, Pascal asserted that the positive benefit of believing in God and being right, and the huge cost of not believing in God and then being wrong, swamped the other outcomes. The wicked are illogical. The faithful have made the right choice.

Note that Pascal did not have to attach probabilities to his model. That is, the expected(average)payoffs of behaving logically (believing in God and taking your chances) were asserted to be larger than the expected (average) payoffs of behaving illogically (not believing in God and taking your chances) whatever the degree of belief you attached to God's existence. For this to be logically coherent, one had to actually believe that eternal salvation was of infinitely positive value, or eternal damnation was of infinitely negative value, or both. But in any of those cases -- and they are not unreasonable assumptions -- believing in God was the logical thing to do even if you thought there was only an infinitesmal chance that God existed. To believe in God logically did not require that you thought God was definitely real, or even that there was a better chance that he existed than not. To believe in God logically only required that you thought there was a tiny chance God existed, nothing more.

This is actually a compelling case for belief, as modern epistemologists, as I understand it, argue that one cannot prove that God exists, but neither can one prove that God does not exist. The only truly logical belief state is agnosticism. That is, you need a divine revelation to believe in God with certainty -- and you need a divine revelation to be an atheist (a case that should give you a headache). Agnosticism, of course, means you attach a probability of between zero and one to the existence of God -- not zero, not one, but something in-between. This is also the conclusion of modern-day Bayesian reasoning if applied to faith in God. According to Bayesian logic, no rational person ever attaches zero to the probability of any hypothesis which is not on the face of it logically false. (An example is 2 + 2 = 5.) If you attach a probability of zero to an hypothesis (for example, that Zooey Deschanel is going to walk up to you tomorrow and give you a big kiss) then this hypothesis can never logically be changed -- even if Zooey Deschanel approaches you on the street tomorrow with outstretched arms and puckered lips, you cannot raise your probability that you are about to be, miraculously, smooched. In class I call a null hypothesis with probability zero "a pig" and the idea is that no matter what new information comes along that bears on the likelihood of a porcine hypothesis, you cannot change it. (I should probably have named it a corpse, instead, as it cannot be revived, but it is too late now.) I have named this the Lipstick on a Pig Lemma. That is, no matter how much lipstick you put on a pig, it is still a pig.

Belief in God cannot be an hypothesis of this sort, for if God or an angel or other divine intervention appears to you tonight, you will surely want to upgrade your probability of belief.

But by Pascal's argument, if you attach any probability greater than zero to the existence of God, you must logically believe in him.

What does this have to do with the choice to fight on in the face of terrible odds with respect to climate change? Well, it all depends upon how severely you weight the risks of extinction of the human species and many other innocent species who will be carried along. If you attach an infinite cost to that scenario, then no matter how small a probability you attach to it -- and anyone logical by 17th century much less Bayesian rationality standards must attach a positive probability to that scenario -- you must conclude that it is worth believing in the possibility that we can avert at least the extinction scenarios.

This is a big assumption. I understand that without altruism, some people may not attach very much weight at all to the extinction of H. sapiens and many other species, and certainly not an infinite weight to that case. But if you attach a very large negative payoff to human extinction (which, according to catastrophe experts at Oxford, means we are left with fewer than 100 humans afterward -- and I think they are optimistic that 100 remaining humans can survive as hunter-gatherers in a horribly parched environment) and you also attach a non-trivial probability to catastrophic climate change, you must also join the cause of screwing your courage to the sticking point and fighting on.

So much for Pascal's Gamble. My second argument is this. Imagine the following scenario. You are standing in the hospital ER with your grand-daughter and the doctors give you sobering news. She may die despite their best efforts but there is a chance they can save her. They can't actually estimate the probabilities of life or death at all, as it is a brand new procedure. (You are thus aware that there are also positive externalities: if the procedure works on your grand-daughter, others are more likely to be saved.) It will be costly, but to you, not her. She will feel no additional pain and suffering. In fact, if the procedure fails, nothing more will come of it. But if it succeeds, she will live an ordinary life, filled with all the happiness and pain you yourself endured. The price to you? No more than 3% of your lifetime income -- say one year's earnings. Perhaps as little as one third that if all goes well.

Before you rush to answer, there is a catch. You need to collect signatures from all sorts of people, all over the world. They all must agree to do the same if and when their grand-daughters are in trouble. Meetings will be arranged with Wen Jiabao, Manmohan Singh, Angela Merkel --please don't massage her without her permission -- Gordon Brown, Barack Obama and Dick Cheney (just to make it disagreeable to everyone), and, of course, Ban Ki-Moon. The hospital in the meanwhile will cryogenically store your beautiful granddaughter for 50 years, and will give you a wonder drug that keeps you alive for another 51 (so you can have a little time with her if and when she recovers). Your travel expenses will be paid in full, but you will still be obliged for the treatment costs (again, up to one year's earnings).

I would argue that you should take the petition and begin the task. If you agree, I think it is unarguable that this scenario is closely although not precisely analogous to the situation we face. Recall that Sachs has said that it will take no more than 3% of GNP to avert the worst of climate change. If you disagree with this, and with the application of Pascal's Gamble, I have only one more argument to make.

Three, I point you to Peter Ward's Medea Hypothesis. In this provocative work, Ward argues against the prevailing view, widely known as the Gaia hypothesis. In the Gaia hypothesis, earth is a system analogous to a loving mother. In the strong version of the Gaia hypothesis, the earth is functionally homeostatic; that is, seeking over time to rectify disturbances to the overall environment and regaining healthful equilibria. In the weaker version, the one to which most of us probably subscribe, Gaia is a balanced, harmonious ecology, only upset by deeply upsetting factors (such as industrializing pollution). In this view, if we can only stop making a mess of the planet in time, and let nature take its course, we will live on, clean and green and happily.

No such luck, says Peter Ward. Our earth mother is far from the loving Gaia, but is, instead, the child killing Medea. Life is its own toxin, according to Ward, and life itself is fundamentally limiting. Life brings its own death. Ward admits freely that carbon emissions are killing the habitat, but he argues this was inevitable.

Ward's main advice to us is, at least implicitly, to stop feeling guilty that we are killing ourselves off -- and taking thousands of species with us. He argues we were all doomed anyway. In fact -- and this is the clincher -- Ward argues that instead of thinking of the human species as the planet killer, we should reverse that idea and recognize ourselves for what we really are: life's last hope. That is, Ward argues, all life on Earth will kill itself off unless human beings do something to save themselves and those they care about. Human beings have for the first time on the planet demonstrated that they just may have the technological wherewithal to save us from our terrible earth Mother, Medea.

Although Ward is apparently turning ecological wisdom on its head, for most of us the course of action offered is not so different than it was before. Mankind must still mobilize. But if we think of ourselves as the planet killer, we can imagine that the sort of soulless, selfish monsters that got us here can't change overnight and get us out of here. On the other hand, if we realize that all life on the planet was going to die off sooner or later (the Sun only has a finite lifespan with perhaps another five billion years, for example) then we do not need to look for a miraculous transformation. In Ward's view, we were destined to face just this life-saving choice in just this dark forest. And if it is our fate to be the one species on the planet capable of fighting off mass extinction, why give up before the battle begins? What if there is even a very small chance that we can win?

I know what Pascal would have said.

If that doesn't compel the most reluctant to follow along, I am afraid I cannot offer much more. I do hope some of my readers may add to the cause if they see even more reason to hope.