Lifeboat Ethics Revisited
Or why helping the rich or poor is a distraction
The story is that nation states are lifeboats. So there are 195 boats in our flotilla. Some are bigger and more seaworthy than others, but about two-thirds are marginal, such that when waters get rough, they will start sinking. For about 300 years the fossil fueled flotilla has been mostly cruising along, singing a song of growth everlasting. There are battles between boats sometimes, but Yeoman Pinker likes to tell about how much happier the better angels of our nature feel as evidenced by the low levels of carnage and slaughter as usual as the last few centuries passed.
Of course with peak conventional oil, a decreasing energy return on energy invested, a little pandemic, another financial/debt bubble looking bustable, the 8 billion sailors are starting to complain more (some even have reason to), and many just aren’t quite as sure as they were just a few years ago that the smooth sailing will continue getting better and better.
Sure, nice James Webb Space Telescope pictures (for the cost per beer drinker of about one beer), Elon Musk still plans to retire on Mars, but 40% of humans face a longage of demand for fresh water, 130 thousand face starvation just in the Horn of Africa, and failing states (clearly sinking but not sunk yet boats) are multiplying. But if you are reading this in English on the internet thing using whatever technology, things aren’t so bad (for you).
But the story is that the rolling-good time won’t last. A bit of a blow, sea waves rise, and two-thirds of the boats in the flotilla sink. They didn’t vote to sink. Nobody can understand why (almost nobody) their economy sank, but all knew who to blame, and so as their boat is sinking they kill all the officers and those who thought maybe doing so wasn’t adaptive (or even required).
The first class boats carry about 19% of the flotilla’s crew, so the story is, when there are 6.5 billion sailors in the water, and the 66 remaining boats look like lifeboats…, and then what? Unfortunately, if the 6.5 billion could (all would if they could) climb aboard the lifeboat of their choice (all right thinking humans agree they have this right, me included of course), all of the remaining boats will sink.
So sad, too bad, and since those now living on the 66 boats can’t stop the swimmers (aka Sea Peoples, more recently known as refugees/immigrants), then all sink. Whether you think it good or bad is irrelevant. Gaia doesn’t care what you think.
Should the people on the 66 “lifeboats” (as viewed by all in the water and about half of those still onboard) welcome the Sea Peoples? Likely the 66 lifeboats could take in some, perhaps as many as half a billion. But 6 billion wouldn’t get what they wanted and needed (deserve), which the vast majority will agree is unjust.
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Given that the 66 still floating (more or less) boats (now lifeboats) can’t stop the complete catastrophe underway — the one no one can stop (i.e. the complete justice of everyone equitably sharing the same outcome), then arguing about whether to welcome or resist the immigrants is a distraction.
The condition of there being 195 boats sailing about the globe rapaciously consuming it (it’s the global economy, stupid) is not remotely sustainable, and so seeking out the condition of one (or more) boat(s) persisting is a distraction. How they go down and in what order is a distraction, an unpredictable detail.
Those who foresee the going down of the 195 nation states cannot pick and choose which they want to go down with, unless they are distracted. Expect 99.99+% to insist, and pay ‘good money’, to be distracted (Yeoman Pinker and many others are writing books as I type).
But to revisit the subject of Lifeboat Ethics, you need to time travel back to 1974 by reading the article Garrett Hardin wrote to help others in that year with the painful process of thinking. He failed.
Some racists liked what he wrote, and all right-thinking left-leaning types hated it, and so et tu, Hardin (I attended an informal talk Hardin gave to UCSB students at a student lounge in the late 1970s and witnessed a clearly premeditated attack by left-leaning students who could only have come on a mission to express their utter contempt).
Because some right-leaning types liked what he typed, he was added to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of racists who wanted to kill black babies. This is all that is now known (by all properly educated people) about Hardin, and why thinking about painful things is universally (insofar as possible) just not done.
Lifeboat Ethics: the Case Against Helping the Poor
by Garrett Hardin, Psychology Today, September 1974
[I have taken several political-spectrum placement tests in my life and I always, per values/views assessed, fall firmly on the Left. Which is slightly bemusing as I’m apolitical with, on a bad day before breakfast, inclinations towards being rabidly anti-political everything including moderates firmly seeking out the dead middle.]
[But there are still too many sailors, and not because I think so, which means I want to kill black babies, so don’t hesitate to dismiss any thoughts I may evoke.]
