Rawls & Me

Tailwind

2012-01-28T20:50:00.003+09:00

With a 169 km/h tailwind, the United Triple Seven literally blew out over the Japanese Sea (or the “East Sea” as the Koreans prefer to call it). In a little more than one hour, I will be touching down at Narita Airport for a week in the Japanese capital which will give some time to work on the paper that Anna and I are co-authoring for WPSA later this spring. The paper is on something we call “aspirational cosmopolitanism” and it basically means that, in our understanding, cosmopolitanism can never be a static end-state but must rather be interpreted as a dynamic process of negotiation, an existential inclination if you like, a continuous process by which we seek to confront our own partiality and parochial beliefs. More specifically, the paper deals with historical memory and how we relate to our collective past. While it is often acknowledged that failure to accept responsibility for historical wrongdoings may worsen a country’s relations with others (as vividly seen here in Asia with its many “history wars”), almost nothing has been written about what consequences this failure may have for the country itself and how it may prevent social learning and, ultimately, even block moral progress. In the paper, we want to look at this “internal” aspect and also discuss some encouraging examples (Germany in particularly comes to mind) for what it, in practical terms, can mean to take responsibility for one’s past.

What future?

2012-01-26T12:53:00.002+09:00

The other day I was speculating a bit about what we would want the future to be like in say a few hundred years from now? First, it should be obvious that we do not all want the same future. This immediate and intuitive observation should serve as a simple reason for us to instead seek a pluralist future, one in which different individuals can pursue different life projects. Leaning for a moment on Rawls here, it seems reasonable that we would would like to see a future which not only safeguards the greatest possible freedom that is compatible with that everyone else enjoys the same freedom, but also a future which provides the protection from ignorance and poverty which gives worth to that freedom on a universal level. We would want a future of punk rockers, surfers and idealists but also one of conservatives, doubters and pragmatists, we would want a future with different religious beliefs but also one of atheism, we would want a future which makes good on the lofty promises of the Enlightenment but also one that recognizes the Kantian aphorism that “out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made”.

This would basically be a future that preserves the human existential condition at the same time as it makes universal the kind of opportunities that many people in the rich world currently enjoys. What would it take to make that materially possible in a world which is already today at its ecological limits? Most likely, nothing short of a radical acceleration of modernity through massive investments in education which would lift society upwards and bring about the kind of technological change and social innovations necessary for such a future. In practical terms, this would depend on our ability to develop radically new clean energy technologies such as nuclear fusion while restoring the natural habitats that we have ruined by permanently decoupling our industrial processes from the natural world. On a sociological level, it would be about a future in which humanity has grown out of its savaged past, yet remains a species full of contradictions, a future in which depression and violence still exist but (just as we have already done within the framework of the nation state) these forces are institutionally contained so that a lasting, universal peace can finally be realized on a global level. It is about accepting that some people always want to go further, faster and higher whereas others may want to stay on the same farm or in the same forest for their entire lives. It is about recognizing such simple facts and using our political imagination to creatively craft a world which makes all this possible by drawing on what we have learned from our encounter with modernity.

It is tempting to ask, how can anyone, and environmentalists in particular, be against such a bright future? The simple answer is: because they do not believe that such a future is technologically or socially possible. But I would be tempted to say that is more than that, it is about a desire to see their own particular idea of the future realized, one in which things are slowed down rather than accelerated, organic communities restored and the world ethically and socially homogenized. In this sense, environmentalism stands for an almost fascist vision of the future. But it is, one should recognize, an ethically motivated fascism since it is considered by many environmentalists to be the only option for human survival. In his 2010 book “Treading Softly”, Thomas Prince writes, “[t]he next era will be one of living within our means, one way or another”. It is important to remember that for many environmentalists, space ships, artificially cultivated meat, fusion reactors and other common themes on this weblog are nothing but artefacts of science fiction. By equating the long-term potential of science and technology with what autonomous market-driven research has accomplished, environmentalists generally believe that the unintended negative consequences of advanced technologies more often than not will outweigh their possible ecological benefits. On a deeper level, this reflects a widely shared belief among environmentalists that human emancipation from nature is the ultimate cause of our current ecological trauma; “[i]f there were a single philosophical position in environmental thought, adhered by all who are concerned about environmental destruction, it is that at the root of that destruction is human’s separation from nature” as Prince writes later in the same book. Consequently, it is not surprising that few environmentalists would embrace the idea that separating ourselves more fully from nature would be ecologically beneficial.

Oil sands and the real meaning of "low energy futures"

2012-01-23T02:57:00.004+09:00

In green thinking, there is much romanticizing of “low energy futures”. Centred around so called “energy descent towns” which are supposed to lead the way to a finite world of absolute limits, there is a firm belief among environmentalists that “big science” can never deliver sufficient energy to everyone and that we have to realize that “the party is over”. The problem, as I repeatedly have argued, is that very few people, in particular in growing countries like China, Brazil and India but also in the United States, find that future appealing. Yet, many of those who reject the environmentalist worldview also reject the very real realities of the coming energy crunch as traditional petroleum reserves are running out while demand is skyrocketing. This is why I have argued that environmentalists in rich countries have a unique responsibility to support big science and breakthrough solutions to the world’s energy needs (such as nuclear fusion).

Without that support and access to energy technologies that are substantially cleaner and cheaper, I am afraid that the “low energy future” will in reality translate into nothing else than what already seeing in terms of oil sands, gas shale fracking and massive environmental destruction.

Getting our act together

2012-01-18T23:25:00.009+09:00

Though I am not a great consumer of science fiction, I think it can sometimes be a very useful tool to reveal what opportunities we have in the real world. The other day when reading an article about exotic risks, I come across the frightening prospect of a black hole suddenly beginning to affect our solar system. Though the risk of this actually happening is fortunately miniscule, the consequences would be truly apocalyptic. Within maybe a century or two from detection, our entire solar system would collapse and be drawn into the hole. Nothing would survive.

Thanks to the existence of star catalogues, we would indeed get this kind of early warning as the light reaching us would become increasingly distorted. How much of a warning of course depends on the speed by which the black hole is moving towards us. But let us say we got two hundred years. What would we do?

Panic?

Two hundred years is a lot of time from a human perspective but a second when it comes to cosmic timekeeping. In two hundred years we have moved from the first trains to Shinkansen and Maglevs, from the first manned balloon flight in 1783 to the Airbus A380, and from the prototype of the telegraph in 1828 to the Internet. On the other hand, between the year 700 A.D. and the year 900 A.D., not much improved in terms of technology. As we should know by now, progress is never inevitable or teleological but a choice that depends on our social institutions. But let’s say that we understood the danger. What would be a reasonable course of political action? Well, given the overwhelming enormity of the threat and its unambiguous nature, it is obvious that any hope of survival would depend on our ability to advance sufficiently in our understanding of the natural universe and in our ability to develop highly sophisticated technology. For this specific scenario, I could imagine two mutually supporting tracks, one into spaceflight which would examine the possibility of evacuating Earth and its inhabitants and one that would look into ways of directly changing the space-time fabric with the aim of possibly neutralizing the black hole.

Either track would require unbelievable investments to stand any chance of success. It would require nothing short of our entire global society getting its act together and putting its energy into these projects. To put hundred millions of people into school to learn physics would require again hundred millions of other people supporting them. And let’s think further about it. Would we stop fighting wars or would there be different factions fighting for different “solutions” (including religious factions suggesting that we should not do anything but rely solely on God)? Or would this be the time when we finally realized that we are one single species? More than anything, I think a threat of this magnitude would make us understand that people are an asset and not a liability, that what we call “unemployment” is a false problem and that our survival would depend on our ability to make massive social investments.

So, yes, indeed, I think humanity would stand a good chance of actually surviving. But the path to that survival would be one that would teach us what we fail to understand today: our shared cosmic vulnerability, our common interest and why we need each other. In a sense, we are in fact facing problems of this magnitude (in particular the risk of nuclear annihilation) but also other and more subtle threats such as the risk of planetary entrapment whose consequences are ultimately not that different. But still, we are so very far from getting our act together.

Tyler Brûlé

2012-01-11T02:55:00.006+09:00

Cuddled up under a red SAS blanket somewhere over Russia, I had to smile when I found a long interview with Tyler Brûlé in yesterday’s IHT. As creator of both Wallpaper and Monocle, Tyler has already been mentioned more than once here on Rawls & Me, always with the assumption that the reader would understand that, unlike him, my own take on the whole globalist lifestyle thing has always been more satirical than serious ;-)

The stated reason for the IHT interview is the launch of Tyler’s latest project, a 24h radio station called Monocle24 which aims to "sample sounds from Seoul to Stockholm”, but it quickly becomes obvious that the author is rather more fascinated by its “border-agnostic and sophisticated” founder. We learn that Tyler was born to Canadian-Estonian parents, grew up with Danish design furniture, nearly got killed on a job in Afghanistan and now runs the growing Monocle empire from his Japanese-inspired “Midori house” in London.

Despite all its existential shortcomings, Monocle is indeed an outstanding publication. Like few other magazines it has succeeded in making the world both more exciting in a Tintin-adventurous kind of way but also more familiar and smaller. From “how to retire in Kamakura” to Turkish drama exports in the Arab world, the latest issue was particular good and has thus aptly been following me around Europe for the last weeks. Yet, whenever I browse its pages, I am also experiencing a sense of post-colonial guilt. In its consumption of airport lounges, Hyatt hotels and first-class bedlinen, Monocle depicts a world completely out of reach for the vast majority of the people living on this planet. And as much as I firmly belief that it is poverty and not prosperity that we shall eradicate (!), I am afraid that Monocle may be a bit too effective in making us forget the real realities of this planet. But then again, maybe it is indeed better that people read about soft power indices and London cabs in Baku than about model trains or whatever?

Portuguese time

2012-01-05T21:29:00.001+09:00

Travelling the world, it is easy to become reckless with time zones. Adjusting one’s watch becomes a simple habit, something one does without much thinking when settling into an airplane seat. Two days ago, when our bus crossed the bridge between Portugal and Spain, we completely forgot.

Being on vacation, we simply did not notice that our watches were one hour behind the rest of Spain and Europe. However, at 7 a.m. this morning we got a call from the hotel reception, saying that our taxi was waiting to take us to the railway station. It did not help much that Anna with drowsiness in her voice insisted that it was only 6 a.m.

Only once, in Las Vegas when the US changed to daylight saving time two weeks ahead of Europe had I made a similar mistake. As then, the lost hour meant an insane rush but in the end we made it in time to our Madrid-bound AVE high-speed train.

Portugal

2012-01-02T22:51:00.007+09:00

On a red bridge high over the river Tejo, I get a last view of Lisbon from the train window. Back here in Europe, the remaining white spots on its map have again played their dirty tricks on my imagination. A week away from work to explore vintage trams, winding hills and the south-western corner of the Iberian Peninsula. Invited to a party in the old town or “Alfama”, we cheered in the new year and were reminded anew of what the future may hold; a girl from Cap Verde with her friend from Australia who she met when volunteering in India, a Romanian-Portuguese couple living in Dubai and our curious hosts who wanted to know everything about Chinese high-speed trains and our new life in Seoul.

When meeting for brunch the next morning, I was asked what I thought was the most important problem facing democracy. I answered, “to make people feel that they have agency and that they can decide their own political future”. Yet, as Miguel immediately replied, “how exactly do you do that?”.

I had to pause and think. Maybe by simply believing in people, by treating them as adults and not accepting the dumbing down of public discourse. At a deeper level however, it is about having a genuine commitment to social investment, to have the imagination to recognize the transformative capacity of education but also a vision of what our society could look like in say a hundred years from now if we were to put our collective energy behind it. Clearly familiar themes on this weblog but also ideas acutely needed as the shockwaves of public austerity are allowed to go through the societies of southern Europe, taking their massive social toll while sparing well-organized special interests like agricultural corporations and the arms industry.

Nothing to envy

2011-12-17T02:57:00.002+09:00

Just as the first turbulence hit the Airbus high over the Ural Mountains, I finished reading Barbara Demick’s “Nothing to Envy – Ordinary lives in North Korea”. It is a book that made my cry; the forced late pregnancy abortions, the prison camps and the unbearable everyday brutality which followed in the wake of the famines that killed off nearly one-fifth of North Korea’s population.

Looking back over the last days, I have again spent an unreasonable amount of time online debating the future. Reading this book made all those debates seem unbearably silly. This is about real people suffering right now, not in some dire post-apocalyptic scenario. But at the same time, the book reminded me of how little all words mean the day when there is no food, when money has become worthless and industrial society does indeed come to a standstill. Contrasting the complete darkness from space with the bright lights of Seoul and China, it is worth reflecting on the fact that North Korea may be the only country in the world truly on a path towards decarbonisation (not that this will be much comfort for its people as the winter sets in).

For my own part, I will soon be back in Sweden; meet love ones, make lussekatter and most likely soon feel rather repulsed by the vulgar abundance which accompanies every Christmas. Some people who read only a few lines on this weblog or on my Facebook page may think that I have a blind faith in capitalism or that I am against things like higher gasoline taxes. I am not. In fact, I think that much higher taxes on fossil fuels (and meat) would be a very good idea in a carbon constrained world. My only worry is that if those taxes were set as high as I wish them to be, they would also cause a massive political backlash against environmental policies and instigate a “cultural war” that may drag on for decades. And, as I wrote late last night, those are decades that we most likely do not have if we are to avoid catastrophic environmental changes on a planetary scale.

Enough said about that. Transferring earlier today in Beijing, I came to talk to a Danish man in his forties working in the pharmaceutical industry in southern Seoul. One of all those bright Scandinavians living and working abroad, every time I go flying I tend bump into them and they make me proud of what Scandinavia stands for in the world. That they reflect about how traditional Korean gender roles will affect their kids in school, that they are curious about the outside world, and that they are highly skilled at their different jobs. If only Pia Kjærsgaard would have listened to any of these conservations, then she might possibly have realized why Scandinavia should not turn inwards but outwards.

Demanding less. Or not.

2011-12-14T02:05:00.009+09:00

Today, a friend of mine who is active in the Green party in Northern Ireland posted a link to a new report on his Facebook wall. The report is called “Demanding less: why we need a new politics of energy” and offers some familiar ideas about the future, such as that we need demand-side reductions in energy use and that we should begin shaping a “low energy society”.

As you can imagine, I could not disagree more.

Instead of an “energy descent”, I think we should invest in a high energy future which can offer fast and reliable transportation, advanced material flows, and the energy necessary for everything from desalination of sea water to greenhouse gas remediation. I strongly believe that the rich countries need to take the lead in developing the kind of energy technologies that will make possible a world in which ten billion people can sustain a decent material life. Focusing on "degrowth" and "low energy" will obscure this global responsibility.

Moreover, the "low energy talk", especially if it focuses on the need for individual sacrifice, will alienate people and lead to unnecessary polarization while being ineffective when it comes to solving our global challenges. Already today we have seen how climate change has become almost as much an act of faith as abortion rights in the United States. To even suggest the amount of sacrifice that would be necessary to achieve sustainability through reduced energy and material flows in a world of seven billion people would be paramount to political suicide. That is why no politicians do that. The most worrying problem with all this is, as I have pointed out before, that we risk falling in between, i.e. not accelerating modernity enough to achieve sustainability through advanced technologies yet not slow modernity down enough to ensure sustainability through reduced metabolism.

In order to make progress towards a prosperous and equitable future, we need the support of all good forces, in particular the people who write these kind of reports. The choice is simple, either continue demanding that everyone, everywhere, subject themselves to the planetary limits and learn to “live within our means” or instead join the effort to finally and completely lift those limits.

Nanoism

2011-12-12T15:14:00.002+09:00

The passing beauty of the blank page as her day withers away and becomes a silent monument to the bitter-sweetness of temporality. A privilege and a curse; an aspiration and its inner judge.

Reactions

2011-11-16T11:24:00.003+09:00

The other week, while trying to write a fair and unbiased review of an article for the journal Organization & Environment, I felt a need to let off some steam. Unfortunately, I chose to do so here on Rawls & Me rather than over a beer with my colleagues.

Little did I expect the strong reactions that my blog post would provoke. On one hand, this is of course a good thing since it is shows that people are actually interested in these important topics. On the other hand, I am afraid that my quick and sloppy way of writing may have led to some unnecessary misunderstandings.

First, I should clarify that the references to Gramscians had nothing to do with this particular paper but more with the kind of general anti-capitalist rhetoric which seems to permeate much scholarship these days. It is rhetoric which spares no ammunition when it comes to describing the failings of global capitalism, yet offers very little in terms of what an alternative global order could look like.

One of the great ideas of social democracy was that it allowed for pluralism, that it offered a future that could inspire many different sorts of people rather than requiring homogenization around a single monolithic vision of society in the way communism or fascism did. I still believe that the future must be built on a similar compromise, that it must take seriously the possibility that not everyone who believes in capitalism suffers from “false consciousness”, but still make sure that we keep society moving in a progressive direction towards greater emancipation. It is about using markets for what they are good for (decentralized decision-making and the accumulation of wealth) while not using them for providing basic social functions such as healthcare or education (which should rather be based on duty or scientific curiosity).

Because of our fallibility as humans we need effective limits on authority and check-and-balances. I am scared by those who think that “science should trump politics” and who think that everyone must submit to their own worldview or die. At the same time, we urgently need to make progress towards sustainability and this is why I wish more scholars would dare to make the move from simply “deconstruction” of existing power relations to plausible ideas about how we can transform these relations in a progressive direction.

Scientific neutrality

2011-11-10T15:16:00.006+09:00

I am currently reviewing an article which is using Foucault and Fairclough to uncover “the links between neo-liberalism (and its anti-democratic and repressive features) and sustainability”... Sounds like you can guess where it is heading? If not, it might help to know that the article also aims to challenge the “assumption that the political implications stemming from scientific research are ideologically free”...

Clearly, this article is an almost parodical representation of the post-modern consensus and its understanding that being “critical” never means being critical to one’s own ideological position. Obviously, very few Gramscians ask themselves in what way their own antagonistic worldview contributes to making political change “hopeless” or to what extent their own views may in fact have become “hegemonical” within Academia?

In this particular case, I think much confusion stems from the inability to make at least an analytic distinction between the scientific question of whether global environmental change is happening and the political question what we should do about it?

Sometimes progress in this world is really frustratingly slow. Many people still question the reality of environmental change even as humans have completely overrun the planet. Thinking back at the summer and the sulphur smoke in Beijing, I wonder what it would actually take to make these people understand the reality of the threat we are facing? Perhaps something as simple as telling them that accepting the reality of that threat does not mean that they necessarily have to accept the anti-capitalist remedies suggested by the environmental movement? But accepting that reality would of course put a moral pressure on them to actually come up with better and smarter solutions to the problem of global sustainability...

Eine andere Welt ist möglich

2011-11-03T18:09:00.002+09:00

It can be a morning commuter train in the Rhineland or school children walking along the river banks in Phnom Penh. As we travel the world, we experience the physical communality of humanity, how it finally seems to be within our grasp that we share the same common destiny as a species. Working on humanity’s long-term prospects as I do, it can be a brutal reminder that not everyone shares this insight and that many, even educated people, still think that we can afford a future of armed conflict and interstate animosity. At least to me it seems obvious that these people, while clinging to scientific euphemisms such as “security architecture”, “geostrategic balancing” and “power projections”, are not neutral observers but actually, to a large extent, the makers of the nightmarish futures that they fear.

Today at HUFS, the Graduate School of International and Area Studies together with Vrije Universiteit Brussel organized an EU-sponsored conference on “Europe and the Shifting Strategic Trends in East Asia”. The first presenter was a Dr Louis Simon who gave a paper entitled “Offshore Power Europe? A European Geostrategy in an Asian century”. Although I have spent many hours in conference rooms listening to the misanthropic autism of IR-realism, the last months of peaceful hikes and lofty scholarly pursuits had left me somewhat unprepared for what I was to hear:

“...the rise of China incentivises Europeans to think strategically – something that has been prevented by America’s benign penetration since WWII. It also offers Europeans an opportunity to get Russia off their backs, as China demands greater attention from Russian in eastern Eurasia. Europeans should therefore assist the rise of China as a means of shaking off external penetration in Europe and its greater neighbourhood. In turn, a united Europe playing an offshore power role in eastern Eurasia could, by threatening to provide China’s rivals with the necessary power to crush Beijing, extract key concessions from China in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East or Central Asia”.

At first, I could not wait until the floor would be open for comments. But soon I realized that this was a battle that I could ill afford in front of all my new colleagues. So, in a most unusual move, I decided to simply leave the room. Instead of investing more frustration into this, I will now have a beer with my friends from all over the world living here in Globee Dorm because I am absolutely confident that “eine andere Welt” is not only possible but necessary.

Post flow

2011-10-09T00:44:00.004+09:00

Late yesterday night I finished my article on the post-Concorde world. In a moment of overconfidence I submitted it to a top-ranked journal, although I realize that the style is most likely both too essayistic and polemic for their taste.

After a slow morning, I took a walk through yet another beautiful afternoon. Living here sometimes feels a bit like the Truman Show; the same blue sky and high air every day. But then again, everyone says that autumn is the best time to visit Korea, that spring normally means toxic sand storms from China and summer is all rain and humidity.

In Itaewon, I went to my favourite Turkish kebab joint and then on to “Berlin” where the picture is taken. The last days of writing have been so very intense, super flow, and suddenly I am on the other side: time for reorientation and back to reading.

Western Islands

2011-10-01T23:43:00.000+09:00

After three weeks of intensive writing we decided to take a break and catch the last rays of sunlight across the Yellow Sea out on Yeongjongdo Island. Apart from the odd fisherman and a few families dressed up for the Age of Winter, we had the 20 + x degrees warm beach for ourselves.

Modernity as a runway

2011-09-19T18:15:00.004+09:00

Working on my book, I have been looking for a suitable analogy that captures our current ecological predicament. For a frequent flyer like myself I am surprised to find that it could have been there all along, namely “modernity as a runway”.

Think of it in this way: when an airplane is racing down a runway, there is a point when the pilot has to decide whether to take off or to abort. Beyond that point, the remaining runway is too short to allow the airplane to come to a safe stop. In a similar fashion, modernity as a historic process initially offered two very different possibilities: either an acceleration into a space-faring civilization or a deceleration into a pre-modern “sustainable” way of life. As we continue to use up non-renewable resources and filling the planetary sinks, we are moving down that runway at ever higher speeds, however, still without any clear commitment about whether we should try to ascend or if it would be better to jump on the breaks.

In this situation, some people (read cornucopian neoliberals) think that the aircraft will take off without any intervention thanks to the invisible hand of the market-pilot. Others (read greens) think that the whole idea of flying is ecocidal yet lack any realistic idea of how the brakes can be applied given the momentum that the aircraft has already achieved. Yet others (read me), argue that we need to wake up to this situation and at least try to make a conscious democratic decision about whether to attempt flying or not.

Five years on five continents

2011-09-18T23:42:00.005+09:00

Today, exactly half a decade has passed since I wrote the first entry on Rawls & Me. With the exception of the fall semester of 2007, I can see that I have posted here basically every month. Sometimes, as in Melbourne in 2008, the updates were nearly daily, other times they have been less frequent. But throughout, Rawls & Me has been a steady companion, a reflective filter through which I have been able to communicate with myself and others, a place with enough space to hold everything from superficial lifestyle blogging to religious meditation.

A few weeks ago, a friend back in Lund told me that he is keeping track of Rawls & Me through Google Reader. He also said something that made me smile, namely that in my absence, the blog feed offered him regular doses of my “peculiar mix of fear and optimism about the future”.

The Long Emergency

2011-09-15T21:19:00.007+09:00

I have started reading one of the classics of paperback misanthropism: “The Long Emergency” by James Howard Kunstler. I know I have seen this book tucked away in more than one Neo-Malthusian's bag at different conferences over the years. And this far, the book really must confirm their worldview with its basic argument that modernity is bad, bad, bad, and that the progress of the last hundred years is only a “bubble of abundance” supported by cheap fossil fuels.

As much as I think that humanity will be faced with difficult challenges in the century ahead, I am afraid that this book could single-handedly turn me into a neo-liberal:

1) In line with many other writers in the tradition, Kunstler does not at all seem to appreciate the flip side of alienation, namely freedom. He only sees the loss of “organic community” and the rise of “loneliness, anomie, anxiety, and depression”. Yet, anyone who has grown up in a small town or a village knows what social control means and what emancipation it can bring to be allowed to define oneself anew in an urban environment rather than being forced to stay within the same static social role.

2) According to Kunstler, the end of economic globalization is nigh. He views the period ahead as “one of generalized and chronic contraction”. As much as I am tempted to quote Keynes here, I think what is fundamentally missing from his analysis is the fact that people today, unlike in the past, aspire towards the global. People everywhere want their children to grow up and learn about the world. It is a simple fact that once you travel, you want to travel more. And though it may not immediately turn people into political cosmopolitans, the increased mobility does bring an everydayness to the “international” that earlier generations did not have. Although I know that much of this is remain an elite project, it is worth noting that global tourism last year increased to 940 million international tourist arrivals (despite the recession). And as for the global economy as whole, I think Kunstler makes a mistake when he equates the long-term potential of (welfare) capitalism with the last decade of easy credit and speculation. In particular, he seems to entirely ignore the role of education and social policy as drivers of growth.

3) The hopeless lack of a global subject. As much as Kunstler may be right that peak oil, pandemics and habitat destruction are difficult problems he does not seem to appreciate the possibility that humanity may actually “wake up” and decide to act proactively in the century ahead, that we may eventually understand that we are the masters of our own fate and that, working together, we can do remarkable things. It may sound science ficitonish but when thinking about it, the step from fearful nation states to political cosmopolitanism is nothing compared to the historic leap from tribalism to abstract statehood. Perhaps my basic point is that Kunstler, like many of his friends, are obsessively focused on the ills of consumption rather than the possibilities of production, creativity and imagination. And despite the risk of sounding very much like Johan Norberg now, all this made it impossible for me to resist having a nice Thai crunch salad with avocado at California Pizza Kitchen at the newly opened restaurant in 청랑리억.

Optimism in the past

2011-09-11T22:01:00.012+09:00

It is often said that people today are far less optimistic about the future than they were in the past. It is particularly common to associate “optimism” with the 50’s and 60’s. Some quick Google searches on the phrase “optimism in the 19XX's/XX's/XXties” also show this. But I was surprised that “optimism” was not more prevalent in descriptions of the nineties, have we already forgotten about the Wind of Change?

[Methodological disclaimer: it is worth noting that part of the "optimism" may not be about each decade as such but rather about more specific things that happened in that decade]

Viewquakes

2011-09-01T17:07:00.008+09:00

One of the things I like the most with my job is that I learn so much. It may sound banal: of course I do, I am a researcher. But everyone who has been in academia for a while knows that it is not that self-evident after all. I especially like to experience “viewquakes” (to borrow the term of Robin Hanson) as when things dramatically change my worldview.

Today, I was again trawling through the backwaters of the transhumanist field, full of ideas by people who take, how should I put it, a mostly instrumental rather than romantic view on life. 99 per cent of them are men (I do not know why but this seems like an important factor to consider). Anyway, I managed to catch some really good ideas that I will definitely bring into the Book. Yes, that is correct, I am indeed working on a monograph which feels very good without the pressure of knowing that that book will also be my doctoral dissertation.

I am afraid the subject of today’s viewquake is a bit too big for Rawls & Me, but let's say it had something to do with the democratic implications of division of labour and the fixation with autarky among green theorists. You will see in due time.

Strandkorb

2011-09-01T00:20:00.005+09:00

It could have been Heiligendamm right after the sandglass of summer has turned cold. One of those imaginary extended moments which has both time and presence. When everything is at once simple and concrete, the coldness in the air, the grey skies across the Baltic and the self-enclosed bubble that does not gravitate in any one direction. Thinking about it now, concentration can easily slip, it can be rainy morning drives through Baltimore or Arabian deserts at night, but in this fictional moment there is just the right amount of extension in space and time.

I guess we all feel uneasy about ourselves sometimes. We wonder what others think, if we are too extrovert or introvert, if what we say is really funny or if we should better be quiet. How do we know? We are after all in a “non-neutral evaluative setting”, we ask other people to take on the task of fundamental ontological mediation, and as much as eternity can be in their eyes, they are not God and should never be asked to pretend being either.

But in silence we have a window towards the transcendental, a glimpse inside ourselves, and a space that we need to fill with presence. It takes courage to do that, to not escape.

Yet, night will fall also over Germany and aesthetics can at best soothe but not heal. We are an irreversible product of what has been; the actuality of our actions as much as we want to be defined by our potentiality (at least while we are young but hopefully until the very end). God alone can redeem.

Thinking about war

2011-08-31T00:26:00.008+09:00

In one of the very first posts here on Rawls & Me I remarked that the world would probably have been somewhat more forgiving towards Bill Clinton for his saxophone adventures with Miss Lewinsky, had it only known what would follow (i.e. the trauma of the Bush years). The same can probably be said about the remaining US hegemony. As much as all my friends on the Left in Europe take any opportunity they can to criticize the United States, I am not sure if they would be particularly happy in a world without it.

Such thoughts come very natural here. As I noted in my last post, I am less than a hundred kilometres from the North Korean border. In one understanding, all this is just a collective psychosis, any sane person would immediately wake up and stop it. But sixty years of Stalinism do not make sane people.

In a perverse Herman Kahnish-way of thinking, I must admit that I am sometimes thankful that the United States poses a credible existential threat to North Korea, that its leaders know that any attempt to attack the South, in particular with nuclear weapons, would turn the North into gravel and ashes within hours. But as a Christian I cannot accept that kind of logic and, more importantly, what it does to me. I am pacifist because I believe that killing, even under the cloak of war, is murder. Also as a Christian I firmly believe that sacrifice is sometimes required, that we must be bold when confronted with evil. That if we resort to arms, we will lose ourselves.

I often like to think that war is a dying business. That as the world comes together through globalization, we will abolish war and make good on the cosmopolitan promise of one moral and political community of humanity. But if anything the last decade has been a reminder of how far we actually are from reaching that insight. The countless lives that have been sacrificed in Iraq and Afghanistan where the absence of military force would probably have been far more effective in toppling authoritarian regimes (as witnessed during the Arabic spring). I do not know how often I have asked myself why the United States does not believe in its own values, why it chooses to torture people rather than putting them to justice, why it does not open its borders for the world rather than locking them down? But as Europeans we tend to ask more from the United States than we are capable of ourselves. All the possibilities are on our own doorstep as well: why do we not bring Turkey into the union? Why did we let the fear of “social tourism” obscure the common possibilities for growth when Poland and the other central European countries joined in 2004? And why do we keep building new prisons rather than schools at home?

When thinking of the century ahead, all this cannot be separated from the ecological challenge we are facing. And looking back at the monumental changes of the 20th century, it is at least to me self-evident that we must project a positive future, one of universal affluence rather than scarcity, one that can inspire people without requiring them to submit to one single epistemology (such as the belief in the reality of climate change). Many green theorists seem willing to accept the death of billions of people in order to carry out their great project of homogenization. In their world, there are no BMW owners, no people who like flying overseas, no dreams of one day moving to the stars. For them it is all a moral quest to show their own ideological purity. But we cannot have that world. We need a world of compromises, of dialogues and debates, and most of all, we need slow and pragmatic change so that we can learn from what goes wrong. And if that is so, when we need a vision, one that can talk to the highest in us, that can show us what we can be if we believe in ourselves and our abilities. A vision that can inspire also those people far away in America who are right now making up yet another war plan for the Korean peninsula and who, I promise, do not lose much sleep over global warming.

37°33' North 126°59' East

2011-08-28T14:45:00.008+09:00

After two weeks of idyllic silence in Sweden and Norway, I have now returned to East Asia. Yesterday evening I moved into the faculty dormitory that will be my home for the coming year in Seoul. Eleventh floor with a mountain view, a cross-training machine parked outside in the hallway and a foreign professors-only elevator...

The afternoon sun leaves no doubt that Seoul is on the same latitude as Seville. Luckily I brought along some sunscreen. Otherwise, it is difficult not to get reminded by the proximity to another circle of latitude, namely the 38th parallel North which has served as the demarcation line between South and North Korea for more than half a century, running just a few dozen kilometres to the North of my new apartment.

High-speed through China

2011-08-03T16:40:00.003+09:00

At 307 km/h, train G14 makes its way North on an elevated track high above rice paddies and endless suburbs as we finally take the train from Shanghai Hongqiao to Beijing South. Even if seat 61 was taken, this is undoubtedly a classic train journey, the kind that one would sit at home with a large map and plan on long November nights. At the same time, the journey brings a very concrete human scale experiential dimension to distances that previously were just abstract air miles.

Seeing China this way leaves no reason for doubt: we are truly living through the end of nature. Everywhere, human intrusion into what was once dense forests, silent lakes and majestic mountains. I cannot help feeling sad about this tremendous loss, about what we have done to the planet and its natural habitats. It may be that I believe that humanity, in the future, could reverse much of this environmental destruction and decouple itself from the natural world. But doing so will require the emergence of a global subject, an understanding that we, as a conscious species, have a unique responsibility for the future of all life on this planet and that we cannot continue along the current trajectory.

Witnessing the last weeks of political mayhem, not least the debate over the debt ceiling in the US, has been a powerful reminder of how far we actually are from the kind of enlightened cosmopolitan politics that will be needed to safely take humanity through the mid-century canyon of environmental stress. And browsing all those weblogs teeming with racism, hate and narrowly defined conceptions of "national interests", it is difficult to maintain the Habermasian hope of a new shining Republic of Letters emerging online. But let's not forget that it has always been like this, that it always has been more difficult to formulate good ideas than bad ones, and that history will always be a "race between education and catastrophe" (to quote H.G. Wells).

The post-Concorde world and the risk of planetary entrapment

2011-07-24T16:41:00.006+09:00

Here below follows my abstract for the Annual Meeting of the Western Political Science Association to be held in Portland, Oregon, in March 2012:

The Aérospatiale-BAC “Concorde” was one of the fastest but also most polluting civilian aircrafts ever built. Capable of sustained flight at twice the speed of sound and at altitudes high enough to make the curvature of the Earth visible to its passengers, Concorde was a powerful symbol of the technological optimism that characterized the 1960’s. As such, and much like the now dismantled US manned space programme, the spirit of Concorde stands in stark contrast to the prevailing pessimism about the human enterprise. Instead of an accelerating modernity and rapid space colonization (as commonly envisaged fifty years ago) we have for some time witnessed a fading modernity with geriatric nuclear reactors, ageing infrastructure and paralyzing public austerity.

Although political ecologists may not have succeeded in bringing about the kind of structural end of global capitalism that they have long wished for, they have been surprisingly successful in spreading sufficient epistemic noise and doubt to deprive modern project of its utopian energies. Combined with neo-liberal rhetoric about the inherent wastefulness of public investments, this has created a very real risk that humanity will fall short of developing the technology necessary to break free of its planetary entrapment yet not halt the rate of environmental destruction to a degree that would ensure our survival here on Earth.

United 881

2011-07-09T21:31:00.003+09:00

UA 881, a small island of America high above the Sea of Japan. In less than an hour we will touch down on Incheon Airport and get a first short glimpse of what will we be “home” for the year to come. Outside, the sunset is magic purple in the way that makes one marvel and realize anew the vulnerability of our planet.

Although the paper work remains, this means that I will take up a position as assistant professor at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies from 1 September. Before that however, it is back to Beijing and the summer school.

Stars and resort bliss

2011-06-30T21:32:00.002+09:00

It may have taken a few years longer than originally planned, but at last I made it to the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Phnom Penh. In my dreams it had been the kind of place where I could retreat with an old typewriter, put on a white undershirt and escape into my writing. Merely knowing that such a place existed, literally a last resort, was in itself a comfort as I struggled to finish manuscripts in a fractioned world of X2000-trains, early-morning commutes and Malmö sleeping bag nights.

With all of that gone and my life firmly relocated to Asia, I thought it was time to seek out the place in reality. And as often, reality can be kind of underwhelming. But the FCC was indeed bright yellow with white details, the balcony overlooking the Mekong River had its gin & tonic magic and there was the kind of silence necessary to write a book (at least in the afternoons before the rooftop party took off).

Days later I found real silence on a Balinese beach. For the first time in months there was not a thick layer of air pollution preventing me from seeing the stars. Hanging there high above the sea, they had both the familiarity of childhood nights on my grandfather’s farm in Skåne and the unfamiliarity of the southern hemisphere as I will always remember it from that last evening on Wilson’s Promontory before leaving Australia in 2008. Far away from the taxing academic life in Beijing, the stars brought well needed perspective, a simple reassurance about the vastness of the world but also a kind of psychological dilemma: how are people to ever appreciate the endless possibilities of space if they never can see its depth with their own eyes? It is as if we are living on the shores of a great ocean but fog prevents us from imagining what could be beyond the horizon.

With practically no summer vacation this year, I am already heading back to more work. As for the fall, there are still several options but right now it seems as if it most likely will be a teaching position at Hankuk University in Seoul, South Korea.

Beijing

2011-05-31T21:06:00.002+09:00

Back in Beijing since about a week, busy finishing an article for my Hong Kong employer on climate change and China. Little time to post things here on Rawls & Me plus I am still having problems finding a decent VPN-connection. But later in the summer, I hope to at least write something about my upcoming ride with new super-high speed train Shanghai-Beijing as it commences on 20 June.

Below the sulphurous haze

2011-04-25T19:50:00.001+09:00

With 35 million blogs here in China, it feels appropriate to post something on Rawls & Me as I land in Beijing. But the simple fact that I need to use an encrypted network tunnel to get this post up also says something about blogging from China.

Today, I have been visiting the Faculty of Law at Tsinghua University which will be our partner in the EU-funded exchange programme that I am working on this summer.

After the conference euphoria in London last week (see previous post), I went up to Stockholm for Easter to see my sister and her boyfriend. As often, we ushered into long political debates about everything from the mechanisms of labour markets to cultural politics. I like these debates since they let me be wholeheartedly "Left" whereas I otherwise often have to defend more market-liberal views. The funny thing is that my sister's boyfriend in his turn is considered leftish by his colleagues at work... Talk about relative denominations. Except politics, we also went for a run in the forest and a nice walk on Söder.

All that feels very distant, not only after those endless hours over Russia, but also mentally. If anything, Beijing reminds me a bit of a Warsaw on steroids with its colossal scale, coal-infused inland air and wide roads. Especially since, below the sulphurous haze, one can find all those gems and pretty cafés with their large comfy sofas, green orchards and travel-planning expats. Just walking down this trendy hútòng next to the Lama Temple, I stumbled upon a number of small places that I most certainly will return to through the summer. It is a strange kind of reassurance, that despite the recent wave of repression, post-modernity seems to be well and alive.

Toward a politics of radical engagement

2011-04-21T08:54:00.002+09:00

Talking at conferences always leaves me oscillating between nervous anxiety and overconfident bravado. Yet, in between, there are these moments when you once again come to believe in the social sciences, in the possibility of communication and when you realize exactly how much the world needs a politics of radical engagement.

As intellectuals, we cannot hide. We need to be on the barricades, to challenge our own partiality and parochial beliefs, and make good on the promise of the Enlightenment.

The neoliberal order is not written in stone. We can change it, but it will require us to outsmart the neoliberals: to think in new ways, to show them why their profound pessimism about the human condition is unwarranted, and explain step-by-step why we need trust rather than repression, or as the Germans say, “Freiheit statt Angst”.

It is so easy to “resist” things; the real challenge is to find democratically plausible ways to transform them. That was the great idea of social democracy in the 20th century. Now it is our responsibility to take these ideas further and to show why we should aspire for the greatest in all of us rather than the lowest.

Nuclear normality

2011-03-17T22:16:00.003+09:00

For no apparent reason, breakfasts have long been a symbol of normality for me. It is a time of day when all the craziness of the night gives way to ontological security. Some shade grown Mexican coffee, Special-K cereals, and that Pura package which reminds me of distant Australian milk bars.

However, for the last days, not even these simple signs of familiarity have been enough to shake a deep uneasiness about the events that are unfolding in Japan. The headlines speak of nuclear meltdowns and a death toll close to 15 000 people.

Talking to my class today about the accidents at Fukushima, I realized how little people know about even the most basic principles of nuclear power. I do not say this to make fun of my students but rather as a reminder of how far we actually are from democratically guiding the technological civilization that we have created. It will clearly take a Herculean educational effort to provide people with the tools necessary to make informed decisions about many of the questions that will confront us in the 21st century and beyond.

As others have pointed out, this is not the time to politicize the suffering that Japan is going through. But yes, I have always been sceptical about nuclear power, yet at the same time a strong supporter of further nuclear research. It is cheap to say that the events at Fukushima and other plants have vindicated scepticism about nuclear power. However, I fear that many greens will make exactly that connection and that it will be very difficult to avoid more general resentment about advanced nuclear technologies.

Through the canyon

2011-02-23T22:18:00.005+09:00

The recent spate of postings here on Rawls & Me has brought back some familiar themes, such as the contested role of technology in securing environmental sustainability. Like in the past, I find myself discussing policy measures when something tells me that much of the debate actually has to do with far more fundamental questions.

Looking towards the future, I think the stage is set for a grand debate about the direction of the human enterprise. While there are already ample signs of a growing planetary consciousness, much of its focus still remains on the global challenges we face rather than on the solutions that we could possibly develop.

If humanity is to make it through the mid-century canyon of environmental stress as the world adopts Western lifestyles, we need to think hard about what brought us here. Instead of looking at the escalating environmental destruction as ultimate evidence of social and political failure, I think it makes more sense to think of it as a painful feedback signal in a longer civilizational learning process. After all, it is hard to imagine how a planetary civilization would be able to develop without at some point confronting its bio-physical limitations. The question is rather if we, in time, will be able to overcome the traumatic character of our initial encounter with modernity and use the knowledge we have gained to find a more sustainable trajectory into the future.

In the search for such a trajectory, we should be careful not to fall victim to either romanticized notions of a pastoral past or to utopian ideas about some advanced Star Trek-like future. At the same time, we have to realize that given the unsustainable nature of present trends, any viable response to the ecological crisis will most likely need to be radical in nature.

One key fault line in the coming debate will be our relation to the natural world. As Martin Lewis pointed out already in 1993, “the central theme of modern environmentalism may well be the idea that humanity’s separation from nature lies at the root of the ecological crisis”. Among environmentalists, it is commonly believed that the only way we can close this rift is by reimmersing ourselves in the natural world, by only using locally manufactured natural products (such as wood), and by “treading softly” on the planet. As evident not the least from this weblog, I hold pretty much the opposite view, that in order to protect the natural environment, we should seek to decouple ourselves from it. Recognizing that any attempt to “return to nature” in a world of seven billion people would literally destroy nature as we know it, I believe that we should instead return nature to itself and begin the process of ecological restoration. While nano-technologies may hold part of the key to such a decoupling, it is clear that only space industrialization on a massive scale can truly allow us to disengage from the sensitive ecological systems that we now occupy with our buildings, roads and mines. This does not mean that I do not appreciate the spiritual value in nature. It is rather because I recognize this value that I think that nature should be preserved and that human contact with it should be limited to recreational purposes.

A second fault line is the legacy of the Enlightenment. As Stephen Eric Bronner points out in his book “Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Toward a Politics of Radical Engagement”, there is currently a deep confusion among intellectuals on the left about the origins and objectives of progressive politics. According to a commonly held view, the Enlightenment is the source of all exploitation and its values are inherently racist, sexist and eurocentric. What such a view obviously ignores is that the yardstick it uses for judging the Enlightenment, is in itself a product of the Enlightenment. And as much as we cannot ignore that individual thinkers of the Enlightenment harboured the prejudices of their time, it is – as Bronner persuasively argues – wholly unsustainable to reduce the ethos of the Enlightenment to those prejudices. I believe that the true legacy of the Enlightenment lies in its emphasis on critical reflection, its cosmopolitan sensibility and its enduring commitment to social reform. If progressive politics is to offer any hope for the future, I believe that it needs to reconnect with this legacy and point to a world of universal democracy and freedom.

Finally, and somewhat connected to the previous point, I believe that capitalism represents a third, and very dangerous, fault line in the debate to come. When living in a money-obsessed society like Hong Kong, capitalism may seem like an unstoppable force. Driven by powerful economic interests but also billions of individual aspirations, the accelerating process of capital accumulation that began in Europe in the sixteen hundreds is now distinctively global in nature. Clearly, this process has done a lot of good to the world, brought out our inherent productivity, enabled unprecedented levels of functional differentiation and given a majority of the people on this planet a far richer material life than their ancestors could ever imagined. At the same time, the human and ecological toll of capitalism has been catastrophic. Child labour, maimed workers and animals shackled in factory farms are all sufficient reasons to resist capitalism in its current form. However, as I repeatedly have argued, we make a mistake if we think that capitalism equates exploitation. In fact, as the economy becomes more sophisticated, value creation requires ever higher level of human ingenuity and creativity. While people could get rich in the past from exploiting their workers, a mature capitalist economy rather depends on access to a highly educated work force, not to mention consumers who can buy what is produced. It is my belief that a social democratic system is uniquely equipped to provide this context for growth. I recognize that part of this belief comes from the fact that I grew up in one of the most successful, yet egalitarian, economies in the world, Sweden. I will not expand on this point any further right now but I strongly believe that many critics of capitalism (and many capitalists as well) fail to see its full long-term implications. In any case, I think few would deny that our global future to a large extent is dependent on what happens with the capitalistic system and what direction of change it will undergo in the decades to come.

Ethical responsibility and climate change

2011-02-21T23:01:00.007+09:00

Today at work we were talking about ethical responsibility and climate change. A colleague suggested that the difference between China and the US could be likened to that between a murderer and someone guilty only of manslaughter. His argument was that when America began its industrial development, no one knew about the risks of climate change whereas China began its industrial rise at a time when these risks were already well understood. Recognizing that climate change will, in effect, kill people in the future, my colleague suggested that China was guilty of nothing less than deliberately murdering future people and that only the dishonest practice of “time-discounting” could obscure this fact.

Listening to this argument, I realized that it brings out many of the reasons why I disagree with mainstream views on the ethics of climate change.

Firstly, we have to consider that China has witnessed an unprecedented decline in poverty over the last three decades. The poverty rate has fallen from 85 percent in 1981 to 10 percent today and even if rural poverty remains dire in many places, mass starvation has been averted and countless present lives have been saved. It is clear that fossil fuels, especially inexpensive coal power, have been instrumental in making this rapid export-oriented economic growth possible.

Secondly, when looking at the number of people that are at risk of dying in the future as a result of climate change, we have to compare that number to what the consequences would be if the world were to adopt the kind of socio-economic policies that my colleague and other neo-Malthusians tend to advocate, such as a dramatic reduction in economic activity. The number of people that would be affected if some countries were to fall into spiralling deflation while others (the US comes to mind) would strenuously hold on to their current way of life, especially by the use of military force. In fact, we cannot even begin to imagine how the system of global capitalism, and all the billions of individual aspirations that are tied to it, could be dismantled without risking serious international mayhem and ecological destruction as people would return to self-sufficiency.

Thirdly, and most importantly, we have to look at the long-term implications of current growth patterns. If China succeeds in lifting all of its 1.3 billion people away from poverty and into the global middle class, we would have hundreds of millions of talented people who could contribute to the world with their creativity and productive labour. Instead of only looking at the consumption-side of the economic equation, we should ask what role these people could play in securing the long-term survival of humanity through the development of new energy sources, more advanced recycling technologies and, ultimately, space colonization. If we truly are not to discount the future, then we cannot ignore the simple fact that if humanity were to climb to the stars, millions of years of civilization would lie ahead of us and tens of billions of humans would be able to enjoy the precious gift of consciousness.

Considering all of this, I believe that we have a moral duty to do what we can to mitigate climate change, be it through demand-side reductions or supply-side innovation (see previous post). However, we would indeed be guilty of wilfully murdering future people if we chose to ignore the bigger historical picture of human evolution. As much as we need change, we need change in an intelligent direction, a direction that can inspire rather than frighten people and a direction that has a reasonable chance of securing democratic support not only in individual countries but also in a pluralistic world.

Technology-led climate policy

2011-02-17T23:21:00.004+09:00

Today we talked about “Energy and climate change” in the sustainability class. In preparation for this, I stumbled upon a piece by two economists at McGill University entitled “An Analysis of a Technology-led Climate Policy as a Response to Climate Change”. The paper explains why climate change mitigation poses a much more difficult challenge than some economists like Nicholas Stern want us to believe and why the current target-based approach to climate change mitigation is doomed to fail as it puts the “cart” (large cuts in emissions) before the “horse” (the technological means for making the cuts).

Unfortunately, as the authors correctly point out, the debate on climate change has been almost exclusively about the ends (how much emissions are to be cut) rather than the means (how emissions are to be cut). While there is clearly room for demand-side mitigation (such as more energy efficient building codes, more trains instead of cars and less meat consumption), the simple fact that we are now seven billion people on this planet makes it imperative that we develop new means of producing vast quantities of carbon emission-free energy.

Access to such emission-free energy would not only provide immediate mitigation by replacing coal and other fossil primary energy sources, it would also pave the way for electric cars, large-scale desalination of sea water and other crucial components in a more sustainable future world. The list of possible technologies includes things like nuclear fusion, deep geothermal energy and biological hydrogen production. The problem is that such technologies are still decades into the future and will require a lot of basic research and development. Many people will argue that we do not have the time to wait until such new energy sources can be developed. While they may be right that we should immediately do what we can in terms of demand-side mitigation, it is clear that without radical new supply-side technologies, climate stabilization will be nearly impossible:

“On the face of it, attempts to directly control global carbon emissions will not work, and certainly not in the absence of ready-to-deploy, scalable, and transferable carbon emission-free energy technologies. The technology requirements cannot be wished, priced, assumed or targeted away.”

Global imagination

2011-01-28T11:59:00.002+09:00

One month of teaching later and it is time travel again, this time to Indonesia, a country that for long has been high on my “list” of places to visit. Being the fourth most populous country in the world with an overwhelmingly Muslim population, Indonesia seems to offer a particularly important piece in the global puzzle.

Though inevitably shallow, I think travelling, at its best, can help with constructing that puzzle, to challenge our geographical prejudices and open our senses to the unexpected. While teaching one of my courses (the one on “Globalization and Justice”) I was again reminded of a wonderful piece entitled “Global ignorance” by Martin Lewis. Published in Geographical Review in 2000 (90:4 603-628) but still most timely, Lewis makes a strong case for why scholars of globalization must engage with local contexts and look beyond the tired “The West and the Rest”-imagery.

Public radio

2011-01-11T18:13:00.006+09:00

Tomorrow afternoon, it will be two weeks since we landed on Lantau Island and took the high-speed train into Hong Kong. My last visit to Hong Kong was in 2006, actually a few months before my first post here on the weblog. Despite the discontinuity, I was immediately reminded of how much I liked the city and its green surroundings.

Over the last two weeks we have settled in a bit. We have found a nice apartment on the 25th floor in Tai Po, gone for a hike through Plover Cove Country Park, been to IKEA and most of all worked like crazy. This spring I will teach three courses: one on environmental sustainability, one on globalization and justice and one on animal rights.

Meanwhile, my dissertation continues to generate responses. Yesterday afternoon, the Swedish public radio (P1) broadcasted an interview with me which I would like to share here on Rawls & Me.

Starfleet graduation

2010-12-23T05:25:00.007+09:00

Five days later and I am still in a kind of surreal mode. “Ineffable bliss” comes to mind but most of all I am feeling so very grateful for all the love I received last Friday, both from those who attend the defence in Lund and from those who for different reasons could not make it.

Before I sat down with my discussant Sverker I had made up a list:

Be calm

Don’t be ironical

Try to answer each question within its “domain”

Listen

Avoid talking about space and “StarTrek” in particular

Breath

Ask for clarifications

The point about StarTrek dawned on me some weeks before the viva when I talked to a person who was not at all familiar with the Trekkie universe. Though “StarTrek” for me stands for a wonderful melting pot of Greek humanism and Swedish social democracy extrapolated into the 24th century, I think it is important to recognize that for other people it may just be another strange action series with ridgy heads, pointy ears and lightsabres :-)

In light of such concerns I was extremely happy to be given these Starfleet-cufflinks from my fellow PhD students...

Spikning

2010-11-21T02:12:00.003+09:00

Fresh from the printer. With a dark purple globe. The book!

With my PhD submitted and everything on track for the defence, I am also happy to report that I have been given the Hong Kong post-doc! Flights now booked for 28 December, leaving me with about forty days left in Europe to tie up all loose threads and clear out what has been my Lund office for six years.

Boardrooms and slums

2010-11-04T03:06:00.005+09:00

A two hour domestic flight up to Delhi with Jet Airways. Time to recollect my impressions and try to make some sense of the last days. Much like I had expected, Mumbai immediately hit me with its dire poverty and newly found riches. Massive high rise buildings driven to the skies by speculation next to places like the Dhobi Ghat where the “washing caste” still washes linen by hand for hospitals and other institutions.

On the second day here we went to the offices of Tata Financial Services. Tata is one of the world’s largest industrial conglomerates, with businesses in virtually every field from tea to cars (including the already legendary Nano). At the office we visited, they were developing IT solutions for banks, airlines and other transaction intensive businesses like insurance companies. Outlining their globalization strategy, and describing how they have succeeded in moving upwards the value chain from simple labour intensive programming tasks to becoming fully fledged IT-partners, I could not help but smile. This is the world of the 21st century, a world in which an ever tighter web of interdependence is being woven, and a world in which war is increasingly becoming a historic anomaly. As companies continue to integrate their electronic infrastructure across borders, the enemy is no longer a distant Other but rather the ones that make sure that your check clears or that your flight is on time. Sitting in their fancy board room, eating Indian appetizers while listening to their plans to increase the number of women in their workforce, the happy “planetary future” that I often write about suddenly seemed to be within reach.

The following morning we were schedule to go for a “slum trip” to Dharavi. When I first saw this point in the programme back in Sweden I must admit that I felt repulsed. And when the people from “Really Tours” picked us up outside our hotel in safari-style SUVs I feared that my worst suspicions were to be confirmed. However, once we got out to Dharavi, things were very different from what I had expected. First, it is worth pointing out that it is not the poorest in India, but rather the lower middle class, that live in slums. Second, there are slums that are a lot worse than Dharavi. But still, I was surprised to see all the activity, the happy faces of children who greeted us with curiosity, and the strong drive towards modernization. Looking ten, twenty years into the future, one could well imagine a very different Dharavi. On a less positive note, much of the work carried out in Dharavi is related to the recycling of plastics, aluminium and other metals, work that is done without proper equipment and protection with possibly disastrous long-term effects. Also, it was possible to see that the caste system is still very much alive in Dharavi, with the “casteless” Dalits doing the worst tasks like emptying the public toilets or cleaning the alleys.

En route to Qatar

2010-10-31T01:45:00.002+09:00

Passing over Anatolia with 1244 miles left to go until Doha. Tomorrow morning I will be in Mumbai, at the other end of the rabbit hole, suddenly thrown into a world I know almost nothing about.

Together with 11 colleagues from my department I am out on a week-long study trip which will include visits to Tata Industries, Jawaharlal Nehru University and the Indian Social Action Forum. Last time when we attempted this trip in April, our plans were dashed by Eyjafjallajökull. Instead of a week in India we then got an evening at an Indian restaurant in Lund and some sad gin & tonics. This time around however, our luck seems to be better.

I hope to be able to publish at least something here on Rawls & Me during the trip. After two days in Mumbai we will continue up to New Delhi where we will witness the Diwali festivities. And already next Sunday I will be back in Sweden where finally the tables are starting to turn; not only is the dissertation off to printing, I have also been shortlisted and interviewed for a post-doc in Hong Kong starting 1 January 2011!

Green light

2010-10-28T17:12:00.003+09:00

At last, I am happy to report that my PhD thesis has received a “green light” from the internal examiners and that my public defence will go ahead as scheduled on the 17th of December, 1-3 p.m., here in Lund! You are all welcome, more information will follow!

Reification

2010-08-29T19:35:00.002+09:00

Yesterday night I scrolled through Picasa and the last years of travel photography. Among all the pictures I found a few short videos in which the silent world of the past suddenly came alive. I could not help thinking about how we actually construct our memories, how we filter and reify. How we chose to remember scolding when there was also playfulness. Or, for that part, romance when there was so much insecurity.

Looking at the summer that is drawing to its close, it feels like a very long time has passed since that Düsseldorf lounge afternoon. Slow lane alright. Maybe a few more excursions (including one wonderful drive in June through the English countryside) than originally planned. But all interlaced by unfulfilled hope. And now it is almost September and the X2000 commuter routine is about to start.

As tradition has it, I am soon off to Manchester for the Workshops in Political Theory where I, for the first time in my academic career, will be chairing a workshop on my own. The paper line-up looks promising as always, with everything from climate change ethics to the role of voluntariness in biodiversity conservation.

Bourbon plasticity

2010-07-16T02:12:00.004+09:00

Had this been in America, it would have been a summer of triple bypass frappuccinos. But now it was Rügen and all I had was this glass of discounted bourbon filtering the white Wilhelminian Bäder architecture.

Apparently, not even five months were enough to prepare for the sixty degrees in temperature difference. Exhausted by the heat, my thoughts roamed. Suddenly it was summer in East Anglia and I am about to turn 25. Every day the newspapers are filled with stories about the prolonged heat wave. I see myself bicycling on the left, buying chocolate cookies for evening talks with my friend-to-be Ally and, everywhere, there are these seemingly life-altering decisions.

Maybe the bourbon helped smoothing the edges, but looking back, I felt very grateful for what has been since. And I felt much less anxiety about deciding how I want my life to unfold from here on.

Grimeton

2010-06-14T20:41:00.003+09:00

Nearly a decade ago I was persuaded to go on an organized bus trip to Paris. On the way to the ferry in Varberg I remember passing by six imposing pylon antennas known as “Grimeton”. Built in the early twenties, the Grimeton transmitter was used for transatlantic radio telegraphy and came to play a key role during the Second World War when all cable communications with the US were cut off.

The six antennas, each measuring 127 metres, were aligned so that its ultra long waves (17 km) could pass south of Norway yet make it out across Skagerrak and the North Atlantic. Far on the other side, at Rocky Point on Long Island, there was a similar station receiving and transmitting back.

Back then on the bus trip I had not been to either Long Island or the US but, much like Amerikahuset here in Gothenburg, Grimeton came to spark my imagination at the time. And yesterday, when driving home from Kalmar I decided to pay Grimeton a visit. Unfortunately, the exhibition had already closed for the day but just walking through this World Heritage site triggered a profound sense of escapism or “Fernweh” as the Germans would say.

Slow lane

2010-05-09T23:27:00.007+09:00

I am not a frequent reader of FT but during the weekend, their “Life & Arts” section sometimes offers rather good reading, this time about sex in Shakespeare’s writing, glasnost art and then the concluding two columns called “Slow lane” and “The Fast Lane” respectively. In the latter, the Monocle editor-in-chief Tyler Brûlé writes about the shallow world of international travel, one that I can easily identify with as I down another mouthful of crisp silvaner in the Senator lounge here in Düsseldorf :-)

However, looking towards the summer, I hope there will be more slow life than fast lane. Unusually enough I do not have any bold travel plans but rather look forward to bicycle rides, archipelago excursions around Gothenburg and academic work. With my viva rescheduled for October I plan to make some revisions to the manuscript but will also take the train up to Oslo for a week-long summer school on environmental security. Another high priority is to finally submit the revised version of my article “Individual guilt or collective progressive action?” to Environmental Politics.

Meanwhile, I am not sure really what to make of Rawls & Me. It feels like I will take a little break after the latest flood of postings.

At the Wembley Hilton

2010-05-09T07:19:00.002+09:00

Bar writing in my Moleskine. After a long day of academic excellence I feel like moving into some less formal territory. Every time I do this on Rawls & Me, I get uncertain about what language actually can express.

It must have been in Kenmare on the West coast of Ireland, my first real encounter with incommensurability, the idea that language simply cannot bridge our metaphysical divides. It is like there are those fundamental ontological building blocks and that we simply do not share them. As a Christian, I can maybe accept a fractured epistemology, but not that the underlying experience of reality could be so different between different people. Especially with those you love.

Sitting here now, much later, I still have this feeling that it was not so much the actual words, because they can always be chosen with greater care, but rather that no matter what I would have said back there, communication would have been impossible. Accepting that conclusion opens up a rift that is difficult to close. For if it is so then people deeply in love can not only be separated by unfortunate circumstances or egoism but also by metaphysics.

Some thoughts on basic income

2010-05-09T03:42:00.006+09:00

Beside the election, the other reason I am in Britain right now is for the inaugural Brian Barry memorial symposium. Organized by Chandran Kukathas at the London School of Economics and featuring an impressive list of distinguished scholars, it is a two day event honouring a political theorist who was not only a great source of theoretical inspiration for me but also someone who shared many of my normative beliefs.

Today, I have had the privilege of listening to, among others, Philippe Van Parijs and Simon Caney. The first reminded me of a paper I long have wanted to write in order to explain why I am critical of the idea of an unconditional basic income.

While I can imagine some future state of post-scarcity and universal affluence in which we could completely decouple productive work and monetary remuneration (think Star Trek), it seems to me that for the present there is an urgent need for all of us to contribute productively to the world. With billions of people starving and formidable problems of sustainability ahead of us, this hardly seem like the right time for any of us to retire into being solely consumers, be it to play computer games or to become Malibu surfers (as the famous example goes).

What I am afraid of is that an unconditional basic income would give people, who are already alienated from society, an exit route that would further undermine the idea of society as a collective and collaborative project. While the present capitalistic system is obviously imperfect and we can easily think of jobs that are destructive rather than productive (say, marketing cigarettes), that rather calls upon us to use democratic means to better orient society towards the kind of work needed. In that process, money remains one of the most effective motivational tools in our arsenal. While I am a great defender of having a generous welfare system with extensive unemployment benefits, I think it is crucial that such benefits are seen as a temporary rather than a permanent form of income.

Politics

2010-05-08T20:20:00.001+09:00

After a late evening at Nuffield College in Oxford, we all seemed to agree that the outcome was the best we could have hoped for. After all, the Tories did not get an outright majority and, looking at their actual policies, a Lib-Lab coalition would make the most sense. Unlike the free market German Free Democrats (FDP), the Liberal Democrats are in many ways more of European-style social democrats (see below). But such an analysis fails to take into account a number of things. First, Nick Glegg has promised to first seek a coalition with the largest party, second, what the lib-dems most of all want is electoral reform and third, with this in mind, if Brown is seen as desperately clinging to power, a future referendum on whether or not to switch to a proportional electoral system may in effect become a referendum on the coalition instead.

In any case, I must admit that as a foreigner I know too little to really speculate. Meanwhile, all hell seems to have broken out on the world markets. In the best of worlds, judicious politicians would use the current economic crisis to complete the European monetary union with a strong fiscal and political union. In reality, Merkel in particular has shown an exemplary lack of leadership and a profound inability to communicate to her voters how dependent the European countries already are on each other. With idealism already in short supply throughout the continent, and leading intellectuals retreating into being “critical” rather than recognizing how fragile the liberal project really is, we seem to be in for a rough ride.

Another election

2010-05-06T17:29:00.004+09:00

In Frankfurt, waiting for flight LH 4728 which will take me right into the closing moments of the British general election. Tonight I plan to be in Oxford with some political theorists, watching what I am afraid will be a pretty miserable affair. Though I of course hope that Brown will make some surprise gains, it makes me sad that people are still buying into “compassionate conservatism” (for a bit of reality check on what it actually means, I recommend this piece by Johann Hari in The Independent). As for the liberal democrats and Nick Glegg they may have some very good policy ideas such as abolishing tuition fees for universities, rising the taxes on capital-gains and not spending £20+ billion to maintain Britain’s nuclear deterrent but they will in any case remain the junior partner in a future government.

Unlike the Swedish social democrats, Labour does not have a track record of being fiscal responsible and it is uncertain if they, or anyone for that matter, will be able to make the very harsh cuts that will be necessary to come to terms with the £175 billion deficit, not to mention the trillion pounds or so in debt that Britain has accumulated. Much like Sweden in the nineties, these will be hard times and a challenge to all progressive ambitions. One can only hope that they will have the courage to let the majority of the burden fall on the rich.

A hopeful future

2010-05-06T00:02:00.004+09:00

Yesterday as I was walking home from the library, I stumbled upon an election rally with all the leaders of the Swedish centre-right coalition. Surrounded by orange balloons and cheerful supporters they were hammering in their message about how fiscal responsible they have been over the last four years, about the need to continue rewarding work rather than benefits, and, of course, what devastating effects another €0.05 per litre of gasoline taxation (as suggested by the red-green opposition) would have on the economy...

Looking at them standing there at the podium I was reminded of a blog post I wrote last year called “King Théoden and the fate of Swedish social democracy”. I cannot say that much has changed since then. Though the good guys are leading in the polls by a 5-10 percent margin they still lack a theoretical analysis of their own, an ability to connect the dots and to challenge head-on the misanthropic views of the right.

In order to contest everything from seemingly innocent reforms (such as the school voucher system undermining social cohesion) to the perverse idea that we need inequality to have economic growth, progressives have to trust their own history and use an informed historical analysis to show that many of the arguments employed by the right today were used already a hundred years ago (think Hirschman). But looking forward, progressives also have to project their own vision of the future, to take up the great themes of the present, like the fundamental choice between social trust and surveillance, and show how their future will simply be more hopeful.

Svenska Amerika Linien

2010-05-02T22:21:00.005+09:00

Back in Gothenburg with blue skies and a photo excursion on my own. I should be honest and say upfront that my relationship with Gothenburg has never been easy. The city is, for the most part, brutally ugly with few green spaces. The Preemraff diesel refinery tends to fill the morning mist with fumes more akin to life on an oil platform. And the ocean is still a few kilometres to the west, meaning there is no unbroken horizon for the sun to sink into.

Yet, circumstances have meant that I have been coming back now and then ever since that first summer job when I was 19. More recently, Gothenburg has been my home since I returned from Melbourne last winter. Obviously, there are good things with any city and I have learned to appreciate the small islands: the outdoor patio of the Da Matteo café on Vallgatan, the Saturday ferry trips across the harbour (the ferries are an integrated part of the public transport system!) and then of course the ethereal memories of the past. For more than half a century, Svenska Amerika Linien (S.A.L.) operated an ocean liner service from Gothenburg to New York and it is a heritage that always has sparked my imagination. Today, one can still see some remnants, such as “Amerikahuset” and the actual terminal building which is now used for visiting cruise ships.

Warsaw

2010-04-26T07:07:00.001+09:00

Warsaw both came and went with its short preview of the summer. Flying back over the island of Bornholm my mind scrolled through the cobblestones streets, the ostalgic Pewex club interiors and the quick airport bus good-byes.

There was a time, before Rawls & Me, when I used to go to Warsaw on a fairly regular basis to see my friend who was then working at the English-speaking section of the Polish state radio. He has since moved on to other jobs closer to home and I reckon that it must have been four years since my last visit to the Polish capital. Coming back now in the aftermath of the Katyń disaster, the streets were still covered with wax from all the candle lights and, in the corners, there were black posters commemorating the dead. As a foreigner it is difficult to comprehend the scale of the catastrophe, that almost the entire political and military elite was wiped out that morning. I remember when Olof Palme, the prime minister of Sweden at the time, was shot in February 1986 and how the whole country came to a standstill. Though an assassination clearly is different from a plane crash, the sense of national trauma reminded me very much of when I, as a seven year old, was watching the news after Palme had been murdered.

Post Poznań

2010-04-24T23:01:00.001+09:00

I follow the train tracks further east. In two hours I will be in Warsaw. Not much of a consolation price for the cancelled India trip but still enough to reconnect me with the outbound journey.

Mesmerizing German anthropology, a short glimpse of how everything could have been very different before returning to the ubershallow world of Monocle. In this issue, there is a photo suite from Tangier with some hipster guy assertively reading a guide book on “The U.S. and British Virgin Islands” in a café. I do not want travels to be like that. I want them to be about the indefinite, about that mix of linguistic uncertainty and playfulness, about actually seeking out the unknown.

Yet, at the same time I am great proponent of the “global living room” as a generative metaphor for the future, of slowly “domesticating” the international, of daring to dream of a day when unbounded physical mobility has become a reality for everyone on this planet and not only for a privileged few.

//

As for the world of research, I am afraid that the Wallenberg post-doc scholarships for Stanford on global sustainability issues went to two chemists and one biologist. This does not mean that I will give up on all plans for California, I still have a good contact there and I will try to put together a more traditional post-doc application towards the fall.

Probabilities

2010-04-19T02:14:00.011+09:00

Saturday morning I was scheduled to fly out to New Delhi through Vienna with Austrian Airlines. As thousands of others over the last days, I have seen my travel plans dashed by the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano on Iceland.

As one of the others in our group sarcastically noted on Facebook, what are the odds?

Low one is tempted to think. Yet, considering how seismic active many parts of the planet are, it rather seems as if we have been exceptionally lucky in the past. Civil aviation is a relatively new phenomenon and though there are historic examples (such as the two weeks of airspace closure following the 1980 Mount St Helens eruption in Washington), the scale of events this time is obviously unprecedented. But with more than 60 000 flight movements on any given day worldwide we should perhaps not be that surprised that we eventually ran into something like this.

Thinking further about it, I am reminded of an interesting chapter by Milan Ćirković on observation selection effects in a recent book on global catastrophic risks. The basic idea is straightforward enough: past experience may not be the best guide when it comes to estimating the frequency of really big catastrophes (such as major asteroid impacts or bursts of supernova gamma rays) simply because we would not be here doing the estimation if such catastrophes had happened in the past...

The Western

2010-04-05T04:39:00.005+09:00

Climbing up to 34 000 feet over the Rockies, I am already missing California. It has been one densely packed week with the annual convention of the Western Political Science Association, breathtaking coastal drives along Hwy 1 and a campus tour to Stanford University (unfortunately, despite their earlier promises, I am still in limbo with regard to the Wallenberg post doc scholarship).

This year, the “Western” as it is colloquially known, offered a number of interesting panels on everything from eco-anarchism to the Obama presidency. My own panel, on the “communities of the future” succeeded in putting the spotlight precisely on the differences between my work and more mainstream accounts of environmental politics, sparking a lively discussion on the prospects of global sustainability.

Talking about which, the Star Trek nerd in me was particularly happy to take a walk along the south tip of Sausalito (the fictional location of “Starfleet academy”) and also, in the same vein, experience the sublime silence of the redwoods in Muir Woods where, in May 1945, the UN charter signatories-to-be gathered to honour the memory of FDR.

In these times of tea party activists and voters with attention spans more like 12 year olds with ADHD, our idealism is again put to test. It may seem utterly unlikely that we will ever grow up to decide our own history and, with it, our planetary future. It may seem as if the current constellation of chauvinistic nationalists, technophobic primitivists and overly pragmatic politicians will each in their own way continue to erode our cosmopolitan dreams. Yet, we shall not forget how much darker the horizon seemed only five years ago. With this in mind I hope I am forgiven for once again quoting this remarkable passage from Obama’s inaugural address of last January:

”We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth; and because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall some day pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself.”

Caledonia

2010-03-07T21:33:00.004+09:00

As announced in the previous post, this weekend has for long been set aside for a weekend trip with my friend Ally. Despite that I have been living in the UK for months at the time and been to England more often than I can remember, this was actually my first visit to the North.

Looking back on the last days in and about the magnificent city of Edinburgh I must say that I am stunned! Wow! What a city, and yes, I can really see why Ally would like to move here. Yesterday we picked up a rental car and drove out to Tantallon Castle for a great walk on the cliffs with all the seabirds circling below. After the unending fimbulvinter in Sweden, all this and the green fields were certainly a solace.

And now I am back at the airport where it is time for the dissertation finale. In a week the final version is due for the "internal examiners" (grönläsning).

Whiteout

2010-02-03T17:40:00.003+09:00

Overnight, another 20 centimetres of snow fell on the deep frozen ground. Nonetheless, the tram made it through the ever taller snow banks and delivered me on time for the first X2000 service down to Lund. Once aboard I got myself a warm complimentary latte and the well-needed time to finish the last remaining Powerpoint slides for my teaching. As often this time of the year, everything has been rather insane work wise with 8-23 days being the norm. Looking ahead I am afraid this will remain the case all the way up to 15 March when the revised version of the dissertation is due. The sole exception to this routine will be 4-7 March when I intend to travel to Scotland with my dear friend Ally. Further into the spring things also look much brighter with both California and India (!) already booked and ticketed. But for now, it is just to hang in there.

Northern Comfort

2010-01-13T21:41:00.006+09:00

Some days in between. Time to unpack, time to finally run those washing machines of summer clothes and bring down the empty suitcases to the basement. While the memory is still alive, I decide to order Wilfred Thesiger’s “Arabian Sands” from 1957.

And then, like a Hobbit, I feel like a second breakfast. Luckily, I am planning on going to the gym tonight.

Helsingborg

2010-01-10T02:35:00.001+09:00

Through the train window I look out over the frozen beach promenade. Moments later the sea disappears and the train continues its familiar climb into Pålsjö skog. For long this was the epicentre of my dreams, a site of permanence and solace. In its steep beech forests, much of what once mattered has passed.

All which would have been sufficient if my life was a novel. But it is not and then it would be simply tragic to try to reduce it into one. Instead, it should be painfully clear that the narration is open-ended and that we alone are responsible for keep filling the pages.

Skyscrapers and abras

2010-01-06T06:17:00.002+09:00

One last night on the shores of the Gulf before it is time to return to the cold Northern winter. Yesterday evening we could see the fireworks at the opening ceremony of Burj Khalifa (or “Burj Dubai” as the 828 meter supertall skyscraper was known during its construction phase) and also make a premier trip on the new driverless, fully automated metro.

Again it is not difficult to spot that other and much darker side of Dubai. Yet, crossing the Creek at night in a small wooden abra together with 20 tired Pakistani guest workers I start to think that the real difference is not the exploitation as such but rather the missing layers of physical separation. Unlike back in Sweden, when one buys those super cheap H&M clothes, I am here suddenly face to face with the global underclass of producers. And, talking to the taxi driver from Gilgit up in the borderlands with Tajikistan, I realize that, no matter how unsustainable it may be in many regards, the livelihood of so many people depends on the continuation of this insane dream.

//

Before departing from this world of palm fronds-shaped islands, I should also say something about the second excursion we made from Dubai. This time we drove north into the Musandam Peninsula. Belonging to the Sultanate of Oman, the Musandam Governorate is a tiny exclave of 25 000 people which juts into the Strait of Hormuz, leaving only 60 km of water between its shores and Iran. Unlike the sands of Dubai, Musandam offered a dramatic fjord landscape and a Batumi-styled town called Khasab, complete with cigarette smugglers, navy patrol boats and souvenir shops selling walking sticks with axe-tops...

Al-Ain

2009-12-30T16:27:00.002+09:00

Positioned on the edge of the Rub’al-Khali (or the “Empty Quarter” as it is simply known in English) this sleepy border town felt like a good first introduction to the Emirates. Built around a date oasis, Al-Ain seems to offer a snapshot of contemporary life in the UAE; American-sized malls, guzzling sport utility vehicles and sparkling colonial resorts, all interlaced with images of a fading traditional world. And just below the surface, a formidable army of guest workers manning the cashiers at CarreFour or toiling to upgrade the already excellent road system.

But as soon as one leaves the man-made world and heads south, up the 1400 meter high Jebel Hafeet mountain, one somehow gets a glimpse of the back story of this rapid transformation. Looking out over the endless desert, the conventional white “dish dasha” robe makes immediate sense under the blazing sun, the walled fortifications become as much a protection from the sand as from people, and then of course the only possible passage provided by the camels (which today, despite their natural inclinations are used everywhere for camel racing, recently even with light humanoid robots as their jockeys...).

Egypt

2009-12-29T02:20:00.008+09:00

With a similar sense of unworldly realism as when crossing the equator, I follow the white miniature airplane across the LCD-screen as it come in for landing over the Nile Delta. Though the trip has been planned for months, it is still another thing to actually be here, to drink the Soviet style coffee out of the EgyptAir cup or to listen to the pre-recorded prayer prior to take-off.
And then Cairo, a city of outsized proportions covered by a dense inversion layer of air pollution. Even for someone like me working on questions of long-term sustainability, it is easy to lose track of how fast these cities in the developing world are growing. Right now the population counter stands at 14.5 million, putting it on par with Kolkata or Shenzhen. It is also easy to forget that, as much as we in the rich world bear responsibility for past and present emissions, it will most likely be the policies, strategies and aspirations of countries like Egypt that ultimately will determine much of our future prospects for sustainability.

Before heading off into this to me virtually unknown world, I have some good news to report from closer to home. On 23 December, Serbia submitted its EU application in Stockholm and simultaneously the union finally lifted its visa requirement for Serbian citizens. As I have repeatedly argued in the past, this act of simple human decency was not only exceptionally overdue but also most urgent if we are to avoid dashing the last hopes of European normalization among the young in Serbia.

Liminal character

2009-12-14T00:17:00.005+09:00

Waiting for the flight back through Switzerland. An airfield small enough to not hide the liminal character of the journey in mall-like consumption and unending concourses. Instead, the windows here leave me with all the visual evidence that my 40 hours of intermission in Florence are coming to an end.

I transfer the pictures from my digital camera; there is a Buffyesque graveyard in the foreground and the rest is of course what you would expect. It was a nice walk up there to San Miniato al Monte. And being here was just as uncomplicated "good" as it can be sometimes when things are passing.

//

As for the EUI, it was actually much like I had expected. An incredible beautiful setting, talented people and a sense of college-like isolation. Tomorrow I will be in Gothenburg finishing my post-doc application and then on Wednesday it is time for my “slutseminarium”, the last major checkpoint before the viva in June.

With friends like these...

2009-12-04T21:17:00.005+09:00

Those who have followed Rawls & Me know that I have come to defend a techno-environmentalist position, arguing that the convergence of radical technological change and social innovation offers the most promising path to global sustainability.

Unlike many Greens I believe that a planetary future of high mobility, global prosperity and accelerated technological innovation is compatible with maximizing habitat preservation and natural flourishing. However, from the beginning, I have also argued that in order to facilitate such a future we need lifestyle changes in the present; that we need to reduce our environmental impact at the same time as we make unprecedented investments in scientific research and R&D.

Yesterday evening, Swedish public TV ran a documentary on the new long-term infrastructure bill for the period 2010-2021. Despite a total spending of 217 billion SEK ($30 billion) in new investments, the net reduction in emissions is expected to be a meagre 0.1 percent! With half of the investment going into new roads that number should perhaps not come as a surprise but still. This is 2009. We should know better.

With the transportation sector being the single largest source of direct emissions (not counting land conversion, forestry or, more ominously, imports), it is also a sector where politics can have a direct effect. Unlike more tricky issues such as dietary patterns, it is after all a political decision what infrastructure we want in our society. Either we can continue down the grey fossil road with more external shopping centres, more highways and sprawling suburbia or we can move in the opposite direction towards a bright-green future of dense urbanism, efficient collective transportation and a restoration of the public.

The documentary featured some leading centre-right politicians who insisted that new fuels will make the road investments all “green” (as if the production of cars did not require any material resources). Clearly unable to grasp the complexities and the global dimensions of the issue, they failed to see why a country like Sweden should “lead by example” nor why we need to provide a powerful example of what Green Growth can look like. But what was worse was to listen to their watered-down talk of “innovation”. In it, I could hear a foul echo of my own words, that we cannot hope for “radical” lifestyle changes nor should we put blame on individuals. True as this may be for the global, as I think that we cannot realistically ask billions of Chinese or Indians to not go to McDonalds or to forgo modern sanitation, we sure as hell can tell people that they should not drive excessively, and if they still do, they should at least offset their emissions. And sure as hell, high carbon taxation is the way of sending this message.

But, and this is what I missed in the debate afterwards with Gunnar Falkemark, we also need to project a positive vision of the future, to challenge the Neo-Malthusian logic that says that we are witnessing “peak everything” and that from now on, it is just downhill. We need to talk about space colonization, fusion energy and maglev trains! Or to take another of my favourite examples, there will be Argentinean steakhouses in the future; the only difference is that they will serve in-vitro meat!

Late in November

2009-11-25T20:09:00.006+09:00

Though it is actually “Moominvalley in November” in English, the original title has stayed with me as a long echo of the closing nineties; memories of an approaching winter in that student apartment on Nygatan, back when everything “was simpler and more confused”...

If the Swedish “Sent i november” does a better job in capturing the melancholy of the final days of autumn, so does walking down Köldgatan (sic!) to collect the laundry in the rain. This is as far away from international first class terminals and desert drives that one can get. This is “real”, at least some would insist.

The Manuscript is due in 7 days. After that, more updates will follow, including a planned escape from “reality” to the U.A.E. over New Years.

Riverside

2009-11-12T11:58:00.002+09:00

Finally back at LAX after another two days of post-doc scouting, this time in Southern California. Tomorrow morning I am off to Europe. Have a lot to write so I will leave you for now with a picture of the San Bernardino Mountains, as seen from my hotel room.

San Gregorio

2009-11-06T04:59:00.004+09:00

12 hours of uninterrupted sleep later and I am still reeling from the cold, maybe not that surprising after all the flying. But visiting the pharmacy in Half Moon Bay helped, and so did a walk on the nearby beach (picture). Afterwards I continued down to San Gregorio State Beach along road number 1, my own tiny interpretation of the classic road adventure. Now Menlo Park and work.

Canadian airspace

2009-11-05T09:10:00.001+09:00

It has been ten months since I last flew a long-haul and since then I had almost rubbed out the physical memory of how far 5358 miles really is, even if one now happens to be enjoying a courtesy upgrade to Economy Plus (the same as the regular Y-cabin but with a lot more legroom, indispensible for those of us who are 1.85+).

Anyway, all those inseparable hours in the air. I listen to Annika Norlin, songs about evaporating life trajectories, thoughts that have grown upon me ever since that hike along Côte d'Azur: that it gets more difficult from here on. Though life of course always has been absolute I am surprised by how tangible the process has been recently.

That it is really make it or break it.

In a shallow sense I am of course thinking about the dissertation, due for its "final seminar" at the department on 16 December. Or the course papers, the article for Environmental Politics or the Wallenberg post-doc application. But obviously there is more to it; the bitter-sweetness of actually growing up.

Seasonal cold

2009-11-03T20:02:00.006+09:00

Cold to the bones I left Gothenburg and the hammering rain. With the weather forecast talking about 20-25 degrees in the Bay Area I guess it is only fair that Murphy endowed me with a decent seasonal cold.

Having spent the last two three days in utter slow-motion, reading good books like this one in bed, I have at least recovered enough to be able to travel. So now I am checked in for the first segment tomorrow morning, SK CPH-LHR and from there on UA all the way to SFO.

Rheinisches Schwarzbrot

2009-10-27T08:42:00.003+09:00

Taking that ICE 654 from Berlin at 06.50 on a Saturday morning. But this time past Wuppertal and instead all the way to Bonn for a few days on the Rhine celebrating that dad is turning sixty. A special feeling to be back travelling together all of us in the family, it must have been four years ago or something since we did anything like this.

A slow upstream cruise with Köln-Düsseldorfer. A day with autumn leaf colours in Heidelberg and some good cheese on the train from Mainz. And now, already back in Gothenburg, trying to re-accelerate and finish all that has to be done before I can leave for California on 4 November. Fleeing moments but the next days will be somewhat more bearable now when we are equipped with half a suitcase of German bread...

The tale of poverty

2009-10-20T13:45:00.001+09:00

In my research I have occasionally made the controversial claim that part of the “resistance” against a just world order is due to the belief that it would mean a “levelling out” of our economic wealth. Closely associated to this view is the idea that we in the industrial countries are rich today because other people in the developing world are poor. In many ways these beliefs reflect a traditional pre-modern understanding of poverty that has been, if not before, thoroughly falsified by the experience of welfare capitalism. To illustrate why this is so we can begin with imagining a traditional agrarian economy. In such a setting it may be true that the rich benefit, at least in a material sense, from having a large class of destitute people who carry out all the hard work necessary to maintain society. But as soon as we move forward in history, the introduction of labour-saving devices and the expansion of the monetary economy mean that the rich have a lot more to gain from growing aggregated purchase power. Continuous productivity gains in fact begin to depend on that more and more people become skilled and also become able to buy all the goods that are produced. By the advent of industrialism, this feedback loop starts to accelerate dramatically as mass production sets in. At this point, capital owners realize that without consumers, the massive productive capacity of their industries is not of much use.

Yet today, in a sense of historical déjà-vu, we are again faced with the belief that it is necessary to keep people poor in order for the economy to function. The argument normally goes that without a constant flow of cheap natural resources and the underpaid work carried out in for instance textiles industries, the world economy would come to a halt. What is missing here is of course the other side of the coin, namely what additional purchase power that all these (previously) poor people would bring to the market. Since economics by definition is a plus-sum game, this would simply mean that all our boats would rise. Most likely, a lot of menial work would then be priced out of the market since no one would be willing to carry it out, yet this should come as a relief and not a threat since it would leave more room for automation.

Fantastic as this tale may sound, I believe that it is a pretty accurate description of what has already happened in many parts of the world. Yet, as you are all aware, the real caveat remains. If the world were to see, and data suggest that it is in fact seeing, such an unprecedented rise in living standards, it would put an enormous strain on the natural environment, possibly unleashing cataclysmic environmental changes. While maybe temporarily halted by the current deep economic recession, some analysts think that we have already missed the turn to a low-emissions path and that the lofty promise of mainstream sustainable development, that poverty reduction would automatically lead to less environmental degradation, has categorically turned sour.

To overcome this apparent trap, and again show why the world does not “need” poor people but rather transformative progressive politics, we urgently need breakthrough innovations capable of challenging the Neo-Malthusian logic prevalent in much contemporary Green thinking.

Shrill trumpets

2009-10-20T05:36:00.006+09:00

Returning home after a long tedious day of work at the library. Meanwhile the blogosphere is boiling with activity after the Swedish xenophobic party Sverigedemokraterna was given a prime media outlet in the form of an opinion piece in Aftonbladet. Traditionally, the leading media has chosen to ignore rather than to engage in debate with these ominous undercurrents in the Swedish society.

So, what do they say when they are given the chance? In a surprisingly academic yet shrill tone, their party leader Jimmie Åkesson trumpets that Sweden is faced with its greatest threat since the Second World War and that that threat is spelled ISLAM. While most of it can be dismissed out of hand (as the prospects of “sharia law” replacing Swedish law any time soon), Åkesson’s article offers an interesting panorama of his strange universe of ideas. Borrowing the terminology of the British neo-reactionary Roger Scruton and his notion of “oikophobia” (as in an unhealthy rejection of one’s own culture), Åkesson writes:

“One of the many inherent paradoxes of multiculturalism is that, despite its universalistic aspirations, it remains a mono-cultural phenomenon that only has found fertile ground in the post-modern oikophobic West. By basing its views solely on Western experiences it sees the West as having attained a higher stage of development that the rest of the world has yet to reach. This is also the reason why the power elites of today are so totally blind for the dangers of Islam and Islamization. [...] one seems to think that Muslims want nothing more than adjusting to a Western way of life [...] this is also why [the multiculturalists] think that they will be able to tame Islam in the same they way that they were able to tame the European Christianity and confine it to the private sphere” (my translation)

Though only an excerpt it is difficult to know where to begin disentangling this conceptual confusion. But to start somewhere it is interesting to note that Åkesson seems to view multiculturalism as having “universalistic aspirations”, something I think most multiculturalists would strongly object to. Also, most defenders of multiculturalism are not at all convinced that Islam or any other religion will cease existing as a public force, this is rather the reason why they argue the value of sustaining co-existing, yet distinct, cultures.

Beyond these easy first misconceptions it is not difficult to recognize that part of the confusion Åkesson experiences is indeed due to the ambiguous relationship to the modern project that multiculturalist thinkers tend to exhibit. By doubting the emancipatoric force of the Enlightenment, and with it the cosmopolitan vision of humanity one day being able to constitute itself as “humanity”, room is given to precisely these kinds of murky views. At the same time, too often has the “human” been nothing but the pseudo-universalism of the privileged few and over-generalizations of Western experiences. That observation however does not invalidate the prospects of, in the future, being able to raise the contingent rationality of a Eurocentric Enlightenment into a new, truly global Enlightenment. And if we believe in that bright future we have to ask ourselves how we can heal the wounds that give rise to people like Åkesson, how we can transcend the deep class divisions that now leave the difficult task of integrating immigrants to those already marginalized while the upper classes are busy exoticizing ethnic food and sending their kids off to “free schools”? Only be reaffirming our allegiance to the founding values of the Enlightenment can we counter these trends and start building a truly universal civilization of mankind.

The planetary dimension

2009-10-14T18:14:00.004+09:00

A cold Wednesday morning, I go running for 10 km in the nearby woods, at a distance I can hear the workers and their machines in the port. This is where Sweden ends to the West.

Also this morning I finished a first draft design for the new CCS-Politics website, as often it was quite liberating to do something hands-on instead of just thinking in the abstract. Of course, there is no permanent escape, today Dagens Nyheter had yet another piece by Christer Sanne on “Living without growth”.

What to say? Maybe that, as much as I agree with some of his basic ideas (for instance the need to shift consumption from the private to the public), the essay obviously fails to understand the global dynamics at stake. Despite its explicit concern with the “poor countries”, it does not at all ask what the responsibilities of the rich world are, except than maybe to simply stop consuming. Instead we should ask ourselves what we productively could contribute with that would fundamentally redefine the “sustainability equation”. Sensible as the language of “one-planet-living” may sound at first, it clearly points in the wrong direction: instead of returning to a romanticized idea of “nature” we should try to de-couple ourselves from that nature and seek to restore the integrity of the natural world. Instead of reducing working hours, we need to intensify our effort in the decades ahead. Maybe in a hundred years we will indeed be the Keynesian grandchildren that Sanne talks about in his book, but for now we certainly have our work cut out for us.

Lillsjödal

2009-10-04T10:05:00.000+09:00

Muddy fields, a cold lake that has already forgotten those unrelenting summer afternoons, and all these remarkable people who represent the highest and the lowest in us all.

Fragment (consider revising).

Even Word tells me that my thoughts are fragmentary. But it is not like if I could easily synthesize everything into one simple story; it is not like teaching, that I can just force linearity and attention. There is no authority to invoke; I am simply alone here and there is really no silence to hide in. Friends who have followed me since I was seven years old, what can I say that would tell them that something is substantially new and different? How could I possibly prevent falling into those familiar patterns?

Sauna-bathing in that lake despite my cold, Morrissey on the iTunes-playlist, and all these young professionals.

Yesterday in Lund, someone told me that it was a relief then she read my Facebook-update some weeks ago that I had found a pitcher with mojito and “was now crazy drunk”. That she saw it as a hole in the armour, a comfort that I was just as human as she. Undoubtedly an eye-opener, that people can at all think of me as being that hard and unyielding otherwise. Maybe it is a thing about getting older, that one has to revise one’s self-perception.

//

3 a.m.

Tomorrow I have to return the rental car before noon and then work.

And now, England

2009-09-30T06:48:00.001+09:00

From the last warm days in Berlin to a ghostly empty airport hotel in East Anglia.

Abrupt and (even for me) unexpected scene shifts as the international postdoc hunt continues. Yesterday I got into Oxford around 8 p.m., just in time to join the celebrations of a political theorist who had survived her PhD defence earlier in the day and who was now moving on to Graz, Austria. Sitting at a highly archetypal pub with some new and old friends; conversations that make you realize how much we are all in that same boat, that even in Oxford we are all fakin’ until we (hopefully) make it, all trying to come to terms with the unrealistic demands we for some reason like putting on ourselves.

And today, after visiting the Institute for the Future of Humanity at Oxford University, I must say that even if a job there remains a genuine long shot, just the experience of coming over here and talking to all this people has been immensely inspiring. Sorry for sounding this uber-enthusiastic, especially at this late hour, but whenever I do these kind of trips it becomes sort of a “reality check” for me and it certainly helps easing some of the dissertation angst.

Crellerstraße

2009-09-24T21:39:00.014+09:00

I follow Crellerstraße for a while, looking up at all the green-clad balconies while trying to avoid bumping into the few but hurried early-morning residents leaving their homes. It is not even seven yet; if one knows how to capitalize on it, the rather extreme arrival time of the night-train gives you a somewhat unique window to the real Berlin.

Half an hour later I have completed the circle and find myself back at Yorkstrasse, exiting a yellow-red train. I know the terrain here all too well for my own good, better to seek out a nice silent café and isolate myself with the dissertation.

After a few hours of writing and pancakes at "Toronto", I realise that this is inevitably set to become one of those famous last warm days that one should better spend outdoors. Therefore, and despite the heavy backpack with all its books, I head out for some election scouting. The German federal election on Sunday is only three days away. A lot of posters everywhere but it would be a stretch to call it “election fever”. If nothing completely out of ordinary happens, Angela will gain rather substantially on her result from four years ago, right now she and her CDU has a lead of about 9-13 percent on Frank-Walter Steinmeier and his SPD. More interesting I find the political slogans of The Left: “Out of Afghanistan”, “Tax the rich” and the all-encompassing “Damit es im Land gerecht zugeht”. And of course, I just have to mention this one with a gorilla joining the fight against gentrification:

Future talk

2009-09-23T23:58:00.004+09:00

Today I gave the final 2 x 2 hours of lectures this semester. With only four hours of seminars on Friday remaining, I am about to finish what has been three almost insane weeks.

In this final lecture I tried to shift the focus from the past and its ideas towards the future of humanity. It is always an invigorating task to listen to what risks and possibilities the students identify when they are allowed to think more freely about the future. In some ways their answers reconfirmed that strange dualism between personal and global futures that has been observed in a number of more scientific studies; strong optimism about their own life prospects and despairing pessimism about the world at large.

With the teaching drawing to a close, I will spend the next weeks working my way down that long list of to-dos, including the more joyful task of planning a post-doc scout trip to California in early November. But already tonight I am off to Berlin, if only for one day.

The rectification principle

2009-09-15T01:52:00.002+09:00

Next week will see me back teaching political philosophy for the first time in over four years.

Though it will only be two lectures, it is still exciting to reread the classics and try to come up with new smart ideas about how to teach them. For one thing, when covering Nozick, I will put some extra emphasize on his rectification principle since it, at least by some interpretations, has some rather interesting implications for his more general entitlement theory.

As we all know, Nozick argued that the demands of liberty effectively upset any “patterned” distribution. According to him, we have to accept prevailing social inequalities if these are the results of (a) free and voluntary exchanges and based on (b) just initial acquisition. Since we know that human history did not at all unfold along such lines we can reasonably assume that the people who are rich today are, at least partially, rich because of different transgressions in the past (think slavery, colonization or, why not, simply theft). Because of this problem of historical injustices, Nozick (on page 231 in “Anarchy, State and Utopia”) writes:

“For example, lacking much historical information, and assuming (1) that victims of injustices generally do worse than they otherwise would and (2) that those from the least well-off group in the society have the highest probabilities of being the (descendents of) victims of the most serious injustice who are owed compensation by those who benefited from the injustices […], then a rough role of thumb for rectifying injustices might seem to be the following: organize society so as to maximize the position of whatever group end up least well-off in the society.”

On this and some other pages (especially 152-153), Nozick finds himself sliding into acknowledging the need for a one time redistribution according to, yes, the Difference Principle. The problem is, how exactly do we carry out a “one time redistribution”? As many theorists of justice have pointed out, it is not like that we can take all our monetary resources and put them in one big heap that we then divide fairly. Even if carried out that way, it would only take a short while until many of the old injustices would reappear since the most valuable things in a late-capitalist economy tend to be not only immaterial but also very demanding to redistribute. Just think of the role that our upbringing plays in what opportunities we are able to identify and pursue. To avoid the spectre of paternalism in the process of redistribution, there are good reasons why we should opt for “slower” means of redistribution (such as making health insurances universal or higher education free) rather than “faster” means (such as re-education camps)... All in all, it seems that we indirectly have arrived at a justification of a rather extensive welfare state :-)

(which, of course, can be justified on other and more civilized non-Nozickian grounds)

Better

2009-09-04T17:01:00.001+09:00

Better, in every way. The room may still be dark but I traded Anna for The Hives. The presentation went well enough and afterwards we went for some excellent Thai food at Koh Samui on Princess Street.

Marcel brought up Rawls & Me, saying that the weblog does not give away that many juicy details about my private life. True, but unlike other blogs that seamlessly blend the personal and the political, that has never been the programmatic purpose. Yet, I still find a value in not deleting post, in accepting that there are misanthropic days as well as more hopeful ones.

Tomorrow the topic will be democratic deliberation, the role of listening in green political theory and the question of how to cope with intractable controversies. Sounds like useful stuff.

Rochdale Canal

2009-09-03T17:13:00.004+09:00

Overlooking the old industrial waterways of Manchester from the thirteen floor at the Hilton Deansgate. I had to switch off the lights to align my thoughts after this first day of intense academic activity.

As I down a glass of chlorinated water I realize how difficult it can be sometimes, that whatever dreams I had they are being tested by time and my own inadequacies. It is not like I no longer believe, or remain idealistic, it is rather that I recognize, time after time, how difficult communication really is, how easily we give in to ontological insecurity and how uncertain all our futures are.

//

“simply being was easy, just having you there”

There is a certain defeatism in saying that all relationships that are truly worthwhile must end. That “being” in itself ultimately will not suffice, that human beings are after all consumables, that with sufficient intellectual and emotional integrity comes the inability to love over time.

I do not say that it is like that, nor that we should not try our best to extend these aesthetic moments of “simply being”, only that I fear what we could perhaps call the Anna Ternheimification of my soul.

Something in me vehemently objects to this. That instead of reducing human existence into aesthetics, we should think of it as pointing towards the eternal, that it is only a lack of sensitivity that prevents us from experiencing the transcendental in the eyes of those we love. Yet, true as this may be sub species aeternis, we still have our everyday lives, we still go to IKEA, collect airmiles or walk dogs, or laugh at that somewhat inappropriate joke, we are humans, we are not only spirit but also flesh, and we cannot demand others to acknowledge our own concepts of transcendental purity. But if that is so, then we have to accept the flip side of the coin, namely that at the end of the day we might ourselves be considered expendable and, what would be even worse, simply “boring”.

Once more, with feeling!

2009-09-02T20:04:00.004+09:00

Back at that very same Nero in Manchester. Again it is one hour until the conference starts and again Marcel has written a thought-provoking paper, this time on “Zero-growth libertarianism: Population Growth and environmental sustainability”. Reminds me of a paper in the Journal of Applied Philosophy by Thomas Young who asks if overconsumption and procreation are morally equivalent, a question he, fully in line with the Neo-Malthusian paradigm, also answers in the affirmative.

Other highlights this time will be Andrew Dobson’s text on William Ophuls or “Political Theory for a Closed World”. Clearly, the stage is set :-)

”A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith”

2009-08-25T01:47:00.003+09:00

A good friend just pointed my attention to what must be one of the more unexpected literature reviews this summer, namely Carl Rudbeck's review of Rawls's bachelor thesis in Dagens Nyheter.

For those curious, I have a post about the same piece here.

I shot Paulo Coelho

2009-08-21T17:56:00.004+09:00

A few days ago I handed in the first chapters of the dissertation to my supervisor. Despite my best intentions I still have about ten pages to write until I can say that the manuscript is complete (for now). Once done, September looms on the horizon as one of the busiest months ever with fifty hours of teaching, one article to revise for Environmental Politics and several new conference abstracts to write.

In the midst of all this, I began reading a brief novel by Staffan Vahlquist. It is a sinister fantasy, the kind of exaggerated tale one can dream up after too many bottles of wine on a winter night, a furious assault on all the metaphysical mumbojumbo making up “New Age” and its prevailing hegemony of superficiality. All the things that one could say, yet seconds later realize that it will only lead to further estrangement and meta-ontological rupture rather than bridge-building and understanding. But sometimes, one just have to let it out :-)

Wordle

2009-07-21T22:40:00.010+09:00

Inspired by my friend and colleague Nils I decided to take the first chapters of my dissertation through Wordle. The result is pretty impressive and also sets the right tone for the coming weeks...

Next stop for Rawls & Me will (probably) be Manchester Metropolitian University in early September where I will attend their annual workshop in political theory. Bis dann!

The Old Vicarage

2009-07-15T05:14:00.012+09:00

“Here am I, sweating, sick and hot,
And there the shadowed water fresh
Lean up to embrace the naked flesh”

We took our thoughts with us and packed us into a cramped Luton-bound flight. Another summer of apparently seamless travel, before long the world had changed again and we were under that well-known apple tree in the Grantchester orchard, reading the poem above by Rupert Brooke.

This time, the feeling was even stronger, this must urgently become the common right of all humanity. While some temporary restrictions on personal mobility may be called for, it is imperative that we do not forget the vision of a world without borders. It is obviously unacceptable that “nationality”, a completely arbitrary category that people are simply given at birth, should dictate so much.

Yet, any such vision remains futile unless paired with an equal strong vision of a world of global prosperity, a world in which cultural curiosity has come to replace economic necessity and political oppression as the main motives behind migration. I believe that such a world can be achieved within our lifetime. Apparently, the policy wonks behind the newly proposed “Stockholm Programme“ do not. Instead they imagine a world of fear, militarized security and social instability in which borders have to be fearfully protected and a “digital tsunami” of surveillance has to be launched to “protect citizens’ rights”.

We must resist these waves of Newspeak and together work to protect the fundamental values that we again find to be in peril.

Riad Due

2009-07-14T06:55:00.008+09:00

From Essaouira we took the spiffy white bus back to Marrakech. Travelling in Morocco quickly brings back that long shadow of colonial divide, arriving behind the thick wooden door at Riad Due simply completes the picture. Outside, the myriads of ancient alleyways making up the market souks. Inside, futuristic shots worthy of any glossy interior design magazine. An environment so sparkling clean that you would barely find it in Europe; the magic touch of Milanese photographer and designer Giovanna Cinel which caught my attention years ago when reading the travel magazine RES.

An old riad turned into top notch suites and luxury rooms. The jasmine hand wash welcoming you, the generous breakfast and the smiling hospitality. All those small things that still leave me ambivalent. Are we contributing to something good and sustainable here? Or just reinforcing the public/private divide that the wooden door represents?

Alizee

2009-07-06T21:52:00.001+09:00

It is here in Essaouira that the Atlantic trade wind, the beautifully named Alizee, comes ashore. The wind follows your every step here, through the narrow alleyways, along the wave-lashed ramparts and into the night when only the silent shuffle of kaftans may occasionally blend into its infinite melodies.

This morning, I woke up to the sad news that my dear grandmother had passed away. Her name “Alice”, though cognate with the wind, was always something reserved exclusively for formalities. To me and my sister she was simply “grandmother” and as one she took very good care of us both.

She will be deeply missed.

Tangier

2009-07-04T01:42:00.002+09:00

More than a decade has passed since I last visited Andalucía and worked at that shipyard over in Puerto Royal. It must have been in the winter of 1998 and the cliff of Gibraltar was wrapped in the fleeing morning mist. Barely visible, the Rif Mountains signalled to me from across the strait, and I remember how the vastness of the world literally dawned on me.

//

After three days of coastal Spain and the burning inland heat of Granada, we left with the noon-ferry from Algeciras. Alta Velocidad, maybe a bit of cheating to take the catamaran but over the last days I have grown ever more excited about finally making landfall in this ash-white city known for its fading colonial ambience and Beat generation disillusionment. Having cleared the border formalities, we stepped outside the terminal and into what was instantaneously recognizable as a different world. An old seventies Mercedes took us up to the Neo-Moorish train station Tangier Ville where we made some enquiries for our onward journey with the legendary “Marrakech Express”. With the train due to leave first tomorrow evening, we are now preparing ourselves for our first night in Africa.

Intermission

2009-06-23T01:56:00.003+09:00

Back from the European waterways, ten days of intermission awaits in Gothenburg until it is time to leave for our second expedition this summer. Following a four hours flight down to Andalusia on 30 June, we will experience the red fortress of Alhambra before taking the boat to Morocco and the great desert.

It will be the first time that I travel to Africa and though I know that Morocco is quite different from the rest of the continent, it is still a door that I long have yearned to unbolt.

River tales

2009-06-13T00:10:00.004+09:00

After a glorious election day in which the Pirate Party made it into the European Parliament, capturing at least one and possibly (depending on whether the Lisbon treaty will get ratified or not) two seats, Lina and I left Gothenburg for Germany. A first instalment on this summer’s vacation plans, we are to follow not only the Rhine but also the Danube and the Elbe for about a week, seeing friends and taking some slow river cruises.

In Frankfurt we were given a tour of Campus Westend from 1929, a monumental building in the new Realism style which first served as headquarter for the chemical concern I.G. Farbenindustrie AG (responsible for the development of Zyklon B) and then, in one of history’s many staggering turns, as coordinating centre for the Marshall plan and the office of General Dwight D Eisenhower. Since about a decade ago, the complex has become the main site for the University of Frankfurt and thereby also the setting for the exchange year undertaken by my friend Marcus. With such a back-story, one cannot help to feel envious of his new philosophical hunting ground, especially in the light of its prominent faculty consisting of people like Axel Honneth.

//

Sitting down afterwards for asparagus and “Grüne Sauce”, I was reminded about how much all this has come to mean to me, at first maybe as an insecure identity marker when growing up in small-town Kalmar and being all too eager to differentiate myself, but then later as ever richer memories and unfinished dreams.

All Hands Hoay!

2009-06-07T04:38:00.006+09:00

Tomorrow Sweden and most other countries in the union will vote for the European Parliament. Unlike earlier elections, in which I always have felt certain about voting for the Greens, this year has made the choice a bit more difficult.

Founded in 2006, the Swedish Pirate Party has rapidly grown into a serious contender with polls indicating that it could win as much as eight percent of the vote, giving it up to two seats in the parliament. Unlike other similar parties that quickly have gained (and then lost) electoral fame, it is worth nothing that the Pirate Party has a member base of more than 48 000 people, making it the third largest party in Sweden in terms of membership.

I signed up about a year ago, mostly as a reaction to the raft of new repressive laws that were being enacted at the time, most notably the electronic surveillance legislation known as “Lex Orwell”. Since then, the downward spiral has continued with IPRED being written into national law (giving private companies police-like authority) and then the grossly unfair verdict against The Pirate Bay which suggests that simply linking to proprietary material is a criminal act, implying among other things that this very blog post is illegal since it now has a link to TPB.

Since I decided to join, I have found myself in a number of heated debates. Friends and colleagues have tried to persuade me about how culturally barren a world without copyright would be or about the imminent dangers posed by Islamic terrorism. Too often have these debates degraded into the classic frontlines and the all too narrow question of how certain artists or authors are to be paid. This is not, and has never been, a question of how to financially support the production of literature, music or movies. It is a question of to what extent we are prepared to violate basic democratic freedom in order to satisfy commercial interests. It is a question of what defines democracy itself, of what our ideals truly mean when they are tested. As I have argued before, I believe that for democracy to triumph and ultimately become universal, it is pivotal that it remains true to its values.

If Sweden cannot live without monitoring the internet, how can we expect China to? If we today believe that the government has the right to intercept any international phone call in the pursuit of a marginal terror threat, what would we not be ready to do if there was indeed a major terror incident? How come that our commitment to our values and our readiness to sacrifice is so completely off-the-scale compared to what for instance the civilian population of London showed during the Blitz? Why cannot anyone stand up and say that democracy does not come for free?

I hope YOU do. Tomorrow.

vienna:views

2009-05-28T01:15:00.003+09:00

Vienna always comes back. Today as my colleague Emma was leaving for a summer at the IIASA Institute in nearby Laxenburg and I had to brief her on all my favourites spots. Then later, on the train, I felt an urge to relax after the last crazy days of thesis administration, to pour up a small bottle of The Glenlivet and start reading vienna:views.

So insure
Against.

Against Vienna.

Capital of insurance
Insurance of capital
where people push problems
for profit,
to the resounding sound of…

STEMPEL = stamps
stamps of the ink-tank, think tanks of reassurance
stamps of authority
stamps of bureaucracy
stamps of ...?

Singular power

I dream of standing at Westbahnhof, maybe even leaving Vienna with the night train. Just to depart with the knowledge that I will return.

(outside in the real world, Obama nominates Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, hope she gets confirmed, meanwhile in Europe, it is soon time for the EP-elections, I intend to vote Pirate and will give some good reasons for doing so here on Rawls & Me before not too long)

Leaving on a Mayday

2009-05-19T01:58:00.002+09:00

The commuting has resumed with full strength; 1400 km this week alone and more to come before summer finally gets here by mid-June and releases me from the fixed tracks. This year, the summer promises excursions to inter alia Prague, Bingen, Marrakesh, and a utopia-workshop in Reading.

“Come fly with me, let's float down to Peru
In llama land there's a one-man band
And he'll toot his flute for you
Come fly with me, let's float down in the blue”

On the Mayday-album, I like this Sinatra cover by Anna as I keep struggling with the Manuscript.

In spite of my best intentions, I will not be able to write it all up this spring, not that it matters much with my final seminar scheduled first in December. But it would have felt so good to conclude this semester by being able to put that long text in the drawer. In any case, there are some good news as well, Environmental Politics liked the article I presented in New York in February and, pending certain modifications, it will hopefully be published by early next year.

In bed at the Radisson Edwardian Berkshire

2009-05-06T21:01:00.002+09:00

Barely had I landed in London before the flu hit me. Having been queuing for security at Frankfurt Airport together with a flight from Mexico City some days ago I naturally felt a bit concerned. But after a night of high fever, I could feel that the worst was behind me.

Nonetheless, while my colleagues have been busy touring the Houses of Parliament, Transport for London and Deutsche Bank, I have been stranded in the same luxury hotel room, trying to read an old IHT and making plans for the fall now when my STINT application has been, big surprise, rejected. To be honest, my confidence in that organization is rapidly approaching zero, not because they have rejected the different applications that I have sent in over the last four years (that is simply part of the game), but because they seem to use a very strange ranking mechanism (the more I publish in international peer-review journals, the less scientific competent I become) in combination with insinuations of the kind that I do not really care if I get the scholarship or not.

Yet, I should not forget that somewhat banal motto “don’t be bitter, be better”. Over the course of my doctoral studies I have indeed been very fortunate with external funding; I have been able to visit both Rutgers and the University of Melbourne, participated in dozens of international conferences and met so many inspiring people. And the upside of this year’s STINT-round is that my friend Marcus will be able to spend the fall in New York, hopefully I will have the chance of visiting him there.

Bonn

2009-05-01T02:20:00.004+09:00

Leaving the academic world behind, I have had reason to reflect about “place”.

As always, Germany speaks to me. I see all this: the light rain in the gardens, the knowledge that I have built a life around escapism, around the reconstructed journey, around small things that I cannot help to notice.

IHDP

2009-05-01T02:20:00.001+09:00

International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change. That is one impressive acronym. Organized by several different UN-related bodies, the 7th IHDP conference certainly has a laudable mission, to integrate social and human perspectives into our thinking about environmental problems.

After one day of intensive panel discussions, poster presentations and plenary sessions, I am both thrilled and scared. Scared about the amount of spin, the number of already overstretched buzzwords finding their way into ever new combinations such as “sustainable adaptation”. Thrilled about all the work that is going on out there, about the great number of people from all over the world coming together to talk about our common future. In my good moments I think that, post-structuralism and financial crises aside, we are still building that planetary civilization. In my bad moments, I fear that all the economic growth assumptions going into those climate models are about to turn sour, that from here on it is simply downhill.

Both exaggerations, I know. But between the lines I cannot help but wonder if the disintegrative forces are not stronger, all things considered? In the past, humanity has had the good fortune that many of our actions, even if driven by self-interest, have led to desirable collective outcomes (just think about the process of capital accumulation). However, as our environment continues to deteriorate, much of this will change. Instead of laissez-faire we will need a conscious understanding of social transformation, an idea of how to get from a troubled present to a democratically decided future. And that on a global level. In time.

I am not saying that it cannot be done. Only that it will require so much good will, idealism and simple patience with each other.

Scandinavian

2009-04-29T05:58:00.003+09:00

Landing in Germany after a short hop with the “Mad Dog”, the legendary MD-82 that has become a symbol of Scandinavian Airlines. Though well past its retirement age, it is a plane I love flying with. Like the rest of its near-defunct airline, it brings forth a strange sense of stubborn loyalty telling me that I will keep flying SAS with the faint hope that one day its managers will come to their senses.

Enough aviation. As previously announced I am here for the IHDP conference in Bonn where I will try to learn as much as possible in two days before heading back to Gothenburg just in time for the annual “Valborg”-festivities.

Czechpoint

2009-04-23T06:27:00.002+09:00

Trailing Stockholm and even tiny Norrköping, the time has come for Malmö to open its own Czech restaurant. Located at Lilla Torg in a pastel-coloured building that would be well suited for the squares of Malá Strana, the restaurant is cleverly named “Czechpoint” and apparently heavily sponsored by the Pilsner Urquell brewery.

Despite the “Kalte Platte” and the quintessentially Bohemian garden, the overall experience was a bit of a disappointment. Not only did I miss the proper pronunciation of “Pill-zz-ner OOR-kwell” but the food was both pricey and handed out in scant portions. That being said, I am happy to now have a bit of the Czech Republic within commuter train distance.

Laborare omnia vincit

2009-04-09T03:14:00.002+09:00

In a surprisingly generous gesture, the evening sky turned blue and the rain dried up. No longer confined to the university library, I took the tram home, went out for five kilometres of running, poured up a glass of Proviva juice, and then found myself back with the dissertation.

Ever since I first enrolled in the PhD programme I knew this time would eventually come. The strange mixture of definite closure, frustrating inability and paralyzing anxiety. But as the days get brighter I feel that I am slowly winning over the spell, falling back into that productive mood that my memory has come to forever associate with American college grounds.

As for the near future I am also looking forward to going to Bonn for an IHDP-conference in late April and a week later to London for an educational excursion with our Lund department. I will try my best to take Rawls & Me along for both.

Dramatisch und zugleich leicht und spielerisch

2009-03-21T08:22:00.004+09:00

With my mother turning sixty this weekend, I decided to head home to Kalmar for a few days. More than usual, it gave me a reason to reflect upon the passage of time.

While here, I had the chance to meet up with an old friend from school. It must have been twelve or thirteen years since I last saw her, and since then our lives have gone down very different paths. By now she has three kids, has settled down in a house and been in the same relationship for more than a decade. Beyond the courage, I realized how envious I felt of the continuity of memories such a life must offer. To me, that inner narration has all but broken down as my memories have become, if not inaccessible, so at least woefully compartmentalized.

Sometimes however the walls between the past, the present and the future collapse. Like tonight, when my mother and I celebrated her birthday with a classical piano concert by the young Hungarian Gergö Teleki in a small nearby town. Teleki truly mastered his art, playing mostly Franz Liszt and Béla Bartók, spinning my mind away not only to Szentendre but also to Brookline and Ehrenfeld.

Above the piano, on the wall, a large fresco painting. In its right corner, a house, one that with the help of the music talked directly to me. The dream of one day finding such a place, of (re-)establishing continuity and having a porch on which one can sit through summer nights, drinking a Krušovice or a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, knowing that it will last. I think I even like the fountain, especially if it occasionally will be covered in American snow.