Post-industrial and ultra-technological societies have rigorously separated the stories of human 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 twentieth century was inevitably perceived as a desirable outcome.
For some years these two stories have been coming together once again, meshed up 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 shocks.
In our economic theory and market practice, many complex constructs are used to define systemic shock. Among them are some traditional ones of economic crisis with slow growth, high unemployment, and declining gross domestic product. Some constructs are more technical and specialized and deal with increased volatilities and uncertainties in financial markets. More tangible and physical constructs appeal to unique regional market issues, such as the current widening gap in insurance coverage. Recently, some constructs of climate inequality have brought together the stories of nature’s vulnerability and social fragilities on the same conceptual and policy plane.
All these constructs and stories contain an element of social fragility. Such 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, they 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. Experiences of stress, destruction and loss have erased the distinction between the economic and political impact of natural, health-related and man-made catastrophes and the sheer human disaster and suffering. They have also raised the need for an immediate examination of the legitimacy of many current cultural and political norms.
This process of examination leads 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 political legitimacy. It is well understood and accepted that a social order, to be found legitimate, must protect the life, property and essential liberties of the people who belong to it. 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 becomes the indispensable foundation for systemic legitimacy.
Social resilience for the purpose of this essay 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 may, through a process of network contagion, have deep cascading effects upon social and economic layers, previously considered riskless. These impacts may lead to systemic collapse and a full or partial reorganization of many systemic nodes and layers.
The processes of collapse and reorganization may be gradual and of an 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: it is always finite and vulnerable. Remediating the impacts of climate and natural disasters in an equitable manner becomes a common measure of societal endurance.
Various degrees of the systemic ability to provide equitable remediation and then recovery from a catastrophic shock have become a comparative metric of systemic resilience. Systemic stability 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 emerges a need to provide a transition from currently dominant and sorely insufficient to adequate values, while mapping definitions and measures. This is not a transition within the field of exclusively and purely technical definitions. The transition is also about redefining a cultural measure, namely the measure of value, which must be associated with the legitimacy of current economic and political enterprises. Furthermore, the transition must be about providing information and a degree of evaluation of the durability and longevity of its underlining social establishment. A cultural measure must thus contain valued societal information. But the 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 must have systemic resilience at its core to be legitimate.
The process of economic globalization has entered the regime of lower climate predictability and growing volatility in extreme natural catastrophes. On this very ground, it is necessary once again to intertwine the stories of nature and social values.
The foundations of the current version of the global economy can be traced back to about forty years in the past. The first phase of globalization was about economic growth and accumulation of wealth. It was about the advancement of technological knowledge and the building of regional and global interconnectivity between financial, trade and economic systems. The economic statistics of the period convincingly reinforced the conceptual and technical conclusions about unstoppable progress. Absolute and per capita gross domestic product metrics were rapidly rising. The proverbial tide was lifting all boats. The pursuit of GDP growth as a measure of the economic effectiveness of the system assumed unlimited and boundaryless resources.
Economic success blunted our intuition accumulated from historical experience and our historical cognition gained from studying natural sciences and mathematics. These exact sciences maintained that every physical system and every physical process has boundary conditions and limitations. Once these boundary conditions are breached, previously stable systems and processes may collapse or perform in chaotic and thoroughly unrecognizable manners. From the 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: of efficient and equitable markets, of resilience in 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 globalist economic model, which appear at a time of disruption and instability.
At present, there is no recognizable modern and democratic political system, which can survive, let alone succeed, without economic growth being its primary objective and top deliverable to its citizens. Nevertheless, for three centuries, since the onset of the industrial revolutions in Europe, the expansion and intensity of our drive towards growth and wealth relegated to the second order the values of environmental protection and maintaining the stability and predictability of the earth’s climate.
In the 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 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 may thereby become reflected in established policy.
During this process there is an element of moral hazard in such policy innovation being implemented only in physical, statistical, economic and health metrics but not yet becoming deeply embedded in cultural values, which are well accepted in society. It is still by no means necessary that this process of exploration, investigation, and policy definition 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. 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 emergent transition and mapping of new cultural values may express itself. 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 capable of accomplishing this drive is the search for systemic survival and legitimacy. By this logic, the second phase of globalization should 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.
The principles and foundations of such a transition are by no means left uncontested by major global players. There is always opposition by some states and societies to a discussion and recognition of shared human values. The source of resistance comes from the desire of states to defend and preserve their sovereignty. The same holds true for the pursuit of a new cultural framework where economic growth and the value of climate stability and the restoration of nature are held in the balance of critical decision-making.
Such a system will have to allow for twin objectives – growth and wealth-creation, on the one hand, with sustainability and preservation of natural, human, and climate resources, on the other. The importance of balance between these two objectives is undisputable. However, the instruments of balance are far from available. The current economic model is fully 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 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. Markets, trade, and investment work without the intervention of a hegemon; they tend to have self-correction mechanisms and recovery memories and capabilities, which underwrite their own state of stability. In turn, both cultural traditions and market frameworks are missing a moral sentiment needed for fostering sustainability and for the recovery of a natural resource as vital as climate stability and predictability, with which markets cannot effectively deal. Hence, the mastery of economic growth presents a danger of allowing self-deception to grow in society regarding its mastery over nature.
The lack of a globally accepted framework and a hegemonic plan of action should be taken as a call for action, indicative of the need for collaboration. Resolving and managing a global crisis of an essential natural resource without core and periphery, as well as 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. For global climate risk to emerge as a unifying concept of common human heritage, such collaboration is 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 those who will 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. At 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.
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. 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 technological societies, these stories have stayed far apart for far too long. The excess volatility of climate, combined with the accumulation of knowledge on the impacts of climate unpredictability, is creating a societal opportunity to rethink these two stories. We must weave them together again, as our ancestors have always done in the past.
The Author
