APOLOGIES TO THE GRANDCHILDREN

Until I read and reviewed Andrew Fellows' Gaia, Psyche and Deep Ecology, I had not heard of the work of William Ophuls, which also features prominently in John Reed's book reviewed below. So I ordered these books on Amazon and read them with huge profit over the weekend. William Ophuls was born in 1934 and spent a number of years in the US foreign service before receiving a PhD in political science from Yale in 1973. His first book as an independent scholar came out in 1977 – Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity, followed by Requiem for Modern Politics in 1997 and Plato's Revenge: Politics in the Age of Ecology in 2011. Themes from these earlier books are taken up and developed in these more recent books, which I regard as essential reading for our time in terms of understanding the trajectory of our globalised civilisation that is on a collision course with nature's inherent ecological limits. Interestingly, many of Ophuls' ideas parallel the eco-philosophy of Henryk Skolimowski - he uses the same terms sane, humane and ecological, but Henryk's work is not cited, nor does it appear in the bibliography.

The wider analytical background goes back at least to the work of Edward Gibbon in the late 18th century on the decline and fall of the Roman Empire; the term 'immoderate greatness' is derived from Gibbon and exemplifies the process of Hubris and Nemesis characteristic of Greek tragedy where 'those afflicted by hubris become the agents of their own destruction. Like a tragic hero, a civilisation comes to ruinous end due to intrinsic flaws that are the shadow side of its very virtues. (IG, p. 2) In the second book, the author likens civilisation to a long-running Ponzi scheme that robs nature and borrows from the future, expanding and exploiting to the limit then subsequently imploding. In the first book, he examines the key elements of biophysical limits in terms of ecological exhaustion, exponential growth, expedited entropy and excessive complexity; then the human components of moral decay and practical failure. In this context, the important work of previous scholars with whom I am familiar is cited, in particular Oswald Spengler (The Decline of the West), Arnold Toynbee's Study of History and The Crisis of our Age, based on a multivolume work by Pitirim Sorokin. More recently, one could also have added Fritjof Capra's The Turning Point, and the author draws on a number of writers with whom I am not familiar.

Ophuls brilliantly demonstrates the inexorability of the overall process paralleled in previous civilisations but globalised in our own and underpinned by an ideology of economic growth based on aspirations to knowledge, mastery, power and wealth devoid of intrinsic morality and implemented through instrumental rationality. The city is necessarily a parasite on its surroundings whereby increased population and wealth leads to a rise in demand and consumption, resulting in an overexploitation of natural resources and eventually in ecological exhaustion (the Europeans first globalised this process in the history of colonialism). The dynamics of exponential growth entail a doubling slightly larger than the sum of all previous growth where technology can only postpone rather than remove the day of reckoning. Due to the present orientation of the human brain, the future is neglected and discounted at virtually zero, despite the pioneering work of economist Lord Stern. This has parallels with our cultural attitude towards death – we know it will happen but not when, so we continue to live our lives on a business as usual footing.

This growth trend leads to expedited entropy where nature effectively exacts a tax on human activity, partly in terms of diminishing returns and rising costs. This process is exacerbated by the development of excessive complexity and overload leading to an unmanageable situation that is inappropriately tackled by attempting to exert control through tax and regulation. Unfortunately, in complex systems 'an actor controls almost nothing, yet influences almost everything' (IG p. 37) This makes systemic failure inevitable in the long run. The author points out that such complexity as the essence of civilisation 'is utterly dependent on a continuous input of physical, intellectual and moral energy without which it simply cannot be sustained.' (IG, p. 41) and the human challenge is that managing the system requires prudence – 'the exercise of judgement, caution, forethought and self-restraint', which is exactly what we collectively lack and therefore fail to implement.

If the premise - also articulated by Machiavelli and Voltaire - that human nature is essentially the same through history, then, as Gibbon puts it, prosperity ripens the principle of decay while the causes of destruction multiply with the extent of conquest. The initial moral core and guiding ideals of a civilisation are corrupted through commerce and affluence along with a focus on individual and vested interests at the cost of the common good and the maintenance of civil society. This leads to practical failure whereby the elite attempt to maintain their 'advantageous present' based on systemic inequality and corruption of political processes, as one sees so transparently in the US. 'Ecological problems, exponential pressures, thermodynamic losses, risky complexity, moral decay, and human incapacity are evident everywhere, differing only in extent and degree' (IG, p. 66) – collectively, we are on the Titanic heading for the iceberg, where the proverbial rearranging of deckchairs rather than a fundamental re-orientation is totally inadequate, yet we cannot bring ourselves to take the necessary action, as Greta Thunberg has repeatedly stressed.

It is not as if we are short of warnings on the implications of ecological overshoot and collapse - Rachel Carson in 1962 (we use four times more pesticides than then), The Club of Rome 1972, 1992 and 2004, EF Schumacher 1973, the UN environment conferences since 1992, IPCC 1990, and the world scientists' warnings of 1992 and 2017 calling for 13 unpalatable actions in order to reverse ecological damage (and one could add the work of Lester Brown on eco-economy). Owing to our collective procrastination and delay, the urgency and magnitude of the actions required has increased - yet, irrationally, we persist in business as usual, indeed 'so far from trying to solve our problems, we persist in behaviour that makes them worse.'

Apologies to the Grandchildren reflects further on our ecological predicament, its deeper causes and, crucially, its political consequences. Six chapters are devoted to the demise of liberal democracy with its delicate balance of conservative emphasis on order and stability with liberal aspirations to freedom. However, we are now witnessing an unravelling of the social order and civil society both with a regression into tribalism and with an overemphasis on the left concerning freedom for minority identity groups rather than looking after the interests of ordinary people - item, the 2019 UK election result and the probable Presidential result in 2020 in the US. Ophuls identifies an additional factor as the decay of the patrician class where 'noblesse oblige' in contrast to the typical meritocracy where entitlement does not entail responsibility. The author sees the crisis of collapse as signalling the advent of chaos and therefore the rise of tyranny – people will choose security over freedom when things get bad, as we have seen with the tactical introduction of the Patriot Act after 9/11, to give one small example.

The loss of trust in the political process as well as the distortion of reason and the decay of truth are symptomatic of a general crisis of governance and legitimacy (and application of Gresham's law is that bad information drives out the good). Effective governance requires what Hobbes called a 'Sovereign' and Rousseau the prevalence of the disinterested general will as an ordering principle for civil society. This means that we need an overall moral vision of the future based on the common good rather than sectional or national interests; this in turn entails a supra-governmental authority with respect to environmental security, as I discussed in my review of Nicholas Hagger's recent books on a potential world constitution in Issue 130. Such bodies have been systematically undermined up until now, particularly by the US.

In both books, Ophuls repeatedly calls for a metanoia, as indicated in my review of John Reed's book above. However, this is completely impossible and totally impractical from a political point of view within our system. We only 'gesture at solutions' when leading scientists tell us that we need a 'transformation based on a fundamental reorientation of human values, equity, behaviour, institutions, economies and technologies.' (AG, p. 106) Given our shadow side, natural limits and recurrent flaws in human nature, the author does not think that technology will get us out of this impasse; indeed, he thinks it likely that a technotopia would result in a mechanistic and tyrannical dystopia, as we are already seeing with surveillance totalitarianism in China, a development that will become potentially pervasive with the installation of 5G. So he anticipates a return to a more localised system, which is already in evidence in the green and transition movement. One big question, however, is whether we can in fact replace fossil fuel energy not only with necessarily intermittent renewables, but with some form of ecologically benign form of energy, as envisaged by Nikola Tesla but suppressed by commercial interests a hundred years ago.

Like John Reed, Ophuls is concerned by the spiritual devastation entailed by our loss of a connection to the infinite in terms of disorientation and lack of meaning. We require 'a profound transformation of consciousness that abjures self-destructiveness and selfishness, manifests a will to live in harmony with nature, and aspires to some higher values than worldly wealth and bodily comfort.' (AG, p. 21) He notes that we live in a civilisation that produces goods in abundance but not the Good, and he advocates a life of spiritual abundance and material simplicity. However, as also noted in the previous review and by Chris Bache in his book reviewed in the last issue, the suffering entailed by overshoot, chaos and collapse is 'a necessary crucible for the forging of a new era, for the making of a new collective soul.' (AG, pp. 101-2) There is an evolutionary prospect of a greater consciousness in the long term, but the short term outlook is precarious and our ability to take the necessary collective transformative action seems to be fatally compromised. One more hopeful line of analysis missing from the book is the rising influence of women and the feminine principle, with writers like Riane Eisler, Scilla Elworthy, Mary Midgley, Naomi Klein and Anne Baring, the first articulating a partnership rather than the current inherently exploitative model based on domination. In the meantime, the creative minority including readers of this review should do everything in their power to raise awareness and promote a smoother transition to a fundamentally new world characterised by the Bulgarian sage Beinsa Douno (Peter Deunov) as a future Culture of Love.