Geostrategic Media Political Commentary, Analysis, Security, Defense
Ivelin Zvezdov
Post-industrial and neo-technological societies have rigorously separated the stories of cultural values and those of the earth’s nature and climate. Human civilizations have been fully dependent on the wilderness of nature and the particularities of climate for their survival and success for millennia. It is understandable that this decoupling in the 20’th century was inevitably perceived as a desirable outcome. For some years now these two stories are coming together once again meshed by the increased unpredictability and volatility of extreme climate events and their recorded and proven impacts on society at large. They are coming together at a time of repeated signs of perceived and real social and economic fragility, which if not absorbed and equitably remediated may trigger systemic changes. Many complex constructs are used to define systemic change. Among them are some traditional ones of economic shock and of increased volatilities in financial markets. More tangible and physical constructs appeal to unique economic issue such as of the widening gap in insurance coverage. Most recently some modern constructs of climate inequality bring together the stories of nature and social issues on the same conceptual and policy plane. All of these constructs and stories contain an element of social fragility. These formalized concepts are part of a language, which is built to abstract from reality and to adapt to academic, scientific and policy research and its consecutive conversations. Yet, these are not only theoretical constructs, but also tangible stories describing social catastrophes already experienced in recent historical realities. The misfortunes of climate change, pandemic and armed conflict emphasize the fragility of our modern society. These experiences of stress, destruction and loss have vividly erased the distinction between the economic and political impact of natural, health and man-made catastrophes and the sheer human disaster and suffering. They have also raised the need for an immediate examination of the sustainability and legitimacy of many current cultural norms. This process of examination is intended to lead to a proposition that for a cultural norm to be legitimate it must be found socially sustainable and socially resilient. The resilience of a social system becomes a requirement for its own legitimacy. It is well understood and accepted that a social order must protect the life, property and essential liberties of the people who belong to it to be found legitimate. The cultural definition of social resilience and sustainability may vary to some degree across geographical regions and political systems but there is some broad consensus. There is even less divergence in understanding that social resilience in itself becomes the indispensable foundation for systemic legitimacy.
Social resilience for the purpose of this analysis is defined as the ability of a society to adapt and absorb large shocks and externalities caused by excess climate volatility and unpredictability. In general resilience is achieved through preparation for extreme, highly unfavorable, and catastrophic outcomes oftentimes cascading through all nodes of the systemic structure. Systemic architects build tiers of reserves and pockets of conserved energy, which are designed to absorb catastrophic shocks. Still systemic reserves and endurance are an exhaustible resource. Once such resources are depleted, catastrophic shocks through a process of network contagion may have deep cascading effects into social and economic layers, previously considered riskless. Such impacts may lead to systemic collapse and full or partial reorganization of many systemic nodes and layers. The processes of collapse and reorganization may be gradual and of evolutionary nature, but it may also be of a sudden and catastrophic nature. In both cases social resilience towards environmental and climate shocks and catastrophes can never be infinite. Remediating the impacts of climate and natural disasters in an equitable manner becomes a common measure of societal endurance. The various degrees of this systemic ability to provide equitable remediation and then recovery from a catastrophic shock have become a comparative metric of systemic resilience. Systemic stability thus becomes a measure of the veracity of social and political systems. Once systemic and social resilience is brought into macro-economic and macro-financial policy discussions, there grows a need for providing a transition and mapping in definitions and measures. This is not a transition and remapping of exclusively and purely technical definitions. This transition is also about a redefinition of a cultural measure – being a measure of value, which must be associated with the legitimacy of current economic and political enterprises. Furthermore, this transition must be about providing information and a degree of evaluation of the durability and longevity of its underlining social establishment. A cultural measure thus must contain valued societal information. This transition is also required to both stimulate and defend the need for a revision of cultural values in such manner that they unquestionably enhance systemic legitimacy. This new dominion of cultural values must contribute to systemic sustainability and thus must have systemic resilience at its core to be legitimate.
The process of economic globalization at a time of lower climate predictability, at a time of growing volatility in extreme natural catastrophes provides this very ground necessary to intertwine the stories of nature and social values. These premises allow an examination of a twofold need for both redefinition of values and for reclaimed systemic legitimacy. The foundations of the current version of the global economy can be traced back to about forty years. The first phase of globalization is about economic growth and accumulation of wealth. It is about the advancement of technological knowledge and building of interconnectivity among regional and national financial, trade and economic systems. These were years of continuous economic growth. They fostered the progress of the established model and the acceptance of its very outcomes. The economic statistics of the period were convincingly reinforcing the intellectual and technical analysis. Absolute and per capita gross domestic product metrics were rapidly raising. The proverbial tide was lifting all boats – big and small. GDP growth as a measure of the economic effectiveness of the system assumed unlimited and boundaryless resources. This economic success blunted our intuition accumulated from historical experience and our historical cognition gained from studying natural sciences and mathematics. These exact sciences have always maintained that every physical system and every physical process have boundary conditions and limitations. Once these boundary conditions are breached, otherwise and previously stable systems and processes collapse or may perform in chaotic and shockingly unrecognizable manner. From first principles of system’s theory, it is established that breaking through one boundary condition may be sufficient to shock a system and throw it into a state of chaos or collapse. In the last two decades we have broken through three such boundaries of stability – these of efficient markets, of the resilience of global health, and of the predictability of the earth’s climate as a vital natural resource. The breach and exhaustion of these limits reveals previously hidden costs of our economic model at a time of disruption and instability. At present there is no recognizable political system, which can survive, let alone succeed without economic growth being its primary objective. Furthermore, for three centuries, since the onset of the industrial revolutions, the expansion and intensity of our drive towards growth and wealth rendered to second order the values of environmental protection and maintaining the stability and predictability of the earth’s climate.
In this inevitable entanglement of risk factors, cultural values and measures of systemic legitimacy, there is a critical component, which is rarely discussed. This is the impact of moral hazard. The scenario of its emergence has been experienced previously in other settings and can be foreseen with certainty. The measurements of disaster and shock in health and economic systems and their contagion effects upon social fragility have been observed and presented to the public discourse. Counter measures of remediation are also defined and refined. Both types of measures are examined and validated by technical and political authorities and thus may become reflected in established policy. During this process there is an element of moral hazard of such policy innovation being implemented only in physical, statistical, economic and health metrics but not yet becoming deeply embedded in cultural values, that are well accepted in society. It is still by no means necessary that this process of exploration, investigation, and policy definition in itself will lead to a transition in cultural values. There is no mandatory social provision or entity that requires this transition to take place or makes it inevitable. Such a transition to a new set of cultural values cannot be mandated. It cannot be enforced. If moral hazard is allowed to become the preponderant ethical concern in the process of value transition, itself accelerated by rapid systemic change, then systemic legitimacy will be endangered. Thus, the only mechanism which remains to facilitate a transition to a new set of moral values is a widely accepted necessity at all societal levels to ensure the survival of systemic legitimacy.
The development of the global economic system is one process where an emerging transition and mapping of new cultural values may express itself for observation. A transition and remapping of value must then overwhelm all other considerations to become embedded in the values representing the second phase of globalization. The only intellectual force which is capable of accomplishing this drive is the search for systemic survival and legitimacy. By this logic the second phase of globalization should establish itself to be about managing common and existential threats from natural catastrophes and extreme climate events as much as it would be about economic growth and wealth accumulation. A new global economic system is thus deemed timely for design. This one must balance twin objectives – growth and wealth creation on one side with sustainability and preservation of natural, human and climate resources on the other. The importance of balance among these two objectives is undisputable. However, the instruments of balance are far from being yet available. The current economic model is fully and well equipped with all the instruments and techniques of causing a profound disbalance. To pursue the objective of economic growth and accumulation of wealth tools and frameworks refined over hundreds and in many cases over thousands of years are well established. These are goods, commodities and financial markets with their domestic and international trade agreements and their investment and growth policies. The mastery of economic growth presents a danger of allowing self-deception to grow in society of its mastery over nature. The lessons learned every day from climate science reveal elemental forces that can bring about a redefinition of the path of civilization. These same earth and physical sciences show society with every newly compiled scientific report that the story of growing climate unpredictability and its adverse outcome of extreme catastrophic events is also a human story. Balance rather than mastery should be the only sustainable and legitimate principle in the further development and unfolding of this story. To pursue a balance with a new set of values, which center on preserving natural and climate resources, at present society is inadequately, and better still, quite ill equipped for the task. We are unequally equipped to pursue balance and hence the most likely outcome is disbalance and inequality of outcomes. The hard task has become not whether and when but how to find with urgency a new set of moral values which will underwrite this story of balance and stability.
Our current civilization and its economic model have honed and perfected instruments and processes for economic growth for many years. This drive to succeed economically to accumulate wealth has become genetically engrained in many who subscribe to the values of contemporary civilization. It has become a part of the human story. So far this has been a tremendously positive story of our civilization. Now a time has come, where a natural resource upon which this drive depends so thoroughly and unequivocally, namely the predictability of earth’s climate, has run short of its previously unquestioned stability. There are no social preparations for this turn of things. A comparison is highly illustrative between the enormous accumulation of tools, treaties, international and state structures on trade, development, and investment to what we have to manage and balance a newly defined instability. The modern pace of knowledge creation and technological development allows states, societies in general, to quickly build a comparable machinery of institutions, treaties, and processes for managing this risk, and to ensure sustainability and predictability of this natural resource of earth’s climate. This can be done in a relatively short period of time.
The essence of these two human activities – the pursuit of economic growth and the preservation of a fundamental natural resource, defined as the stability and predictability of climate can no longer be mutually exclusive. Societies have trained themselves to succeed in the former for many generations and yet they are only in the first generation to face the need to be equally effective in the latter. The time of a single generation must be sufficient to raise a civilization to the magnitude of this task. This amounts to a shift in cultural values. The definition of economic success must and will continue to encompass growth and wealth accumulation. An updated and modern definition must balance these with environmental sustainability, personal and public health, and general well-being. Market and economic stability and success are no longer sufficient to define systemic success. This transition of values must hold true at the level of the corporation, the public sector, an administrative region and even the sovereign state and the international institution. The interconnections between the lack of climate predictability, excess climate volatility and the emergence of new frameworks of values in economic and political activity are not straightforward and linear. Herein the technical definition and social perceptions of the concept of systemic stability are changing. The new and emerging technical definition implies moral sentiment. Work aimed at accomplishing the definition of systemic success is a work to gain ownership of the present and the future. The criteria of systemic stability now become a set of shared values and shared technical definitions. While technical definitions are much easier to change values alter through a much slower process of evolution, transition, and remapping. Organizations, regions, states which can provide this desired stability will be defined and accepted as successful both in economic and social terms. The alternative will be considered systemic failures. If an institution cannot be the source of its own stability and sustainability, then it is by all laws of nature and economics a failed entity.
The mechanics of markets, trade, and investment work without the intervention of a hegemon. Nonetheless they tend to have self-correction and recovery memories and capabilities and thus provide their own state of stability. However, at present, both cultural traditions and market frameworks are missing a moral sentiment needed for fostering sustainability and recovery of a natural resource as vital as climate stability and predictability. Only until recently, this resource was deemed to be boundless. The transition and remapping of values will require that now this resource is seen as a basic tenet of the legitimacy of social cultures. In a broader perspective it is evident that climate issues are local, institutional, and individual and they impact communities and organizations differently. Thus, for a transition to a new set of cultural values to take place the work and preparations needs to take priority. The lack of a globally accepted framework and a hegemonic plan of action with an existing philosophical current deeply vested in resolving these challenges emphasizes the need for collaboration. Resolving and managing a global crisis of an essential natural resource without core and periphery, without clearly defined geographical and social hierarchies is a collaborative effort of the largest possible scale. A framework of collaboration will withstand the pressures of chaotic action born from the lack of rigid contractual frameworks. This collaboration is vitally needed at all systemic levels – the state and region, the corporation, university, and the non-governmental, civic, and military institutions.
In a new regime of torrential change in a global system lacking a pronounced hegemon, agreement is unsurprisingly hard on who should bear the cost of action. In such a circumstance there simply cannot be an authoritative prescription of who should define the mitigation of risk and its consequences. On the level of cultural and social values there cannot be an authority which demands the right and the obligation to change a person’s or a social group’s way of life. Hence it is essential to treat global climate risk as a unifying concept of common human heritage. The concept must be allowed to evolve into an item of collaboration and to allow various degrees of its adoption. Out of this collaborative effort climate and health stability fostering services would be generated and simultaneously would become sources of newly created economic and social wealth. This new kind of wealth creation is driven by both the self-interest of all actors, and by the process of collaboration and collective understanding of the vital challenges at hand. Systemic stability, which includes climate and health factors relies for its success and endurance on this accumulation of self-interest and collective interest. At the human level this is an opportunity to connect the story of society and its desire for growth and its hidden pitfalls with the story of the tremendous power of the earth’s nature and its climate. Particularly in the advanced post-industrial and neo-technological societies these stories have been kept far apart for far too long. The excess volatility of climate, the accumulation of knowledge on the impacts of climate’s unpredictability are creating a societal opportunity to rethink these two stories. We must weave them together again, as our ancestors have always done this in the past.
