Nested Sustainabilities and the US Withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement

     Today US President Donald J. Trump put in motion the Nation's withdrawal from the Paris Climate accords. Musical and cultural sustainability depends on sustainability of the Earth no less than does economic activity, a lesson that ecological economists understand whereas the neoclassical economists that run the US economy do not. In announcing the withdrawal, Secretary of State Pompeo justified the withdrawal on the grounds that the Paris agreement was bad for the US economy, never mind whether it might have been good for the Earth and the nations of the world as a whole.
       As reported, his justification advanced no propaganda against the climate science consensus, because this rationalization was unnecessary. It was purely an economic decision, based on narrow self-interest and incorrect knowledge of how dependent national economies are on global commerce and the Earth's resources. The nation's isolationist economic policies are reminiscent of mercantilism. The withdrawal decision illustrates "economic man" acting on a national level. Adam Smith believed that individuals acting in their narrow economic self-interest resulted in a more prosperous economy for all because competition and the marketplace acted as an "invisible hand" to ensure a good  outcome for all. The rising tide would lift all boats. Never mind that some boats were larger than others and would grow faster. But just as narrow national self interest led to centuries of conflict and war in international politics, so in economics the result was the exploitation of the Earth's natural abundance. Now the Earth is paying us back in the currency of mass extinctions and climate change. There is no invisible hand to ensure a good outcome for the Earth and all its creatures, including humans.
       Even though the Paris accords targets are insufficient to do more than slow down the climate emergency train wreck, as a step in the right direction they could have led to more and larger steps. The withdrawal of the world's largest economy will cripple those accords and the chance to do more to mitigate the worst of the climate dangers on the horizon. Given the US' withdrawal, it will be more difficult for other world leaders to keep their nations in the Paris agreement, as well. But US withdrawal is not a foregone conclusion. The US is set to withdraw officially on Nov. 4, 2020--one day after the next US Presidential election.

Natural Selection and the Invisible Hand

   

Invisible path to Oxford, courtesy Wikimedia Commons

     My sound ecology project led me to study animal sound communication, from three points of view: the modern science of behavioral ecology; indigenous ecological knowledges; and poetics, including zoomusicology. Zoomusicologists are especially interested in birdsong, from an aesthetic point of view. Sound functions for indigenous peoples as an indicator of nature: weather and climate, for example, and the locations and activities of animals, as well as spirit-persons. Behavioral ecologists study sound communication as part of the science of animal behavior: they are interested in understanding how, what, and why animals (and plants) signal information to one another by means of sound. Music may be understood as a special form of communication among human animals. Of course, compared with other animal sound communication, human music is thought to be complex in structure, to have aesthetic qualities, and to operate as part of the cultural matrix—that is, it varies among different peoples, it is learned and transmitted from one group and generation to the next, it is creative, and so on, making it different in degree (if not in kind) from the croaks of frogs and the chirps of crickets. And yet, I’ve wondered whether insights from the study of animal sound communication have bearing on music and sustainability, on the one hand, and on the place of sound and music in the contemporary environmental and cultural crisis, on the other.

     In reviewing the literature of behavioral ecology, I found that explanations of animal sound communication were based in the neo-Darwinian paradigm of fitness combined with modern gene theory. That is, individual animals communicated (in sound and by other means) in a struggle for survival with the result that those better adapted to their ecological niche would have the best chance of living longer, mating more often, and contributing their genetic inheritance to the ongoing gene pool of their species. Those better adapted exhibited advantageous variations compared with other members of their species: bigger, stronger, “smarter,” more flexible, and so on; or in the realm of sound communication they could vocalize louder, or longer, or in a more elaborate way, or more often, or when there was less interference from other sounds. As Darwin’s theory of natural selection proposed, then, the animals who were better at vocalizing (all other things equal) would gradually comprise a greater percentage of their species, and over very long (geological) periods of time, would “transmute” (or mutate) into new species. 

     One of the things that struck me immediately about Darwin’s theory of natural selection was that its evolutionary algorithm operated like Adam Smith’s "invisible hand." In both, individuals acting in their self interest—that is, selfishly—were said to produce an overall outcome for the common, or public, good: whether for the better adaptation of a species, or the benefit of society (the market economy, with opportunities and benefits for more individuals). Darwin himself credited the genesis of natural selection to his reading of Malthus on population: “In October 1838 I happened to read . . . Malthus . . . and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favorable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavorable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species.” 

    But recently in reading Silvan Schweber’s detailed examination of Darwin’s reading during the period that led up to his eureka moment, I found confirmation that Smith's "invisible hand" had also been an influence. With natural selection, as in the free market, there was no external intervention or regulation; things were said to work out for the best naturally, and of their own accord, as if guided by an invisible hand. Also, in reading Stephen Jay Gould’s summary of Darwin’s “middle road” the other day, I ran across a similar reaction to Darwin’s theory from none other than Karl Marx. Writing to Engels shortly after reading Darwin, Marx put it this way: “It is remarkable how Darwin recognizes among beasts and plants his English society with its division of labor, competition, opening up of new markets, ‘invention,’ and the Malthusian ’struggle for existence.’” Nature, in other words, operated in the plant and animal kingdoms as the free market did in the sphere of human economics.

     Gould himself had come to the same conclusion after reading Schweber’s 1977 essay. He wrote, “I believe the theory of natural selection should be viewed as an extended analogy—whether conscious or unconscious on Darwin’s part I do not know—to the laissez faire economics of Adam Smith. The essence of Smith’s argument is a paradox of sorts: if you want an ordered economy providing maximum benefits to all, then let individuals compete and struggle for their own advantages. The result, after appropriate sorting and elimination of the inefficient, will be a stable and harmonious polity. Apparent order arises naturally from the struggle among individuals, not from predestined principles or higher control." Gould was quick to demur from Smith's classical economic theory: laissez-faire economics leads to oligopoly and inequality, not a stable and harmonious society. 

     Gould also went on to point out that just because natural selection and laissez-faire economics were analogous, that in itself did not mean they were wrong. Even so, I believe there are reasons to be skeptical. For one thing, it is also possible that Marx was right, in that natural selection is anthropogenic, projecting our human understanding of behavior onto the animal kingdom because we have no alternative: we can’t comprehend what it is to be a nonhuman animal. And for another, as I learned just recently, from a 2011 essay by Peter Harrison in the history of ideas, Adam Smith didn’t mean what Marx, Schweber, Gould, and I thought he meant by the invisible hand. Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” was understood, by Smith and others at the time he was writing, as deliberate intervention, “higher control” —in fact, it was taken to be the hand of God, hidden and invisible, yet working for the good of mankind. In other words, Smith’s free market was not free from the direction of God’s invisible hand. The irony is that Darwin’s natural selection was free from it. And so in this important aspect, Darwin’s evolutionary theory and the classical economic theory of Adam Smith are quite the opposite. Darwin himself would have liked to believe that God’s invisible hand was operating in the natural world, but could not bring himself to that faith, for various reasons that can be found in the voluminous literature about Darwin.

     Metaphors and analogies are necessary in scientific theories. Mathematical formulas represent ideas; Newton’s f=ma and Einstein’s e=mc squared are meaningless until the concepts are explained in words. “Relativity” is both a fact and a metaphor. Smith's "invisible hand" is a metaphor. In The Origin of Species, Darwin wrote that he used the phrase “struggle for existence” in a “large and metaphorical sense including the dependence of one being on another.” And this is to say that for Darwin the “struggle for life” involved not only selfishness, but also interdependence and cooperation, something that is sometimes forgotten by contemporary neo-Darwinians fixated on what Richard Dawkins famously called “selfish gene theory.” Interdependence, after all, is the cornerstone principle of ecological science—the study of the relationships among organisms and to their environments—and one of the four principles of an ecological approach to musical and cultural sustainability. 

Sustainability, the sound commons, and Garrett Hardin's tragedy

    I've written earlier about the soundscape as a commons, i.e. as a resource available to all creatures. Recall that according to the acoustic niche hypothesis, each animal species that communicates by sound does so within a niche in the soundscape, the result of evolutionary adaptation. The niche is marked by timbre, frequency, volume, repetition, time of day or night, etc. with the goal that individuals' signals be received by other species members unambiguously. Of course, they are also overheard by predators, to whom animals may give false signals. Obviously, this works best in a relatively stable ecosystem. Introduce disturbances, such as drastic changes in habitat, or frequent noise interference, and sound communication becomes difficult. Natural disturbances such as fire, human-made disturbances such as agricultural development in forested areas, or climate change, or noise pollution due to ocean vessels, wreak havoc with the soundscape and the acoustic niches available. Communication suffers and species health inevitably declines, due of course not only to the degradation in soundscape but to the ecosystem generally.
    For a century anthropological linguists have written about endangered languages, and comparative musicologists and ethnomuiscologists about endangered musics. As traditional cultures have become displaced or even in some cases gone extinct, or as they modernize and discard their older layers of music, various musical resources, such as instruments, genres, and the knowledge associated with them also have disappeared. This endangerment discourse moved from preservation to conservation to safeguarding to sustainability, gradually acknowledging the dynamism in living traditions. What's been missing is a framework for sustainability. I don't mean a particular type of sustainability, such as economic, environmental, musical, cultural, etc. What I'm getting at is a framework within which to view sustainability. It's not an adjective that modifies sustainability at issue here; it is the larger context within which sustainability rests. And that context, I believe, is commons, broadly understood as a resource commons where resources are not only material but also intellectual, ethical, and cultural, extending culture from humans to the higher vertebrates as well. Sustainability occurs, in other words, where the overriding principles are interconnectedness and mutuality, whether we are talking about an information commons, a fishery, a music culture, or chemical processes such as photosynthesis within an ecosystem. Commons defeats entropy.
    In thinking about commons once more, I returned to Garrett Hardin's seminal essay, "The Tragedy of the Commons" and discovered that I had not really remembered it carefully.[1] This influential essay, now 45 years old, is usually understood to argue against commons; but upon examination it turns out that is not what Hardin had in mind. His article opposed an unregulated commons, not commons per se. The unregulated commons is unsustainable; no "technical solution" (Hardin meant technology) can save it. But a managed commons is sustainable. What is his reasoning?
    In terms which were prescient, Hardin begins by stating that certain problems, such as continuous world population growth, do not admit of technological solutions. The planet's resources are finite, which means despite technological means of extracting more and more of them, population growth cannot in the long run be infinite. This contention prepares his discussion of commons, but readers usually ignore it (or forget it, as I did) and pass directly to his claim that individuals sharing a commons and always acting only in what they see as their personal best interest ultimately must exhaust its resources. And that is all most people take away from this influential essay. In the enormous literature produced in response to it, readers tend to forget that Hardin continues his commons argument in order to discredit the "invisible hand" doctrine of Adam Smith and other laissez-faire (today we would say neoliberal) capitalists. In other words, the tragedy of the commons gives the lie to Smith's claim that if everyone works in their personal best interest an invisible hand will see to it that the public will benefit as well. On the contrary, the public suffers; and ultimately the individuals who may profit at first also suffer as resources become exhausted even for them. For that reason, Hardin concludes, a regulated commons is best. 
    Hardin insisted that relying on individual restraint brought on by knowledge of the common good would not always suffice. His overriding concern was with population growth; wishing to limit this so as not to bring about a Malthusian conclusion, he acknowledged that individuals could scarcely be depended on to limit their number of offspring voluntarily. Regulation by law was the only answer. In China, of course, this is precisely what occurred; but in the West, it has been unthinkable to do anything but depend on individuals' sense of ethical responsibility. Take the discussion away from population growth, or "breeding" in Hardin's unfortunate phrase, and put it into carbon emissions and their effect on climate change, and we have the same argument that is being made today for carbon offsets, carbon taxes, and the like, to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide humans are putting into the atmosphere. We may also see the wisdom in Hardin's choice of the word "tragedy," even though we are loath to accept its implications. Hardin's essay, rightly read, helps us frame the sustainability discourse for music and culture as well as for population and energy.

[1] Garrett Hardin, "The Tragedy of the Commons." Science, New Series, Vol. 162, No. 3859 (Dec. 13, 1968), pp. 1243-1248.