9.3.19 - Drowning In The Bathtub

As I write this, Hurricane Dorian is bearing down on the East Coast of the US, recently having devastated the Bahamas and a few other Caribbean islands. The East Coast is a place full of lots of money and expensive beachfront properties, and it's making me ruminate on the project of climate change denial.

Over the past twenty years, climate change has been growing in consciousness within the mainstream. I can't pinpoint the first time I heard of it. As a benchmark, I remember seeing the Spielberg movie A.I. in theaters and thinking, as the movie opened with a shot of heavy ocean waves, that I had recently heard about how sea levels were going to rise as glaciers melted. That was in 2001. Two decades later, the evidence has only gone in one, dispositive direction, yet public opinion has moved much slower with it.

In the time that we've been aware of climate change as a masscult, we've also been reeling from a political revolution that has seen the validity of government itself questioned and corroded from the right wing. The only comment I came here to write is this: what a load of shit that "big government" is something that stands in the way of progress.

Here's the thing about climate change: no one individual knows what to do about it, because one person's impact on it is negligible. Even for an activist, all they can really do is marshal support from others. This is a problem on the scale of a government. That's what they're there for.

In climate change, we have a problem only government can handle. We assume that at its highest levels, the government is being staffed with competent scientists who know what to do, and we as society support their right to impose on us whatever solutions we collectively need. In other words, they are in place to take care of this issue so we don't have to.

This is an important insight about big, activist government. They're there so we don't have to worry about large-scale issues. Common defense and economic policy certainly fall into this category. Problems arise and even static conditions must be accounted for; and for that, we have a government.

The central insight I'm making is that I believe a better starting point for assessing what "the government" is, or what the role of the state ought to be, is to acknowledge that macro problems will always afflict every society, and neutralizing them in order to create felicitous stability is beneficial for the society, even down to the individual citizen level.

Far from wanting a government to drown in the bathtub, I want a government that is able to let me focus on my private enterprise and solves massive, macro problems that I have no hope of approaching without me needing to affirm every little thing.