What Should I Do?

Beyond Resilience - Personal Morality

In a recent posting to this site James Howard Kunstler  spoke about the failure of many in the environmental community to really grasp the challenge of a post-carbon future. He talked about their “techno-rapture” over cars that run on fuels other than gasoline but lamented their inability to envisage walkable communities or effective public transit systems.  I often feel this same disappointment reading some of the commentary on this site (not so much Chris’s official posts) where the conversations are very focused on preparing for the material impacts of peak-everything. I’ve posted some commentary here previously suggesting that material preparedness may in fact be the smaller part of a much larger story. The challenge confronting us isn’t to make it thru any transition to a post-carbon future with as many material comforts as possible, but rather to make it through with our integrity intact.

I worry about the kind of people we might become if we construe the task in front of us as merely a logistical challenge, rather than a spiritual one. When faced with novel and significant ethical choices, doing the right thing at the right time for the right reasons is no easy task. Virtue, like any form of expertise, requires cultivation and experience. The first step toward this goal is correctly diagnosing your situation. I suggest that being materially prepared and having a reliable reference group (community) is essential but not sufficient. I believe that the ordeals facing our society and our Government’s response to them will test our core values, our courage and our moral integrity much more than our material resilience. Of course we’re never going to rise to the moral challenge ahead of us if we’re short on the most basic material provisions but once we have these covered its important that we appreciate and prepare for the ethical predicament ahead of us.

I’m always amused by archival footage from the US Atomic Energy Commission which includes such pearls as “Duck & Cover”. Less well known but still just as amusing is the AEC’s advice on backyard nuclear bunkers. Such bunkers were an item of serious discussion in America during the darkest days of the cold war but interestingly not many were ever constructed. At the time there were debates about whether a nation of shelter-owners would be more or less likely to stumble into nuclear war. People questioned whether a post-nuclear world would be worth surviving at all and the RAND Corporation ran scenarios on the moral dilemmas of locking the shelter door on family, friends and strangers. The threat of a nuclear holocaust and the possibility of surviving it in a bunker forced people to contemplate questions about the meaning of life, mortality, charity and personal morality. Their answer, aided no doubt by the high costs and dubious practicality of such shelters, was more or less; "let's just forget about it". This time, we won’t be so lucky. The questions will demand an answer.

The advent of peak-everything will force each of us to address at a very real and personal level some of the central questions of life, e.g:

- What constitutes a good life and how should I live mine?

- If the norms of my current civilized society no longer apply, what moral framework will I live by?

- What will be my moral boundaries?

It’s important to answer these questions for yourself sooner rather than later. Egregious moral lapses usually occur in unfamiliar situations where the normal moorings which regulate our moral reasoning and conduct are absent. This situation could arise for many of us if there is a sudden and serious energy or financial crisis. What concerns me most is the behavior of our governments during such a crisis. What will you do if your government starts to enact laws and policies which you find morally objectionable? Would you stand up and risk their censure or would you pretend not to notice programs or incidents which didn’t directly affect you? Think of the rise of Nazism in Germany in the 1930’s. The Nazis were democratically elected in the midst of a crisis. They enacted viable solutions to some of Germany’s most pressing economic problems which gave them some initial legitimacy but the scope and ferocity of their racial agenda took everyone by surprise. Whilst very few people were directly involved in the worst of their atrocities, many knew of them and simply “looked away” perhaps out of fear, impotence, or nonchalance. Years later the complicity associated with passivity came back to haunt a lot of people both publicly and privately. Quite a few prominent individuals including Kurt Waldheim, the former Austrian President and UN Secretary General, found themselves exposed to an unforgiving retrospective moral revaluation. 

If the comforts and conveniences of our everyday life are suddenly suspended because of an energy crisis or second financial meltdown it would help to be mentally, morally and spiritually prepared for the worst. In this case the worst could be the further reaches of what we might to do to one another – or rather allow our governments to do - out of fear, self-interest or indifference. The blogosphere is alive with allegations of government conspiracies, plots, coups and connivances. If just one of these many contentions turns out to have a grain of truth, it would be incumbent upon us to take a stand against it and risk the Government’s wrath. Looking away would mean complicity. I think government incompetence rather than malfeasance is the greater danger in any crisis but even incompetence demands we take a stand against it; especially if its burden falls on the most vulnerable in our society.

Those of us who are better informed and equipped from the outset are likely to endure any crisis more successfully than those who are not. This places certain moral obligations upon us. Rather than retreating into locally privileged (patrolled) communities of like-minded and prepared families and ignoring the plight of people outside our community, it will be incumbent upon us to think and act on a larger scale. Like Mohandas Gandhi, this may involve us risking or even sacrificing many of the privileges we’ve worked so assiduously to accrue.

There are many people in our broader community who have insufficient resources to meet their immediate needs, much less prepare for an uncertain future. What we and our governments do - or don’t do - for these people in a crisis will be the measure of our morality. So far, the prognosis for such people is not looking good. The possibility of localized apartheid developing between prepared & unprepared communities is high. Such differences are likely to be exacerbated by any government response. Limiting our moral boundaries to our own local homogeneous community is unethical. We all condemned the citizens of Johannesburg in the 1980’s when Soweto lay smoldering on their doorstep but we’ll need to be vigilant less we fall into the same trap ourselves. As noted elsewhere on this site, we can’t help the disadvantaged by joining them so somehow we’ll have to strike a balance. What that balance point will be for you & your family will be something you'll have to work out for yourselves, depending on your own unique situation. Having well considered responses to the Socratic questions listed above may help you keep your perspective while others about you are loosing theirs. This is what moral leadership is all about. Once things settle down it would be satisfying indeed to look back on your conduct over this period with pride rather than equivocation or a cringing sense of guilt.

 Maxwell Bach

Hi Maxwell -

I just now read your "Beyond Resiliance - Personal Morality" article.  I appreciate the widening of focus from personal and community preparedness.  Even though that's mostly what I need to get done these days, it's clear that it is insufficient.  I do not know how to bridge that gap between prepared communities and everybody else, but that doesn't disappear said gap.  It will still hit us hard.

What I'd like to add to the morality discussion is that our "core values, our courage and our moral integrity" are already being tested by the way the world is set up.  Since birth, I have lived in a world where we all tolerate the unspeakable if it is happening to people far enough away from us.  We also go along with the ruin of our biosphere decade after decade.  How is this consistant is this with my values?  How is it that I keep on colluding?

As much as I feel pulled, urgently, to change the shape of my life into something potentially sustainable in hard times, I also feel called, deeply, to re-make my morality, or values.  The ones I inherited from the culture around me are blatantly unfair to other people, deadly to the life of the planet and generally anti-survival.  The functioning of civilization in this form also requires that I live as if I don't care about the well-being of our biosphere (including other humans).  This is profoundly untrue.  Can I find and hold to something truer?  These questions are with me NOW, not later when the going gets rough around me.  I am used to comfort and affluence (working class North American = really wealthy globally speaking).  There is a long way to go. 

Challenging the pervasive ignorance of how my life gets to be the way it is leads to a lot of good re-evaluation from multiple perspectives and to life changes.  It is hard going and also satisfying.  There is a chance that I could learn to live with just my rightful share of this planet's surplus.  How would that look, I wonder?

Thanks, Maxwell, for offering your awareness of the morality challenges in this interesting situation, and Chris and Co. for providing such an excellent forum for all of us.

Cheers -

Susan

Well said Maxwell! I remember twenty years ago building a homestead. My then wife wanted us to buy and stockpile guns and amunition along with all the foodstuff we were accumulating. I really thought about it and realized that if we had the only food and our then neighbours, with two kids, were starving would I actually shoot them to protect our food supply. I decided that I didn't want to live in that world and refused to buy any guns. That marriage ended and that may have been one of the crucial pivots for me.

          This is something Americans have to really think about. My mother was a teenager during the depression and talks about the men travelling around looking for work. They would knock on doors looking for  small chores to do and some food in return. Doors were never locked.There was no theft.  If things take a bad turn what will America look like. Most people are well armed and attitudes are quite different today.

A Canadian small farmer

Just read your post - months after it was writtten I realize.....what a load of shit.  You're saying that dead but virtuous is superior to alive but ........ what exactly?  Getting prepared doesn't guarantee anyone anything, but the sheeple will be slaughtered.  The good "bad" Germans as you so aptly point out reacted out of simple human nature - but most lived to tell the tale (see also: crocodile tears).  Its your brand of liberal crap, no - bullshit ... pure, plain, and simple that makes me want to vomit.  Did you feel like you were writing the trailer for some hollywood post-apocolyptic drama when you wrote?  Tangible, practical, versatile.  Those words relect what will be needed and no, I don't enjoy slamming you and your kind of well intentioned thesis minded kind.  Get your game face on.

Maxwell,

Thank you for a thoughtful and courageous essay.  There is so much to contemplate. I agree with preparing oneself and one’s community for the difficult and challenging decisions that we may need to exercise today and in the future. It is a test of what we really believe life is all about. Hopefully fun, grace and the ability to stretch ourselves into places we never knew.

Maxwell Bach perpetuates the myth (=historically false statement) that the Nazis in Germany were democratically elected to form government. The opposite was the case. The Nazi party never had a parliamentary majority and the pro-Nazi vote was already in decline when President Hindenburg authorized the then Chancellor Franz von Papen (who was leader of a small conservative party and appointed by Hindenburg via 'emergency decree') to form a government with the Nazis, making Hitler Chancellor and von Papen Vice-Chancellor. This was also decreed by Hindenburg who wished to keep the Social Democrats out of the game. Social Democrats and Communists  together would have had a majority in Parliament, but they could not form a coalition, because the communists were staunchly antidemocratic (as the Nazis) and under Stalin's ideological directive. The communists actually held the belief that  an interim fascist government in Germany would accelerate the class struggle and thus promote communist world revolution.

There was a deep political divide in Germany at the time, but the majority of people were not pro-Nazi. Hitler came to power via a 'legal' coup d'etat. Legal insofar as the extraordinary powers of the president were written into the constitution. A fatal flaw of the system, yes, but it also shows that in times of crisis supreme office holders are only too happy to discard the core values of democracy. Expect the same in the future! 

Since I rejoined society after taking a 30 year opt-out absence as a wilderness hermit in Alaska; I have had time to contemplate some of your observations. The three key characteristics that I learned while residing alone on a forested beach property 25 miles from the nearest road connected community in North America (by ocean)...in a nutshell:

A. Communication Skills

B. Cooperation Skills

C. Coordination Skills

These interpersonal attributes seem to be the most important for our general success as human beings. Any thoughts on these matters may be directed to me at mainland.alaska@gmail.com for further discussion.

Thank-you sincerely,

Kathleen Wilson

  This was also decreed by Hindenburg who wished to keep the Social Democrats out of the game. Social Democrats and Communists  together would have had a majority in Parliament, but they could not form a coalition..Heal-n-Soothe