Purpose?
What am I trying to say with these articles and eventually a book around Metabolic Morality now I’m calling Revelation of Fire? A famous author suggests that non-fiction authors try to work from the end point and work backwards. This was immediately helpful because my feeling every time I write an article is that 10 or more ideas emerge and the potential end grows further and further away. I have a mental image of myself and my huge mouth trying to swallow the world and I’m wondering the whole time if the effort is not a bad idea. Some have called this the combinatorial explosion. Alas I am seeking to introduce a bit of constraints, a knife and fork with which to break it all into swallowable bits.
An Early Aside
As a quick aside, I plopped down to write this and thought to call it the “Omega Point” fairly literally as “the end point” not realizing the history behind the term. Apparently, “Omega Point” comes from Teilhard de Chardin who was a Jesuit Catholic priest and paleontologist! If you didn’t know that combination could exist we feel the same. To reconcile his two seemingly opposing passions or loyalties he tried to create a synthesis between Catholicism and evolution. It seems to have been a very noble effort and yet for that effort, or more precisely for talking about it, he was exiled to China! Yet his ideas caught on and many famous thinkers are influenced by his work with some conception of a soon arriving transformation. The most popular of these in our current time is called “the Singularity” coined by Ray Kurzweil and influential in Silicon Valley.
Foci
Return back to my foci, my aim in all my current writing is to present an argument about how energy throughput in the human organism as well as through the economy or society is the critical variable for things like health, wealth and social harmony. I am deeply biased by this view and I suppose I ought to simply admit this at the get go. I can only see a few of the ramifications, but the more I try to explore the more interesting they seem. I have predominantly been looking through this sort of lens into physiology, but have ever more been looking at societies, religions, businesses and economies and the energy throughput view seems quite instructive.
History
The best evidence for my overall thesis comes from history and historians. Prior to trying to understand and validate the impact of energy on society, I thought I hated history. Yet historians have really gone deep to dredge out the better explanatory factors for the rise and fall of civilizations. With just a little searching, the evidence flows overwhelmingly as to the relationship between the energetic status of societies and their success. The material histories of most cultures we know existed in times and places favorable to human flourishing. Optimal climate for agriculture seems to be the key variable. The capture of consumable energy drives social strength, political liberalism and innovation. From those we can derive things like guns, and steel while germs too increase with the extent of trade and urban density. Relatedly, the ability to resist germs is significantly related to the health of the population. Favored authors in this niche include: Ian Morris of “Foragers, Farmers, & Fossil Fuels”, Philip Jenkins of “Climate, Catastrophe, and Faith”, “The Evolution of God” as well as “Nonzero” by Robert Wright and Vaclav Smil of”Energy, and Civilization & History”.
Economics
While most economists have abstracted energy and money out of their models, these factors can be added back for absolutely critical insights into the real world. At least one economist, Steve Keen, is doing this kind of work and pointing out that most of real economic growth comes from increasing the economy's use of energy over time. He suggests that explains 85% of all growth, and I would imagine the remainder is still from energy but would from efficiency gains. Thus all economic growth is from or is equivalent to energetic throughput.
Inflation - in an energy focused model inflation would have different meaning. It might be that we always need to clarify the difference between monetary inflation to include private debt growth and real price increases from energy supply shortages. This is a sort of geopolitical cycle where the monetary policy increases the base of the money supply and to a large enough extent this undermines the stability or will of the global energy producers.
Interest rates
Interest rates must have some relationship to energy which is not very well articulated by mainstream economics. My current sense about interest rates is that higher real interest rates are required to refocus economic efforts to things that matter the most such as: the energy sector. With increased rates a higher proportion of income will find its way to investments that are able to yield higher returns and it seems likely that many of these will be related to delivering increases in energy. We can also note that the energy (petroleum) price increases are a, if not the, prime driver of inflation. American economic exceptionalism is perhaps able to continue only so long as the US, or the west more broadly, is able to increase its per capita utilization of energy. After the 70s it really started to slow down, we stopped building nuclear plants and the middle east raised the price of oil. In recent years it has picked back up with fracking, but it's in serious jeopardy with the luddism around nuclear power and the twisted sense that we should actually remove people from the Earth.
Western (especially American) Vulnerability
Central to my view is that America’s real economic Achilles heel is its complete disregard for human physiology. Many of the largest, most powerful sectors: defense, petroleum, pharma & medicine, finance, agriculture, food supply, and technology are receiving rents for undermining the physiology and cognition of their customers and employees. Profit maximization such that it kills the society is very short sighted to say the least. Yet, the incentives are rigged to drive these outcomes. From my perspective there is really no specific person to blame...so perhaps the rules of the game need to be reworked to reduce myoptic optimization and emphasize biological, ecological, full system constraints along with longer term optimization. I’m fairly confident there must be many better ways to organize.
In a framework in which increasing energy throughput is necessary for economic growth, we can evaluate the real impacts of various environmental policies. Relevant to the existing geopolitical situation, a rapid reduction of the use of petroleum without a viable alternative will cause a severe recession or depression with many unforeseeable consequences. That said, further immiseration of the poor is almost guaranteed.
Science
While cumulative science is quite a novel institution in the modern world, its organizing mechanisms are not nearly as innovative as many findings. The same kind of behaviors that compel humans to organize and attend church are at work in the various disciplines. In many domains validating new “truth” is avoided as long as possible prior to acknowledgement of the overturn. New findings and theories dramatically upset the status and incomes of those who are fully aligned with the previous paradigm. While the people and conflicts are more diverse are more heterodox, the battles within academia are not so different than those between the Catholics and Protestants after Guttenberg.
Business
Money as a store of value is equivalent to money being a claim on future energy. The most basic way to say the same thing is that you can use money to buy food, heat & shelter. Money; therefore, is a kind of accounting of potential energy. Profits are obtained by dynamically increasing or maintaining financial throughput, which should on some level mean they are successfully increasing their share of potential energy.
Let’s take Apple which is known to have a large account of cash. On some really basic level they build a device whose cost to build, ship & deliver is at least 50% or less of what it costs retail and then we use those devices en masse to more efficiently live. Many may only use them to purchase entertainment more easily but many will also use Apple products to build businesses. The company is making money (storing and using energy) by increasesing the speed at which others can do the same.
Perception / Phenomenology
The experience we have and the world we perceive safe, benevolent or unsafe, malevolent is predominantly a result of the same: energy flowing through systems perceiving and calculating our body budget. As energy throughput reduces, humans self-organize or cohere like steam becoming water, in fact it’s not quite a metaphor because the related behavior is based on the same fundamental physics. We might call this condensation or congelation.
Personality & Morality
The tone of a person or culture and thus the morals and religious behavior is determined by the energetic throughput aka metabolism of each respectively. This is probably the hardest nugget for most of us to buy in. As far as I can tell most people really identify with their current set of values or morals and don’t see how they might change in differing circumstances or physiological states. We are in some sense meant to be blind to this...this is perhaps the largest “mote” in our eyes. Yet taking it out we can clearly see how we are all made of the same stuff despite our current views and preferences.
In sum
A system that is increasing energy throughput will be engaged in searching for new energy sources to exploit. While having and finding energy sources the system is fundamentally open...this openness is to novelty, variety, new DNA, to new microbes, new configurations, new shapes and more. It looks like exuberance, seeking, experimenting, growing, making peace, not being fussed, sharing and doing for others.