Preventing the Cannibalism of Liberty

“the circumstances of justice obtain whenever persons put forward conflicting claims to the division of social advantages under conditions of moderate scarcity.” - John Rawls, The Theory of Justice

Human Control over the Circumstances of Justice

In his book, "A Theory of Justice", Rawls claims that people in the Original Position are aware of the circumstances of justice - the more or less equivalence of people, the scarcity of resources, and the potential for cooperation among people to yield a more utilitarian (or maximin) distribution of resources.

Rawls' contribution to contemporary political philosophy cannot be understated, and his book has motivated some excellent counter-points (my favorite being Sandel's "Liberalism and the limits of justice"). However, one quirk about this forum of modern philosophy of justice that has always monkey-wrenched by biological gears is the assumption that "conditions of moderate scarcity" exist outside of human control. In reality, we consume the resources on which we depend and we or our cultural memes (from attitudes on consumption and travel to the material objects such as computers and iphones themselves) reproduce and consume resources, and that consumption of resources leads to scarcity. You don't have to be Malthus to know that we live in a finite world, and consequently our growth becomes limited by the scarcity of resources; as living things, we engineer the circumstances of justice, and so much of this modern political philosophy falls short by failing to inspect the dynamics of resource consumption and, consequently, the human socio-political control over the circumstances of justice. Incorporating ecological and economic realities into our discussion of political philosophy can help us better understand how to maintain a high quality of life in human society by, at times, preventing the scarcity of resources that leads to intense, conflicting claims over the division of what few resources remain.

The Consumption of Resources: From Unrecognized Liberty to Bitter Justice

Liberty reigns in the abundance of resources, and often we take those abundant resources for granted. You are free to breathe, because oxygen is so abundant, and so we don't even recognize a world in which breaths can be regulated to ensure a fair distribution of breaths. However, put a group of humans inside a biosphere on Mars, and one could envision a political agreement specifying the "fair use of energy and oxygen." Because we take for granted abundant resources, their consumption often goes unnoticed. During the westward expansion of the United States (into land controlled by Spanish and Native Americans), land was seen as so abundant that anyone could build a house just about anywhere. There was no need to be just in our allocation of land out West. Today, every square inch of land in the United States is owned, and its movement from one owner to another is often a matter of justice - transfer of land to the federal government can be unjust for cattle ranchers, transfer of an empty lot to a real-estate mogul can be unjust for poor people who liked to use those empty lots for recreation. The previous abundance of land led to homestead policies that rewarded the consumption of abundant land for economic growth (this is currently happening in Siberia).

In ecological systems, living things produce an abundance of babies. In economic systems, an abundance of a resource makes it cheap and thus more easily utilized for the production of other resources which are scarce. If the resources are non-renewable, or renewed more slowly than they are consumed, these ecological and economic forces deplete the supplies, yielding fewer resources per-capita. Slowly but surely, previously abundant resources become scarce and, barring an improbable equal distribution of resources, there will inevitably be some inequality in the ownership of coveted resources. When the resources improve the ability of an organism or company to acquire resources, the inequality can perpetuate itself (well-fed lions are more capable predators; rich humans are better able to get degrees, connections and jobs, big companies have more money to expand and buy up new resources). Thus, humans, given the liberty to do so, will reduce the abundance of desirable resources - land, animals, power - until we become limited by scarcity. Barring political agreements to limit liberty despite the perceived abundance of resources, human ecological/economic systems will drive resources to scarcity and perpetuate inequality, thereby engineering the circumstances of justice.

Political Dynamics in the conversion of Abundance to Scarcity

The arguments for continued liberty and depletion of resources are that the resources are abundant and we need them now. If we get the resources now, we make money, and if we don't, then the our competitors will and we will lose. This tragedy of the commons makes it very difficult to protect resources until they become scarce enough for us to feel the tragedy. We did not notice a tragedy of the commons in the use of wild game until the buffalo and elk were nearly driven to extinction, and now, for fairness, constituents must pay large prices and submit to a draw for the possibility of receiving a hunting permit. We did not notice the tragedy of the commons in the emission of CO2 until record droughts, floods, snowstorms, heat waves, and melting of polar ice caps caused major human and economic harm and now, for fairness, we are in the process of signing agreements to ensure a just distribution of CO2 emissions across nations. We did not notice the tragedy of the commons in the world's fisheries until whales or other fish begin to make precipitous declines. The same stories played out for the use of lumber, land, fresh water, ores, and more: Resources abound, they are consumed until their scarcity is felt, and then by mutual coercion we agree to limit our consumption.

While it is reassuring that human political systems often limit the use of resources to ensure their preservation when they hit the wall of apocalyptic scarcity and the threat of revolt, it does not always worked because some resources that might be limiting or invaluable in future economies are currently non-limiting and, consequently, their preciousness is not felt. An example could be the species that are going extinct - they may contain medical clues that enable us to solve pressing global epidemics or food shortages later. Another example is space - the more people we have per-capita, the greater the risk and intensity of pandemics, and currently, we are filling space on the planet without any regulations on human reproduction motivated by epidemiological risk. Our political systems react to some resources - those whose combined contemporary importance and scarcity currently motivate a more just allocation - but are apathetic to resources that may be important in the future.

Furthermore, our political systems are apathetic as to whether or not the quality of life would be better with more resources. What if all of the world's 7 billion people would be happier in a world with 1 billion people - each person could have seven times the amount of personal space, seven times the probability of being drawn for a hunt, seven times the allowable catch from a fishery, and seven times the amount of water, not to mention less pollution in the air and water... or, if the same amount of pollution, then it comes with greater liberty to pollute without repercussion.

Temperance

These facts - the human-engineered scarcity of resources and the potential for a higher quality of life with more resources per-capita - motivate a precautionary temperance. Temperance - moderation, self-restraint - is the oft forgotten virtue in American political discourse. Temperance involves a restriction of liberty to preserve an abundance of resources and, with it, a quality of life that does not necessitate a bitter and emotional struggle for a just division of scarce resources. Temperance, in many cases, requires voluntarily restricting our liberty to prevent the circumstances of justice. Temperance is motivated by a desire to preserve a life of moderate liberty, made possible by an abundance of resources, by restricting only our ability to use the resources in excess. We do this because we know that the self-imposed limitations on our liberty now, when resources abound, will be far preferable to the bitter restrictions of liberty imposed by the struggle for a just division of those resources.

Temperance is a tough sell. It's hard to tell people to stop cutting down trees when there is still a forest, especially (in the words of Daniel Pauly) when the lumberjack and hikers have a shifted baseline of what is a "good" size of the forest. While the shifting baselines and relativity of human happiness blurs the lines about what is an objectively "good" amount of abundance for a high quality of life, it does not invalidate the existence of an optimum (which, granted, may change with evolutionary time). Yes, a kid raised in New Delhi will, statistically, have a much greater tolerance of high population densities than will a person raised in Alaska. However, if we were in charge of being mankind's zookeeper, we would agree that there is an appropriate sized habitat for producing the most admirable and healthy specimens. Too sparse of a habitat and humans will be lonely, too dense of a habitat and humans will be angry and diseased. Somewhere in the middle is an optimal habitat for humans, where most humans will grow up content, with sufficient abundance to carve out their own lives - if they want cities, they can move together with other humans to cities, and if they want space, they can move to the wilderness where there is space. Sometimes, the resource wants and needs of a human vary depending on the stage of life, e.g. some mountaineers in their reckless youth want vast wilderness and remote mountains to climb... so they can talk about it in cities when they are older. So, our lumberjack at the forest may have a shifted baseline, as may the people in the discussion about whether or not to stop cutting down trees, and so they may not realize that that forest is small, only those who, by their nature, disposition, and stage of life, yearn for open space will feel the claustrophobia of a small enclosure. The lumberjack's daughter could grow up, read stories about vast forests of the past, shift her baseline back to a historical level, and feel saddened by the state of the world.

Many people in my generation feel like the lumberjack's daughter. There are no blank spots on the map, no unclaimed swaths of land, no giant herds of bison, no dodos, declining rainforests, depleted fisheries, polluted air, polluted streams, a changing climate and no place where you can, like the frontiersmen back in the day, horse-back ride with a gun and fishing rod, earning your food the old-fashioned way and camping by clean rivers as you travel the West or, like the Native Americans (who, for historical accuracy, fought each other for resources), had abundant herds of elk - ten times the number of elk available today. Our generation grows, as human specimens, on public lands set aside for recreation where we can horseback ride, set aside for conservation where we can chop down trees, and set aside for preservation where we can see species not yet extinct. These lands were major victories by forces of temperance like Aldo Leopold, John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt who thrived as humans and wanted future generations to thrive with wild things and vast, majestic places. However, our use of these lands is not governed by the same liberty felt by Leopold, Muir and Roosevelt, but instead is regulated by agreements, necessitated by the scarcity of these resources. We can only chop down so many trees by our permit. We can only camp for so long before over-staying our welcome. We can't hunt species that are sufficiently rare because their habitat is scarce and their populations threatened. At its best, these agreements give us a sense of responsibility and an obligation to give a good world to the future generations, but, at its worst, these rules confine us to circumstances of justice that would not exist had our ancestors been more temperate.

It could be worse. We could've waited decades until imposing rules and regulations on land, water, air, and game management , leaving us with smaller habitats, fewer game, dirtier air and water, and more people. However, looking forward, we can see many cases where resources are declining and future generations would benefit from our temperance, and modern political philosophy can help us recognize these cases by pushing the discussion of politics in America away from a bimodal justice vs. liberty tug of war and instead incorporating what we know about resource consumption through ecology and economics. When we see how humans engineer our own circumstances, we see that liberty, justice, and temperance are all intertwined - to preserve some liberties for future generations, we must be just and impose rules and regulations to preserve abundant resources before they become critically scarce. The "circumstances of justice" as described by Hume and Rawls are not facts of life, but instead they are often engineered by unrestrained liberty. Hume notes that justice may come at the expense of "nobler virtues and more favorable circumstances" such as benevolence (Sandel gives the example of a friend who insists on paying back, and being paid back, every penny lent, causing one to wonder the terms of the friendship). In American discource, justice and liberty are often seen as at odds - requirements that people be fair to the poor infringes someone's liberty to be selfish - but in some cases where liberty consumes resources and engineers scarcity, justice can empower temperance and restrain those liberties of excess in favor of 'nobler virtues and more favorable circumstances'.

Spiritual Self-Reliance

                I took my dog, Jack, on a stroll to get coffee today. Coffee for me, not for Jack. It was a beautiful, bluebird morning, temperatures hovering around a mild 75 degrees and the humidity felt like it was nourishing your skin and not draining your soul as the heat of the past several weeks has felt. As we peacefully strolled down the streets lined with impeccable lawns and extravagant verdure, a rather frantic lady rolled down her window, looked at me, and asked for directions to get to Jadwin Gym.

                Well, “asked” is a polite way to put it. She did not say “excuse me, sir, may I ask you a question?” Nor did she say it with the inflection in her voice that in the old days one would use when asking questions but nowadays everybody uses to sound like they’re perpetually unsure of themselves. Instead, she demanded knowledge from me: “Tell me how to get to Jadwin Gym,” in a fast, frantic, Jersey accent. I felt like the only thing that would’ve made her statement a better fit with her tone of voice would be to end it with “you mothafuggin’ hippie I will cut your balls off.”

                Now, I’ve never been to Jadwin gym before. However, I have heard of it, and I am a Princeton student so I figured the least I can do is spend a second scrolling through my mental archives in hopes of finding “Jadwin Gym”. I asked her for a moment as I thought about it and displayed the interpersonal pinwheel of “ummmm…” “Kinkos…” no, farther… “Krispie Kreme…” no, farther still… “Jadwin gym” AHA! Here we are. All I could remember was the quadrant of campus where it could be found, a feat of amnesia I attribute to the pressure of her unforgiving gaze, which seemed to say that if I didn’t know where this place was, and if I didn’t hurry up and tell her, she would come to my house at night and cut off my balls while Jack watches.

                I told her “okay, take a right onto this side street right here,” I pointed to the side street 15 yards away.

“Murray?!” she asked, frantically.

                “Yup, Murray!” I replied cordially. Well, 'cordially' is a polite way to put it, since it's very likely that my face started to betray my feelings of amazement at her frantic presence and I started to look at her like she was the sideshow freak who could inhale a full cigarette in one breath and blow it out of her ears. “And then you’re going to follow Murray past Prospect to Western, which is right after Prospect. Take a right on Western, so you’ll be heading back this way,” I pointed the direction one goes after taking two right turns. “Then after just a few hundred yards, you’ll see the stadium on your left – you can’t miss it!” I smiled.

                “Okay.” she said driving off, with a tone of disappointment and anger that perhaps arose from the fact that this whole interaction took an entire minute or that I couldn’t just take her straight to Jadwin. Or perhaps she was furious that my directions were not as good as a GPS that she would’ve had if her iphone had been charged which she wasn’t able to do because her husband-she’s-contemplated-divorcing-because-he-never-helps-with-anything took up all the outlets with his stupid TV and his own cell phone charger and her kids wanted her to do a million other things over the past week and then this one lady cut her off on the turnpike and… what does the lady on the turnpike have to do with her iphone? Nothing, really, but the lady on the turnpike has everything to do with why the cut-off-your-balls lady wants to cut off your balls, and why something as little as an uncharged iphone can be amplified to a monstrous presence that ruins your day and emits the BO of bitterness that sprints into the nostrils of everybody within a 20 yard radius of you, leaving them with a twisted sneer and hateful eyes.

                This is nothing unusual for New Jersey, which I would bet is the angriest state in the nation (in fact, it made top-3 for "least happy"), but it’s all the more tragic when we consider that this contagiously stressed lady is packed into a state with 1188 other susecptible people per square mile, and so her chances of spreading this contagion are quite high. What’s even worse is that humans never build an immunity against stress or jerks, so the instant somebody is ‘healed’ and no longer infectious, they are right back in the pool of susceptibles just waiting to be infected by the dude who lost at poker or the lady who got a bad haircut or the guy whose baseball team suffered an ignominious loss and then drives like an asshole and cuts people off on the turnpike. It seems our adaptive immunity, often extolled as one of the most complex and beautiful systems created by evolution, which evolves within us over the course of our lives to recognize the most bizarre pathogens that we may have never encountered before, has not yet found a way to deal with people from Jersey.

                Such is life in an overpopulated developed world. People have everything they could ask for, things that the founders of New Jersey couldn’t even dream of – we have medicine that has boosted our life expectancy to over 4 times that of my dog (who has already packed in more adventures into his life than most people from Jersey ever will); we have shelters that keep us cool in the harsh summers, warm in the freezing winters, and protected from the deadly trees that crash down during the torrential summer thunderstorms; we have more varieties of food that takes almost no preparation whatsoever (how many people in Jersey have harvested their own fruit, or killed their own cow?) – so much food so easily accessible that people literally die from having too much;  We have ‘things’ – TV’s, iphones, computers, air conditioners, refrigerators, cars, airplanes, bowling alley, boob-jobs, hot tubs, jewelry, boutiques… the list goes on. People in Jersey have everything that humans thought they wanted, and yet one drive through New Jersey or one stroll to the coffee shop is all we need to see that Jersey seems to be missing something that matters more. A lot more.

                A sense of humor? Courtesy? Humility? Human connection? Love? Compassion? Now where can people from Jersey buy those? Can I get a discount on Love if I get a second boob job? Which of the uncountably infinite strip malls in New Jersey sells Compassion at a good price? Is it the one in Lawrenceville? They have everything in Lawrenceville.

                No, it’s not the one in Lawrenceville. It's not even in New Brunswick. In fact, it’s not in any strip mall anywhere because you can’t buy Love or Compassion, *you have to build it yourself*.  Our reliance on others to make things for us and do things for us – building our houses, manufacturing our cars and iphones, preparing our food, pumping our water, solving our family problems (shrinks) – has made us so reliant on others for material salvation that we expect to rely on others for spiritual salvation as well. There’s a lot to be said about self-reliance in the 21st century, and revisiting Emerson is something I always recommend, but the most crucial form of self-reliance I want to focus on today, which we should never abandon no matter how developed and interdependent and globalized and Jersey-like the world becomes, is spiritual self-reliance.

                By spiritual self-reliance I mean having the *endogenous* ability and the drive to cultivate compassion and connection with the world. To sit down - and want to sit down - and try to see the world through the eyes of the lady who wanted to cut off my balls, and think about how we can make her feel a bit happier next time. I’ve always been a righteous bastard when playing soccer, and one of my most lasting lessons from the sport is that you can’t control your God-given gifts, but you 100% can control your effort. We can’t control our innate ‘goodness’, our innate ability to make the world a more pleasant place for those around us, or our innate ability to turn those frowns upside down, but we  100% can control how hard we try. Thus, there’s a bit more to the story than simple self-reliance - there is also an implicit call for self-discipline, as we need to not only know that we can make ourselves contagiously happy, but we have to have the discipline to do it, and to keep doing it even after a lady looks at you like she wants to cut off your balls.

                So how do we become spiritually self-reliant? Well, the exact opposite of spiritual self-reliance would be to live like a spiritual ectotherm. If I were to simply morph my mood to the average mood of strangers around me, I would be the angriest guy the 505 has ever met. However, simply ignoring the angry people will not give me any lasting satisfaction any more than repressing my unpleasant thoughts will give me lasting peace. Nor can I use pity disguised as compassion – “oh, that poor person is so angry… their poor life must really suck. It must be because they're ugly or they're not as good as me... They must have failed at everything… oh, that poor person…” That simply leads to entitlement which we see in too many organized religions “oh, that poor person hasn’t found {insert_savior_ here}… how pitiful they will look as they {insert_form_of_eternal_ damnation_here}...{pat_yourself_on_back_for_being_compassionate}”. I can’t ignore the people, and I can’t pity them, nor can I take of the role of an Atlas or a savior to bear the world's burden and solve their problems… at least not until I have solved my own problems. The option that seems best to me, and what I believe to be spiritual self-reliance, is to work diligently at solving my own problems in hopes of becoming a more radiant presence, and encourage people I know to do the same.

                To be clear, by spiritual self-reliance I do not mean to propose that only in solitude can we find salvation. Nor do I believe we should not lean on our friends and family in a time of need and be there for them when they’re feeling down. In fact, I believe this sense of community is crucial and should be fostered whenever and wherever possible. I always think back to my times at the Christian Student Center at UNM. Despite not being a religious man by an Evangelical’s standard, I would find immense joy and sense of place in their presence, and it made me a contagiously happy person and would encourage me to invite others into the fold – to bring more people into the community so they could feel this love and appreciation that radiated from the community, love and appreciation that would later radiate from them as they walked out the doors of the CSC and into the world. By self-reliance, then, I mean that we should always work on our own (in addition to the help we get from others) to foster the DRIVE to be better, because even within these communities of light like the CSC there is a need for engines. The motion of love throughout the world is not perpetual, but depends on all of us to give it a push, and so by spiritual self-reliance I mean that we all cultivate our own desire to push.

                I can’t fix New Jersey. In fact, I can’t even fix the life of that one lady who wanted to cut off my balls.  Nor can I fix the life of the lady in the coffee shop just minutes later who became horribly upset when I accidentally stepped in quickly to grab my coffee from the counter (as she was moving in to grab her bagel)… it was a crowded room, and I couldn’t see her moving in… it’s a crowded state… it’s becoming a crowded world. We have a span of control that is far less than the number of people whose emotions we inadvertently influence over the course of our day. I can’t even fix the lives of 1/10th the number of people I bump into in my day… However, I can fix myself. By focusing my attention on my own self, my own thoughts, feelings and actions, I can cultivate a glowing compassion in hopes that, of all the interactions in my day that happen so quickly and are so far beyond my control, a respectable fraction of them can lead to the other person walking away feeling happier than they were moments before. Not happy that they got to cut off my balls, but happy that they got directions from a smiling man who would’ve helped them fix a flat despite almost certainly never seeing them again. Not happy that they splashed coffee all over my face, but happy that the gentleman said "pardon me" with a smile, and stepped back to let them get their bagel.

                I wasn’t so lucky with the lady asking for directions, or the lady in the coffee shop for that matter, but no worries, I’ll bump into 100 more people today. Probably around 70 of them would answer “yes” if you asked them if they’re stressed out. If I’m lucky, by the end of my day I’ll be able to make some of them happy, and look back fondly on those smiles and thank-you’s I got from 2/5 people who I held the door for, the sincere laughs I brought out of a guy standing in line with me, and the giggles of delight I heard from the little girl who asked if she could pet Jack, only to have Jack walk up and kiss her on the cheek.

                That is what happiness looks like in the overpopulated, developed world… it doesn’t come as an explosive force, an orgasm of joy that leaves people bed-ridden with goofy smiles on their faces… it comes slowly, in little trickles, seeping imperceptibly out of the crowds. You can’t notice from the droplets themselves, but you can see from stepping back and looking at the spring as a whole that it’s been seeping less and less as people have gotten more and more, making some people worry that the spring is running dry… But we know better. The spring happiness is not some reservoir that will eventually run dry, but instead will flow forever and we are the ones who control how much it flows, and its flow around us is determined not by how much stuff we have, but how much Love we have. We are the grains of sand out of which this spring flows, but no single grain of sand can single-handedly make the spring flow. The best we can do is focus on ourselves to ensure that our personality permits happiness to flow around us, hopefully helping those close to us do the same, causing those close to them to do the same, and so on… and always, no matter what, avoid becoming the impenetrable cement of someone who has lost the drive to love everyone and forgotten that compassion is not an act but a way of life.