Daniel Defoe (author of "A Journal of the Plague Year")

                                   (about the Black Death in London in the 1660s) 

                                 (https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/12755437)                                     

The System

I worked with a colleague years ago who used to tell me, every week or so: “Dwight, always be sincere, whether you mean it or not.” He was trying to use irony to get me to lighten my tone. In those days, and today, I too often slip into strident intensity, and that only puts readers or listeners off.

This is true for many others besides myself and true more now than it was 30 plus years ago when I was working with the friend I just mentioned. Right now, in the Western nations, we desperately need to return to rational discourse: reasoning based on observable evidence, presented in a calm, clear way. Facts that all can see – then what we think the facts mean and why.

So let’s have a frank, calm discussion about what is going on in our currently strident, frantic world. And, in that spirit, let’s begin with basic concepts. Like the crucial concept of an ecosystem.

An ecosystem contains many parts that are all interacting all of the time, now competing, now cooperating. But these interactions enable the whole system to adapt to shocks from outside and restore its internal balances over and over again. The parts do not exist as separate, unrelated entities. Any one of them getting enhanced or damaged affects all the others.

Now, let’s consider some of the ecosystems of this earth. Like, for example, the ecosystems that surrounded and contained farms in Canada when I was a kid.

When I was a kid in the early 1950s, DDT was often hailed as a miracle remedy for the insect pests that plagued us. DDT killed insects that transmitted diseases from human to human and insects that destroyed food crops. It was a modern miracle.

                       

                                      Colorado Beetle (one of the pests killed by DDT) 

                                                         (Wikimedia Commons) 

But by 1972, it was being banned in almost all countries of the developed world. Why? Because long term, in-depth studies had shown that its overall effects on whole ecosystems were catastrophic. And that’s not strident talk; it’s simple fact. DDT put chemicals into the food chains of all kinds of environments at the dead insect level. The dead bugs didn’t just disappear. Amphibians, lizards, birds, etc. ate them. Then birds of prey ate the bug eaters. The chemicals concentrated as they went up the food chain, and soon hawks and owls in the affected areas were laying unusable eggs. The DDT residues absorbed into the bodies of the birds caused them to lay eggs with shells so thin that they crushed under the weight of the bird trying to sit on them in the nest. The hawks and owls died off and then, way down the ecosystem, the rodent populations went crazy. There were no owls to kill the gophers. It turned out that farmers who used DDT on their crops, in the long run, were harming their own operations. On farms in British Columbia, for example, gophers multiplied till they ate so many tree roots in some orchards that, in a season, they sometimes killed every tree.

                       

                                                       Gray Owl (Wikimedia Commons) 

Similar things happened with phosphate-containing detergents being used for a while by householders just trying to get their clothes clean. Phosphates get clothes clean and are “biodegradable”. Which is good, right? No. In fact, they feed living things in river systems that receive the effluents from towns and cities. In fact, phosphates are much too friendly to algae. The algae in many river systems bloomed out of control, used up all the oxygen in the water, and left suffocated fish floating belly up.

But, hooray for Science. Scientists figured these puzzles out and showed us how to solve them. Today, we have some pesticides still, but they are nothing like as toxic as DDT was and are much better targeted. (Herbicides, on the other hand, are another discussion entirely.) Today’s pesticides often aim to kill only one insect species and only in ways that will not cause harm further down the food chain. And getting clothes clean can be done without phosphate detergents.

In all these situations and many others, the concept of an ecosystem is crucial to our understanding of what went wrong and how to fix it. All of the parts are connected and in balance; any shock to one part of the system affects them all.  

What is my point? My point is that once we fully grasp the idea of an ecosystem, we see that a society is an ecosystem. As Robert Palmer said back in the 70s, “it takes every kind of people to make what life’s about.” A society is an ecosystem.

We need farmers and fishers. They get from the larger ecosystem, the food that the rest of us have to have. We need scientists to show them how to do that efficiently and not get sick or hurt themselves in the process. We need medical people to heal them when they do get sick or hurt in their interactions with their environmental ecosystem. We need entrepreneurs to devise new projects. Then, by picking the best of the new products that the entrepreneurs create, a society can change and evolve, which it always must do. Life can’t stand still, not even the life in a very large ecosystem with thousands of species and millions of individual living things in it. The system must grow and adapt as conditions in its environment change, which they always do. 

We need teachers to teach all of the above the knowledge and skills that they need to fill their roles well. And yes, we need bankers and brokers to steer the surpluses society produces into those new enterprises that are the most likely to create even more surpluses and cause the whole system to produce generous quantities of goods and services that real folk can use to stay happy, healthy, and productive. Bankers, if they do their work well, ought to cause capital to flow, in a timely way, to the places in which it can do the most good.

Please also note here that it’s open markets for all goods and services that make this bounty happen. When a state brings in centralized planning to manage the nation’s economy, the result is that the planned economy is not as efficient as a market-based system. Citizens when they step into their consumer roles are merciless. In the market, companies must sell or go broke. Sell at least some of their wares to a public that freely chooses to buy them, for a price that will pay for the costs of their production, plus a little, or go broke.

And no, the banks won’t lend you any more money. If they did, then they’d go broke. People who save their money in a bank don’t want to see their savings get smaller. A bank is not a charity.   Cruel as it can be for a small business just starting up, the market system works for the millions. It yields more goods more efficiently than its centrally planned rivals can. And we have lots of evidence to support this view. East and West Germany. North and South Korea. And many other smaller-scale experiments.

But to say all these things about market-based economies is only to repeat that a society is an ecosystem. 

However, in spite of all the above, the whole ecosystem can go under. If, for example, the economy drastically slows down for some reason, and thousands or even millions lose their jobs, the nation’s leaders can’t ignore the sufferings of workers. If workers and their kids are truly suffering, they will grow increasingly angry, and they will begin to destroy the means of production – the farms and factories where they were working just a few weeks before. And if this trend is not remedied, the whole system will dissolve into chaos. Then, workers will come for the incompetent leaders and they will come with murder in their hearts. My starving kids trump your law and order. Thus, if leaders really are wise and insightful, they set out the manage the whole social ecosystem -- not just the workers, not just the owners, not just the bankers -- and keep it in balance

So let me reiterate. Bankers, business people, owners – none of these exist in a way that is somehow independent of the others. Society is an ecosystem. All of the parts connect to, and depend on, all of the others.

A real ecosystem contains thousands of species, all interacting in subtle complex ways. A scientist can give her or his whole life to understanding just one small part of it. A spoonful of healthy soil contains up to 50,000 species of living things and up to 7,000,000,000 individual organisms. Its ecosystems are enormously complex. The same is true of a modern, complex society. And like an ecosystem, a whole society has to always grow or die out. Evolve or go extinct. Life does not tarry with yesterday.

In the largest view, at this point we see that good leaders of society need to be unselfish and wise enough to write and update laws that make the system work smoothly, so that the diligent and sensible rise and the lazy and quarrelsome are granted enough to get by, while the few who simply try to take from others, by force or trickery, what they have not earned, are apprehended and locked up. 

A really effective leader has to understand the concept of an ecosystem. All of this seems obvious and platitudinous to most people today. But it’s not.

The larger point is that real life – in the natural world for a solitary individual, and even more in the social world for a typical citizen in a complex society – means ceaseless labor and vigilance. Watching behind oneself and to left and right, and ahead, above, and below all the time. Deciding when to ignore events, when to defend against them, and when to cooperate with them. Understanding that we live in ecosystems means seeing not only that life is complex and hard, but also why it is so. The ecosystem concept, once grasped, gives us that, and that is no minor insight. For young people, we can say: “Yes, life is harder than it looks, but here’s why.”

The overall worldview held by a person who understands what an ecosystem is and how such systems work, and who relates every human action to the larger social system, is going to be a much more reliable guide for its holder than the worldview held by the person who does not understand ecosystems.

Business people, academics, workers on farms and in factories, even military people, have to learn to work together within the system. Otherwise, in not that long really, no one is going to work at anything. All will be fighting, day by day and even hour by hour, for their lives.

Thus, in all things, we are going to have to accept in our complex world today that Science must rule Economics. The ecosystem concept that we get from Science shows past all doubt that our social ecosystem, when it is working well, can get very powerful and can create decent lives for billions, but it still, always, runs inside the natural world. An economy is not a living planet. The economy has to respect the planet’s larger ecosystems, or that economy, and all who are unable to think outside of it, will die.  

The most frightening aspect of our current situation in 2020 is that some current world leaders, including the current U.S. president, do not grasp that. Some problems can’t be fixed by a “deal maker”.

The latest instance of a natural shock to our economic system is Covid 19. But this virus is not a surprise suddenly dropped into our society. Epidemiologists knew we were going to get a virus like this one at least as far back as 2015. New viruses emerge regularly out of the normal churning processes of the earth’s ecosystem. Unfortunately for Donald Trump and his supporters, a virus does not know or care about "the market". Nor for Science, for that matter. It just is. It does what it does, and if we don’t respect and accommodate it, it will simply kill more and more of us until we do.

The bottom line for these times is that the American leader who didn’t do his job of protecting the long-term health of the nation, using knowledge based in scientific facts, not quarterly balance sheets, should be removed from office.

But it is worth noting here that Donald Trump is not what one can properly call “evil”. He is not “wrong” in the sense of being against justice and compassion for others. That he lives by the economic view is the deep meaning revealed by his much quoted remark about the virus, “It is what it is”. Losing some human lives is like having some bad employees who steal from your warehouse. It is one of the costs of doing business. He really thinks that he has to ignore the virus if it threatens the country’s economy because unbridled capitalism is the kindest way to go for the long term health of the whole nation.

He is not evil. But he is “wrong” in the more important sense of being mistaken. If he ignores the realities of the natural world, he soon won't have a nation to serve. Compared to thieving employees, a virus is a whole other kind of threat. It threatens the nation's very existence. And that is not just strident talk. 

                          

                                          Covid 19 patients in Brooklyn hospital 

                                                        (credit: New York Times) 

The fourth horseman of the apocalypse is pestilence. Covid 19 is just one more pestilence. The ecosystem of the earth keeps turning out new ones all the time. Pandemics come around every few years as surely as summer turns to fall. Unfortunately, this latest one has become, in the minds of too many of the anti-science sector of our population, a personal attack on them. Which does not matter to the virus. And it gets the final word.

Thus, the response to Trump and his ilk is not venom or rage. It is explanations of models and facts based on sound science. Told calmly, but firmly, over and over. Told even when the telling seems to be unheard and to stir no response. 

Will we change his mind? That is so unlikely as to be considered, for all normal purposes, impossible. But the likelihood that we can change the minds of some people who are staying quiet and, so far, just watching and listening, is real and substantial. If they are to be swayed, it won’t be by strident intensity. It will be by calm, consistent, evidence-based reasoning.

Most of all, no matter what may occur on November 3, even if I can’t make my opponents think like me, by standing my ground and making the rational case, I can sustain my own courage, clarity, and compassion.

I speak the truth, first and foremost, not to get my opponents to become more like me, but to keep me from becoming like them.

In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, nevertheless, have a thoughtful day.