G. K. Chesterton on Enjoying Daily Life

Someone writing around 1930 that civilization might be in ruins in about fifteen years, is worth paying attention to even nearly a century later.  One such person was Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936), whose biography by Maisie Ward I have been reading lately. 

 

Chesterton was unquestionably a genius, but of a type that we are unfamiliar with today.  In our science-besotted age, we cannot conceive of geniuses other than the Albert Einstein type:  the scientific or technological wizard whose superiority is manifested by the fact that nobody except perhaps a few other geniuses can understand what he or she is doing. 

 

Chesterton wasn't that kind of genius.  He was a genius for the masses.  His gift was to take everyday things that everyone knew about—sunrises, beer, family affection, work—and look at them in a paradoxical way that made people sit up and see them in a new light.  He called himself a journalist, and if writing enough published material to fill a bookshelf several feet long with one's collected works qualifies you to be a journalist, he was not wrong to do so.

 

But he was so much more than that:  philosopher, theologian, controversialist, debater, radio personality, and apologist for Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular.  Believe it or not, he wrote many things that reflect on current issues in engineering ethics, and I'd like to focus on one quote in particular.

 

Toward the end of his life, he looked around the England that he loved, and saw how people were being drawn toward what we would now call electronic media (back then, mainly radio and especially sound movies) as a distraction from everyday life.  The very word "boredom" dates only from the early 1800s, and seems to be a peculiarly modern malady.  By the 1930s, Chesterton saw a danger in the fact that ordinary life, without spicing it up with a distraction that called for the observer to do nothing more than sit back and watch, was seen as increasingly boring.  This insight led him to pen the following words, which are quoted from the extensive biography of Chesterton by his friend Maisie Ward:

 

"Unless we can bring men back to enjoying the daily life which moderns call a dull life, our whole civilization will be in ruins in about fifteen years.  Whenever anybody proposes anything really practical, to solve the economic evil today, the answer always is that the solution would not work, because the modern town populations would think life dull.  That is because they are entirely unacquainted with life.  They know nothing but distractions from life; dreams which may be found in the cinema; that is, brief oblivions of life . . . . Unless we can make daybreak and daily bread and the creative secrets of labour interesting in themselves, there will fall on all our civilisations a fatigue which is the one disease from which civilisations do not recover.  So died the great Pagan civilisation; of bread and circuses and forgetfulness of the household gods."

 

The "economic evil" of which he spoke meant the Great Depression of the 1930s, which was arguably harsher in England than in the United States.  What he called for in this passage was not any innovations in technology.  While he was in favor of the good which advances in science and technology can produce, he saw that when people are provided with distractions that let them forget about the daily task at hand, they all too often choose the distraction over the task.

 

This is an ethical issue, and cannot be evaded with the old saw that "technology is neutral—the good and bad lies in how you use it."  Moving to today, vast fortunes and huge industries rely on the power of smartphone-enabled technology to divert the attention of billions into channels that profit corporations while delivering distractions that waste time at best.  And one of the harms it causes is the tidal wave of depression sweeping over the children and youth of the world—a tidal wave that Australia is attempting to sweep back with their recently-enacted ban on social media for anyone under 16, which took effect on Dec. 10.

 

I'm pretty sure that Chesterton, once he understood what social media is about, would be in favor of that ban.  He might even go so far as to recommend that every smartphone on earth be subjected to the treatment that a Houston private school gives every phone that is confiscated from students who violate their school-day ban on them:  slicing in two with a diamond saw. 

 

But the problem isn't just the phones:  it's what we have allowed the phones to do to our psyches.  When was the last time you sat outside for more than five minutes and did not look at your phone, but instead looked at the world around you?  Perhaps it's a busy cityscape.  Perhaps it's a field of wheat in the countryside.  Perhaps it's a forest.  But unless you live in Antarctica or on a desert island, there is life and there are other people around to observe and wonder at. 

 

That was the kind of thing that Chesterton himself could do regardless of where he was, whether in the dullest, dingiest part of London or in the beauty of his countryside home in Beaconsfield.  And appreciation for the ordinary aspects of real life is what he saw lacking in the lives of his fellow citizens of England in the 1930s, just fifteen short years before the devastation at the end of World War II.

 

I'm no prophet, and recycling old prophecies usually doesn't work.  But if mass distraction is a sign of civilizational breakdown, and Chesterton called it right in the 1930s, we should at least pause to consider whether radical-seeming steps such as the one Australia is taking may save us from a breakup that will not be World War III, exactly, but might be just as devastating.  Already, the political systems of many countries have suffered tremendous damage from the pernicious influence of social media.  And worse effects may come. 

 

If the tide is to be turned, it will happen as one person at a time learns how to use technology as a tool, and not allow it to be a master.  Put down the phone and spend time with the real world this Christmas—and with people you love.

 

Sources:  The quote above is from Chapter 21 of Maisie Ward's Gilbert Keith Chesterton, originally published in 1942.  The Kindle edition I'm reading lacks page numbers or references to the source in Chesterton's voluminous writings. 

Social Media Faces the Supreme Court

 

In an insightful article in National Review, Dan McLaughlin lays out the spectrum of how discussion platforms, online video, search engines, and the whole social-media megillah are regulated by a 1994 law called Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, and why the U. S. Supreme Court is probably going to weigh in soon on some apparently irreconcilable lower-court decisions.  While at first glance this may seem to be an obscure matter for legal specialists, it has the potential to affect everything from childrens' mental health to the survival of democracy.

 

When the Act was passed in 1994, there was no Google, Facebook, or YouTube, and legislators felt that the infant web-based communications industry needed some special protections to keep it from being nipped in the bud by lawsuits.  So they passed the two parts of Section 230 which now receive intense attention, because they do complementary things.

 

The first part protects providers of interactive computer services (e. g. Google, Facebook, etc.) from being treated as though they originated stuff that a third party came up with.  This sharply distinguishes them from conventional print publishers, for example.  National Review itself was the target of a costly lawsuit by climate scientist Michael Mann, who claimed the magazine and its writer Mark Steyn defamed him.  If Steyn had instead posted his article as a blog in online-only form, it's possible that the magazine could have claimed Section 230 immunity.

 

The second part of Section 230 more or less exempts private companies operating interactive computer services from being liable for consequences of their own censorship actions.  This almost makes it seem like the services can have their cake and eat it too.  If someone objects to a third party's content on a company's site, the firm can claim they aren't publishers and they're protected under the first part of Section 230.  But if the firm squashes a client organization's posts, as for example banning Donald Trump from Facebook after the Jan. 6, 2021 riots, the company can claim it can't be held liable because of its protection under the second part of Section 230. 

 

In general, organizations such as Facebook have tried to steer a middle ground between the two extremes of letting absolutely anything show up (protected by the first part of Sec. 230) and being the Mrs. Grundy of the Internet (protected by the second part of Sec. 230).  As there isn't much profit in censoring salacious material, the main abuses of censorship that have been most widely objected to concern political speech or postings on controversial topics such as abortion. 

 

Compared to the pre-Internet days when anyone could print nearly anything they wanted, but distribution was a difficult and expensive proposition, the Internet has reduced the cost of distributing speech to nearly zero (or even negative numbers, if you consider monetizing).  And a feature of social media which is not really addressed by Section 230 at all is the fact that in order to increase hits and thus advertising revenue, social media companies have developed sophisticated and exquisitely tuned algorithms to make using their platforms as habit-forming as possible.

 

As with other habit-forming enterprises such as alcohol and tobacco, users of social media form a spectrum.  Some like me rarely deal with it, and others spend eight or ten hours a day on it.  With the exception of Prohibition, now conceded by all hands to be a failure, society has chosen to deal with such habit-forming enterprises by restricting their use to adults and by taxation which is not prohibitive, but definitely inhibitory. 

 

Most of the commerce in the form of advertising and data sales that goes on in social media avoids direct taxation, and although some voices have been raised in favor of restricting the use of social media to those over 18, it's hardly a groundswell of opinion.  So for the time being, social media will continue on its merry way doing unknown but tremendous things to the democratic process and exerting incalculable powers to mold public opinion.

 

While it is probably a good thing that the Supreme Court will finally get to pass judgment on some issues regarding Section 230, the two extremes that the law regulates are more like guard rails than they are like lane markers.  By the time someone is either kicked off a social-media platform or decides to sue one for something online, some pretty serious damage has been done, at least in the eyes of the person getting censored or suing.  It's unlikely that the Court will turn the steering wheel violently toward one or the other guard rail.  I don't think anybody wants to see a completely unrestricted social-media world, although the type of restrictions that are currently imposed have huge blind spots influenced by profits (I'm thinking especially of online porn).  And it's just as obvious that we aren't likely to see companies clamping down on all sorts of questionable content, because it would cut into their revenues.

 

The problems caused by social media today are real.  Teen suicides, the polarization of political speech and resultant paralysis of government functions, online bullying, and many other abuses cry out for some sort of solution, or at least a mollifying influence.  Unfortunately, given the choices that the Court will face, its response will probably amount to tinkering with technical legal details, rather than making any wholesale revolutionary changes to Section 230 or how it is enforced. 

 

In any event, the Court—or any court, for that matter—is not where we should look first for improvements in human behavior.  As G. K. Chesterton responded to a question posed by a newspaper:

 

"The answer to the question, 'What is Wrong?' is, or should be, 'I am wrong.'  Until a man can give that answer, his idealism is only a hobby.  But this original sin belongs to all ages, and is the business of religion."  (from The Daily News, Aug. 16, 1905)

 

Neither the Supreme Court nor Google nor Facebook can do anything about original sin.  But they can make it easier for people to avoid sinning, and let's hope for some progress in that direction.

 

Sources:  Dan McLaughlin's article "The Supreme Court Joins the Section 230 Fight—Halfway" appeared on the National Review website at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-supreme-court-joins-the-section-230-fight-halfway/.  I also referred to an article about the true origin of the Chesterton quote, which is often misquoted, at https://www.jordanmposs.com/blog/2019/2/27/whats-wrong-chesterton.

Fitness Watches: Too Much (Health) Information?

Recently a friend of mine replaced his recalled Fitbit watch with a more expensive, but more versatile, Apple watch.  (The recall was caused by multiple reports of Fitbits that were overheating and injuring users, but the irony of a health-related consumer product causing burns is a subject for another day.)  A biomedical engineer by profession, he showed me how the Apple watch can even display his electrocardiogram (EKG) in real time.  You press a button on the side of the watch, thereby completing a circuit that includes your arms and heart, and right there on the watch's screen is the same kind of wave that we're used to seeing in hospital bedside monitors costing many thousands of dollars.

 

While I was glad for him that he no longer has to worry about sustaining wrist burns from his watch, it turns out that any fitness or health-tracking device that provides instant health information has the potential to cause harm in the form of the nocebo effect.  Strangely enough, finding out too much about the immediate state of your health can make you feel less healthy.

 

Tim Culpan, writing in Bloomberg News, points out that "nocebo" (Latin for "I shall harm") means the opposite of "placebo" ("I shall please").  A placebo is a medication or treatment that has no objective scientific basis, but is perceived by the patient as being helpful.  For unclear reasons that have to do with the mind-body interface, placebos often lead to objectively measurable improvements in health.

 

Culpan cites studies in which researchers reminded concussion victims of their history of head injury, and that reminder by itself made them perform worse on cognitive tests.  Another example he quotes is the online comment of a fitness guru, who complained about his sleep-tracking watch app.  He'll wake up after what he feels was a good night's sleep.  Then he looks at his watch, and it tells him that actually, he was X percent lower in REM sleep than he should have been, or whatever.  And suddenly he doesn't feel as rested as he did before he looked at his watch.

 

The nocebo effect is a lot more widespread than we think.  How many drug ads are aimed not at making you feel better, but at lowering some number that diabetics or hypertensives are told is the key to their health and well-being?  The A1c average-glucose-level test for diabetics and the blood-pressure test for high blood pressure are both things that consumers can now do in the comfort of their own homes—or discomfort, if the numbers aren't what we want.

 

Economics is at work as well.  What begins as a means to an end—measuring blood sugar or blood pressure to avoid the serious negative consequences of diabetes or hypertension—subtly and gradually becomes an end in itself, as patients begin to obsess over the numbers and small shifts up or down that probably have no statistical significance.  But they demand lower numbers from their doctors at any cost, which the pharmaceutical companies are glad to assist with.

 

As with so many other areas of life, one can have too much of a good thing, even if the good thing is personal medical data.  Because the problem originates in one's mind, that is where we need to deal with it, and the best advice I have come across to deal with the nocebo effect comes from an unlikely source:  G. K. Chesterton.

 

Chesterton is nobody's idea of a poster boy for good health habits.  He drank (in moderation), he was fond of cigars and mildly baffled by anyone who questioned the propriety of his smoking habit, and in later life he weighed upwards of 300 pounds before dying of congestive heart failure at the age of 62 in 1936.

 

But while he lived, he lived with a gusto and joie de vivre that made him a model for how to enjoy life, and health while it lasted.  Health as such was not an obsession with Chesterton, but in his voluminous writings he made a few remarks that can guide our health-data-obsessed age toward more helpful attitudes.

 

In his book Heretics, while countering the eugenicist tendencies of H. G. Wells, he remarked, "The mistake of all that medical talk lies in the very fact that it connects the idea of health with the idea of care.  What has health to do with care?  Health has to do with carelessness."  By "carelessness" Chesterton did not mean negligence, exactly, but something close to it.  Being healthy enables one to do all the things that one wants to do in one's station in life, and that is the real purpose of good health.  Just sitting around concentrating on being healthy for health's sake is not only silly, but dangerous to your health.

 

In Orthodoxy, he has this to say along similar lines:  "The mere pursuit of health always leads to something unhealthy.  Physical nature must not be made the direct object of obedience; it must be enjoyed, not worshipped."  He points out a profound truth that applies to obsessions with health as well as with any other created thing:  if enjoyment turns to worship, freedom has turned into slavery.  We can make ourselves unhappy by pursuing the happiness of good health to the exclusion of the rest of what life has to offer.

 

My friend with the new Apple watch is a pretty well-balanced individual, and I think he's not going to let himself be waylaid into checking his EKG compulsively and noting tiny changes in the waveform, as his training would allow him to do.  (If it was me, I'd just be happy to see any wiggles at all.)  But the nocebo effect is a reminder that our health accessories and toys can lead us down a road to unhealthy concern with information that in most cases can be safely ignored.

Sources:  I thank my wife for pointing out to me the article "Beware That Nocebo Strapped To Your Wrist" at https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-12-15/wrist-size-fitness-gadgets-make-for-great-gifts-but-beware-of-the-nocebo-effect.  The Chesterton quotes were from https://historyengineers.com/2017/07/05/our-health-obsession-a-few-thoughts-from-a-mormon-and-g-k-chesterton/ (Heretics) and https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7177711-the-mere-pursuit-of-health-always-leads-to-something-unhealthy (Orthodoxy).

 

To Monetize or Not To Monetize—Reader Responses Requested

One of the more prominent concerns in engineering ethics is the improper influence of money.  It's impossible to do engineering of any magnitude without money being involved somehow, because doing work for pay is what engineering is mostly about.  Without meaning to, G. K. Chesterton provided one of the best and most succinct definitions of engineering I've ever come across:  "the application of physical science to practical commerce."  And commerce involves money, so money changes hands in most engineering work.

It's how money changes hands, and who knows about it, that can lead one into an ethical quagmire.  Two items in the IEEE's Code of Ethics address this problem.  In its code, the IEEE charges its members "to avoid real or perceived conflicts of interest whenever possible, and to disclose them to affected parties when they do exist" and "to reject bribery in all its forms."  Getting paid for engineering work is not a problem.  But if an engineer gives the impression of doing something on an objective basis—selecting competing bids for an engineering project based on technical criteria, for instance—but in fact has been secretly influenced to favor one party over others by means of money or its value equivalent paid by that party, then you have a conflict of interest, at least, and possibly a case of bribery.  And while engineers of all stripes should be careful about such things, one who writes a blog on engineering ethics must be especially cautious.

Preserving not only objectivity, but the appearance of objectivity, is the main reason that since I began this blog about eight years ago, I have kept it as non-commercial as possible.  It is brought to you by Google, a notably profit-making enterprise, but I pay them nothing and they pay me nothing, unless you count the value of the technical facilities they provide me to enter the blog text into their system every week.  In exchange, of course, they hope that my blog encourages people to use their search engine, and I suppose in that way I'm responsible for a vanishingly small fraction of Google's profit.  But other than that very tenuous exchange, I get no monetary or economic benefit from writing this blog.  In fact, on occasion Google has come in for its share of criticism in this space, and nobody has ever pulled my plug that I'm aware of. 

I am now considering an experiment in what is called "monetizing."  Basically, I would tell Google that it's okay to put some amount of advertising on my blog.  Some aspects of this would be under my control, I think, although I haven't pursued it far enough to know for sure.  I do know that if I want to stop it after a while, I can do that, so if it doesn't work out or isn't worth the annoyance, I can always go back to being non-monetized. 

Before I take this step, I am checking with you, my readers, as to your thoughts and opinions on the question of whether I should try monetizing this blog.  I am under no illusions that I am addressing a vast multitude.  The last time I checked, there were a few dozen people who follow this blog regularly, and more who find it via search engines and so on for one-time views on certain topics.  But whether you've been following it for years or just came across it today, I am grateful for your attention, which is so valuable in this media-overload era, and do not wish to do anything that would turn off or disappoint numbers of you. 

So I am asking for your input.  I promise not to do anything about monetizing at least through the end of June.  In turn, if you have any opinion about this—favorable or unfavorable—please let me know in the next week or so.  If you wish to make your thoughts public, use the comment space below this blog (rather unfortunately labeled "NO COMMENTS" until somebody clicks on it and makes the first one—maybe I can fix that too, and I'd get more comments).  Or if you'd prefer to send me a private response, you can email me at kdstephan@txstate.edu.  While this blog is not a democracy and I don't promise to do whatever the majority says, I will certainly take every response into consideration in deciding whether or not to proceed with this experiment.  And if the response is primarily negative, it's unlikely I will try it.  I don't need money that badly, and if monetizing would turn off a lot of readers, it's a bad idea.

If I do proceed with it, I will do my best to preserve the objectivity which I hope has been a characteristic of this blog so far.  I came across a useful philosophical distinction the other day between two types of objectivity:  psychological and rational objectivity.  Psychological objectivity is the state of being neutral on a topic, of having no strong opinion one way or another.  Typically, we can be psychologically objective only about things we know little about, or haven't thought about deeply.  On the other hand, rational objectivity is the ability to distinguish between good and bad arguments on a topic, and to believe a thing for reasons that are genuinely good ones.  Rational objectivity has been my goal in this blog from the start, and I plan to keep it that way even if I receive some money from advertisements that I may not be psychologically objective about.  For that matter, I'm not psychologically objective about engineering ethics itself:  I care deeply about it, and I'm biased in favor of it.  But that doesn't prevent me, I hope, from being rationally objective about it and judging various arguments on their logical and evidential merits, rather than just going with my feelings about a question.

If you respond, I'm not asking you to be psychologically objective.  Rationally objective would be nice, but I won't insist on that either.  Unless it makes no difference to you, consider letting me know your opinion on monetizing this blog by June 30.  After that I'll summarize the responses and announce the next step:  to monetize or not to monetize?

Sources:  In a discussion of American character in Generally Speaking (London:  Methuen, 1928, p. 63), G. K. Chesterton said that Americans favored action over contemplation and excelled in the application of physical science to practical commerce.  The distinction between psychological and rational objectivity is made in J. P. Moreland and W. L. Craig, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview (Downer's Grove, Ill.:  InterVarsity Press, 2003), p. 150.  The IEEE Code of Ethics can be found at http://www.ieee.org/about/corporate/governance/p7-8.html.

Do You Want CNN or ESPN With That Burger?

Eating out is something that lots of Americans do, and watching TV is something else that lots of Americans do.  But increasingly these days, if you choose to eat in a restaurant, you are more or less obliged to watch TV too. And in my opinion, that is an obligation which deserves more public discussion and consideration than it has received up to now.

In the last few years, a number of factors have combined to lead to the proliferation of TVs in dining establishments of increasingly mainstream and even upscale reputation.  I think the first place I noticed them in was a McDonald's in a small Texas town we were driving through, six or eight years ago.  This was when flat-screen TVs were fairly new. The mounting of such a TV on the wall is a simple operation, which is probably one technical reason they are spreading in public places so fast.  (Try screwing an old-fashioned forty-pound non-flat-screen TV to the wall with only three bolts and see how long it stays up.)  Few people go to McDonald's with the express purpose of having deep, meaningful conversations.  At the time, I didn't much mind losing whatever solitude might otherwise have been available, and being subjected to MTV while I consumed my hamburger as fast as I could before going to the next thing, which is often the way people eat at fast-food places anyway.

But the next significant video intrusion into my dining-out experience was at the Luby's we go to every Friday night.  For those readers who are not Texans, I should explain that Luby's is a cafeteria chain that caters to older Southerners for whom cafeteria dining is a positive pleasure, and not a grim necessity you have to bear up under because you're stuck in a corporate office, or a hospital, or a prison, where there isn't anything better.  I'm not personally old enough to favor Luby's over a restaurant where they actually bring the food to your table, but my wife's father lives with us, and it's his favorite place in the world to eat out, so that's where we typically go.

About a year or two ago, I was dismayed to arrive in their large dining area only to find that a large clock on the wall had been replaced by a good-sized flat-screen TV.  Not only that, but there were similar TVs on all four walls, so that no matter where you sat, there was one in your field of vision.  Two were kept tuned to one of the ESPN channels, and two more to CNN.  The sound wasn't loud enough to overpower average conversation, but it didn't need to be:  closed captioning took care of that.

I don't know if you've tried ignoring a TV in your field of view, but it's not easy.  Advertisers know that the brightly colored moving images on the screen attract the eye by appealing to the part of the brain we have in common with lizards and other lower animals.  It takes constant concentration in order to avoid falling almost unconsciously into the mode of gazing unthinkingly at the screen, even if your wife or your father-in-law is talking to you.  And that can lead to other problems.

The journalist and Christian apologist G. K. Chesterton had something to say about a similar trend, though he was writing in the 1920s.  Apparently, there was a post-World-War-I fad in England of hiring a band to play at the larger restaurants.  In a column entitled "On Pleasure-seeking" he said "The fashion of having very loud music during meals in restaurants and hotels seems to me a perfect example of this chaotic attempt to have everything at once and do everything at once."  The phrase "multitasking" had not been invented yet, but that is exactly what Chesterton is talking about.

Restaurant owners don't spend money without a reason, and there must be some felt or perceived need on the part of their customers, that the restaurateurs are satisfying by putting up TVs everywhere.  One food blog I read on the topic commented that it's mainly the younger people who are driving this trend, but most of the younger people I see in Luby's are there by compulsion, not choice, taking their mothers out on Mother's Day or some such thing.  Maybe the TVs showed up because of a command from the Luby's headquarters in Houston inspired by fear that if Luby's doesn't follow the trend, they'll be left behind and eventually shunned like a restaurant would be today if it refused to install electric lights. 

Or maybe it's just a much later stage in the casualization of public culture that has been going on ever since the 1960s.  I have a confession to make.  I may be part of the generation that caused the problem.

The first TV my family ever owned was a big, heavy RCA unit that was deeper than it was wide or tall.  It sat in the living room where my dad planted it when he brought it home, and it stayed put until the day its picture tube died, which back then was like having the transmission go out on your car—time for a new one.  The new TV, which was much slimmer, came with a gold-plated steel cart on wheels and its own rabbit ears, which meant it wasn't tied to the place where the antenna wires came through the wall from the roof.  And one of the first things my father did with it was to roll it into the kitchen so we could watch TV at mealtimes, possibly even suppertime.  That was in 1962.

Half a century later, everybody dresses like they've just gotten out of bed, and they go out to eat and watch TV while they eat, just like do at home.  As ethical matters go, this is definitely small beer, but if this trend continues, it will do its part to further erode the dying art of conversation in congenial settings.

Sources:  The Chesterton quotation is from his Generally Speaking (London:  Methuen & Co., 1928), p. 141.  I referred to the Wikipedia article on Luby's Restaurants, and found a number of food blogs on the topic of TVs in restaurants.  The most vivid one has a URL that I can't repeat here verbatim because this is a family blog, but you can figure it out: http://blogs.riverfronttimes.com/gutcheck/2011/12/restaurants_mind_your_f***ing_televisions.php.

The Theology of Global Warming

Last Saturday, October 19, was the date of the Second Annual Global Frackdown.  In case you didn't hear, the Global Frackdown is an international day of activism on which people who believe that global warming is an oncoming train that's about to knock us silly, gather in groups and protest the oil industry's practice of fracking.  Fracking is a technology that has produced renewed yields from old oil and gas fields and promises to make the United States largely energy-independent in a few years.  But there is no question that fracking leads to the burning of more fossil fuel than otherwise, which is the reason for the Frackdown.  According to the movement's website, there were Frackdown events scheduled even in Texas, where fracking is a native industry and practiced widely.  Opponents of global warming seem to believe in their cause with an almost religious fervor, and for some it may be exactly that:  a substitute religion, complete with a theology, an ethics, and an eschatology that foretells doom for the planet unless we get with the gospel of global warming.

The Frackdown is sponsored by an outfit called 350.org, whose guiding light is one Bill McKibben, a journalist and author of such books as Fight Global Warming Now, Enough, The End of Nature, and Eaarth.  The last title requires a little explanation.  McKibben's basic theme throughout is that humanity has transformed the globe into an artifact (thus The End of Nature).  The rather unfortunate neologism "Eaarth" is McKibben's term for Earth.2, the new thing that isn't really a natural environment anymore, but isn't completely under our control either.  Despite the world's new status as a manufactured product, the laws of physics have not been repealed, and McKibben claims there will be absolutely inevitable bad consequences that will follow if we keep acting as though we were just a slight perturbation in the thing we have historically called Nature.  (Picture a 200-pound St. Bernard who still thinks he is a cute little cuddly puppy and tries to sit in your lap.)  Chief among these perturbations is our burning of fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and gas, which began with the Industrial Revolution and continues to be the single most important energy source worldwide.  McKibben appears to believe as earnestly in the pronouncements of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as he believes in the Bible (he is a practicing Methodist).  The focus of his most recent efforts has been to sponsor grass-roots movements to give the fossil-fuel industry a bad reputation by means of divestiture movements, Global Frackdowns, and other activist measures sponsored through 350.org.  Why 350?  That is the alleged tipping point of parts per million carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, beyond which innumerable disasters loom.  The current number (as of May 2013) is around 400 ppm, by the way.

I picked up McKibben's Eaarth expecting a uniform challenge to my blood pressure, and for the first two chapters I found what I expected:  a laundry list of terrible things that will happen, and are already happening, because of global warming, which is said to be largely if not exclusively due to anthropogenic carbon dioxide in the air.  Storms, droughts, loss of seacoast regions, die-offs of all kinds, you name it.  So far so bad. 

But then I got to Chapter 3, "Backing Off" and I checked the cover to see if the book was really written by only one author.  McKibben turns out to be what I would call a crypto-distributist.  Distributism, as almost nobody knows, was a short-lived political movement popular in England in the 1930s, whose most well-known exponent was the writer G. K. Chesterton.  Its slogan could have been "smaller, more local, more decentralized," and the old principles of distributism are in perfect harmony with McKibben's plans for us to survive the oncoming global-warming disaster.  For example, here's a problem:  climate change may cause entire monocultures of ag-industry genetically modified foods to disappear.  Solution:  have thousands of independent farmers supply hundreds of different varieties to farmers' markets in cities around the globe, and some of them at least will make it.  Problem:  giant fossil-fueled power grids with a few huge plants are wrecking the environment, and giant nuclear plants to replace them would cost too much.  Solution:  spread solar and other renewable energy sources everywhere so that people can be largely energy-independent down to the city block and house level. 

The biggest change McKibben calls for is not technological but cultural.  He thinks we will have to end our love affair with the super-independent lifestyle so encouraged by American culture and commerce, and live more like we used to, in interdependent communities where not only did you know your neighbors, you depended on them for essential things in your life such as services, goods, and jobs.  Only in this way will we survive the bugbear of climate disasters that await us.

Eaarth is really two books: one written by a frenzied climate-change activist, and another written by a pleasant, earnest Methodist Sunday-school teacher who wants us all to get along together and be good little distributists, but without using that word.  I see no indication that McKibben has even heard of distributism, but most of his solutions lie squarely in that tradition.  And to the extent that they do, I by and large agree with them, although my pragmatic side doubts that McKibben and his fellow activists will be able to make much headway against the powerful entrenched political and economic interests who would like things to stay the way they are now.

To the extent that McKibben gets us to have more to do with our neighbors and less to do with huge multinational corporations, I hope he succeeds.  But he seems to have reached the same desirable conclusions as the English distributists through what seems to me to be a long and unnecessary detour through the notion of global warming and its promised doomsdays, which has almost taken the place of a religion for many people.  If you believe that buying an electric car will make environmental Armageddon 0.0001% less likely, then your faith has convenient ways for you to take actions that are unquestionably righteous, and to condemn those bad actors such as fossil-fuel companies that are unquestionably evil.  But life is seldom that simple, and I hope McKibben writes another book that sets forth more substantial and eternal reasons for people to be more neighborly—and leaves out all that stuff about global warming.

Sources:  Bill McKibben's Eaarth was published in 2010 by Henry Holt & Co.  The website 350.org has links about the Global Frackdown and many other related activities.  For more information on Distributism, see my blog of Sept. 22, 2008, "What Is Distributism, and Why Should Engineers Care?"