Memes that Kill: Witch Burning and Other Extraordinary Popular Delusions

A modern interpretation of Anna Göldi, executed in 1782 for witchcraft in Glarus, Switzerland. She is said to have been the last witch killed in Europe, at least as the result of a formal trial. The story of the great witch hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries remains a mystery in many respects. What caused this folly to take hold of the minds of the Europeans? And what caused that folly to abate? It turns out that evil has a natural cycle of growth and decline. It is possible to accelerate the decline of a killer meme if good people get together in rejecting it.

In 1841, Charles MacKay published his "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of the Crowds." It was a milestone: the first study in the field that today we call memetics, a term coined by Richard Dawkins for how ideas ("memes") spread in the collective human consciousness. MacKay was perhaps the first to state publicly that the great witch hunts of the late 16th and early 17th centuries were a form of collective madness. Not even Voltaire (1694-1778) had touched on that subject, despite his criticism of all kinds of religious superstitions. 

As exterminations go, the war on witches was not the worst on record. In Europe, it caused about 50 thousand victims over a little more than a century. But it was so shockingly cruel in targeting mostly helpless women that it is remembered to this day as a form of collective madness. With us, the expression "witch hunt" is even proverbial. 

The extermination of the European witches generated plenty of studies in modern times, mostly concentrated on the causes of the phenomenon. Explanations are many but, in general, it is agreed that it was related to the stress generated by the Reformation and the associated wars. Apparently, torturing and killing women was a form of stress release. The human mind must have plenty of serious problems, evidently, but this much we know not just because of witch hunting.

In any case, it happened, and we should be happy that it didn't last more than it did. But this generates another question: what made the hunt cease? It is a fundamental point: if we could understand what makes people stop believing in killer memes, we might stop them earlier. 

But few of the studies examining the war on witches make a specific effort to understand why the hunting ceased. The general idea seems to be that when the conditions that caused the hunt disappeared, things returned to their normal state. Sometimes, it is also proposed that the enlightenment movement put an end to the killings. Lesson and Ross (1) proposed in 2018 that:

"The seventeenth century, however, was the time of the scientific revolution, whose effects may have eventually eroded popular belief in witchcraft, eroding popular demand for witchcraft prosecutions along with it until witch trials could finally be easily abandoned by religious producers. "

Not to disparage a study that's excellent in many respects, but this interpretation seems to me completely wrong. The death penalty for people found guilty of poisoning or harming others had the aspect of a rational response of society to a threat that, at the time, looked real and documented. During the 16th and 17th centuries, science had little to say about whether or not it was possible to poison people using herbal concoctions or other methods.

As Chuck Pezeshky says, "truth is the reliable and valid representation of information that allows shared coordination of action inside a social network." In some cases, this social representation coincides with the scientific views of the matter, but that is not the rule and it is not even common. 

Finding witches and killing them was not just a job for inquisitors. The book by Trevor-Roper "The European Witch-Craze" (1991) tells us how widespread was the belief, and how intensely it was believed that killing witches was a social duty for everyone, to be done for the good of everyone else. A leader who didn't engage in witch hunting was seen as a bad leader. In some regions, expressing doubts on the idea that killing witches was a good thing could be dangerous. 

If truth is a social concept, then we need to understand witch hunting in a social context, in the form of the entities that we call memes. What makes memes live and die? Charles MacKay gives us an interesting hint when he says, “Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.” As I said, MacKay was a great innovator and this sentence, in itself, is a correct statement of how memes propagate. They behave exactly like physical pathogens in an epidemic: you are infected by others but you recover by yourself. 

Indeed memetic infections can be described by the same equations used in epidemiology, as we showed in a 2018 paper together with my colleagues Perissi and Falsini. Epidemics are the result of internal feedbacks that, in turn, are the result of the networked structure of the system. This internal structure generates typical "bell shaped" cycles. Witchcraft trials are probably the first historical case of a memetic cycle for which we have quantitative data (from Leeson and Ross, 2018 (1)).

The model tells us that the diffusion of the memetic epidemic is a collective phenomenon due to people being infected by others. Conversely, the epidemic declines because people become "immune" to the meme. The concept of "herd immunity" holds not just for physical epidemics, but also for virtual ones. It is what makes society eventually resistant to these killer memes. So, the first step to fight one of these memes is to reject them individually.

There is an even more fundamental point about the decline of killer memes here, well expressed by Trevor-Roper:

Third rank intellectuals and officials started saying that the craze was unjust and irrational. And what they said was taken for granted. Then came the intelligentsia, showing that what it said for two centuries was wrong because of some minor detail in the interpretation of the scriptures. And that was the end of the process.

This statement marks a difference between physical and memetic epidemics. A physical epidemic doesn't care too much about human hierarchies: a king may die of the plague just like any commoner. But, in a social network, the propagation of memes is affected by the hierarchical structure: people tend to trust authorities more than other sources of information. Trevor-Roper hit a profound truth with his statement: witch hunting declined because ordinary people ("third rank intellectuals and officials") started realizing that the meme was evil and that they (or their wives, sisters, or mothers) risked being burned at the stake. And they stopped believing in the official truth as spoken by the leaders.

So, it seems that if we want to stop evil memes, we have to do that starting from the bottom. We can't put too much hope in laws, tribunals, treaties, and lofty principles: they are all under the elites' control and can be bent, transmogrified, or ignored. The leaders, typically, have an interest in maintaining alive memes that are profitable for them. But the memetic war is fought at all levels of the social network. People may be dazed for a while by the "Shock and Awe" treatment they receive from above, but in the long run, they understand. We cannot expect to be able to stop evil all of a sudden but an evil meme cannot last for long when good people get together to fight it. If history is a guide, evil is surprisingly fragile.

An meiner Wand hängt ein japanisches Holzwerk
Maske eines bösen Dämons, bemalt mit Goldlack.
Mitfühlend sehe ich
Die geschwollenen Stirnadern, andeutend
Wie anstrengend es ist, böse zu sein.

On my wall hangs a Japanese carving,
The mask of an evil demon, decorated with gold lacquer.
Sympathetically I observe
The swollen veins of the forehead, indicating
What a strain it is to be evil.

 Bertolt Brecht 

 

1. Peter T. Leeson, Jacob W. Russ The Economic Journal, Volume 128, Issue 613, 1 August 2018, Pages 2066–2105, https://www.peterleeson.com/witch_trials.pdf

Waiting for the end of the world - Sugar and the Information Paradox.

 

Amelia the Amoeba is the protagonist of a chapter of my book " Before the Collapse " (Springer 2019). She is a Naegleria Fowleri who has the rather nasty habit of devouring human brains but, apart from this, she kindly lent herself to be an example in the book of the mechanisms of growth of living creatures. In the following post, Alessandro Chiometti again uses the example of single-celled creatures for an interesting discussion on how our brains are destroyed, not by a brain-eating amoeba, but by an excess of available information. As a post, goes a little against the principles of modern "throwaway information", in the sense that rather than starting with trying to impress you with some flashy information, it gives you a little lesson in chemistry. But if you feel like working on it just a little, you'll see that it is a very interesting and thought-provoking post. It suggests that too much information is doing to us the same thing that too much sugar could do to Amelia: it kills our brains. And you'll learn some chemistry, too! (UB)

By Alessandro Chiometti 

We are used to call "sugar" a substance that is actually sucrose, one of the many existing "sugars" which are referred to in organic chemistry as carbohydrates. These compounds can be formed by a single molecule of any sugar (monosaccharides) or by several molecules (polysaccharides). Sucrose is a disaccharide formed by the union of the two monosaccharides, glucose and fructose.

Although these two molecules have the same brute formula (C6H12O6), they are very different: glucose forms a six-atom ring while fructose forms a five-atom one but, above all, it is glucose that is the primary source of energy for every living being.

The role of glucose in the various aerobic and anaerobic cycles is fundamental for the production of the molecule that carries energy in the cell (ATP) and therefore for any cellular engine that requires energy. All the nutrients we consume throughout our lives are transformed by the body into glucose or stored as precursors of this in various forms (e.g. glycogen), ready for use.

In short, it can be said that glucose, and therefore its various precursors present in nature, is what allows “life” as we know it, in the sense of mobility, movement, sport, physical and intellectual effort, growth. It is certainly no coincidence that when you want to cultivate a bacterial culture with a suitable growth medium, the sugar supply must always be guaranteed. Like us, bacteria and other microorganisms grow and multiply thanks to glucose and therefore to sugar, of course.

However, have you ever noticed that we can keep sucrose for decades at room temperature and nothing happens to it?

It does not go bad, molds do not grow and, if greedy children or ants do not get their hands on it, even after years we find it exactly where we left it. And we can consume it safely without fear that some bacteria have grown in it.

And this, I guarantee, will happen for any sugar solution in which the sugar percentage is greater than 70% (for example, honey).

This is because microorganisms are very sensitive to what we call "osmotic pressure," and for this reason when they are in contact with pure sugar or salt crystals, or being in a too concentrated solution of these, they simply die. Instantly.

The cell of a microorganism is held together by the cell membrane which is called a "semipermeable membrane." It is a barrier that, when surrounded by a liquid phase, lets the solvent in but not the solutes dissolved in it. In an aqueous solution, in practice, water would pass through this membrane but not the salt dissolved in it.

But what happens when a semipermeable membrane separates two solutions of different solute concentrations? In this case, the solvent (water in general) passes through it from the most diluted part to the most concentrated part (thanks to the strength of the osmotic pressure). The result is that the two concentrations will be equalized until they are identical.

If we are talking about a closed system like a cell it is obvious that just so much water can be contained in it. The result of a strong osmotic pressure may be that the cell will explode from inside or, vice versa, it will dry out into a ghost of itself in the desperate attempt to dilute the external concentration. That will happen to all living cells.

I know that this was a very long introduction but, it was necessary to attempt the risky speculative reasoning on what is happening in our society as regards the possibility of accessing information.

The more time passes, the more it seems evident to me that the enormous amount of knowledge that we have at our disposal has in no way increased the knowledge of people or their ability to draw conclusions. following these. Rather the opposite.

Apart from the tsunami of fake news and orchestrated disinformation, all of us today have access to an amount of data and information that was unthinkable until a few decades ago. We can access the NASA website to find out how the permafrost melting is going in real time, we can access the John Hopkins University to know every death and every contagion due to Covid on planet earth, we can see the measures taken by each country and understand who has guessed or not the management of the pandemic, we can access the sites of evolutionary biology and know the progress of the sixth mass extinction.

Yet, there is something that's going wrong. Functional illiteracy is skyrocketing. We do not know how to distinguish between an astronomy site and an astrology site. In front of a three-variable graph, we have the same attitude of the Kubrik's apes in front of the black monolith.

Many people find it increasingly difficult to complete the reading of an article that fits on a single A4 page. (By the way, are you still reading?)

And many of them, even if they read it,  remain convinced that the article proves them right even if it says the opposite of what they claimed.

Where's the problem? Where is the osmotic paradox that can justify this?

I am trying to find a correlation here (warning: speculation on reasoning already speculative per se ) by comparing the information paradox with the "sugar paradox." It seems to me that the more information comes into contact with our minds, the more Holbachian common sense comes out of our heads. It should be obvious that common sense is not learned in books. Once, we had enough of it to distinguish a charlatan from a scientist. Not anymore.

Now, let me be clear: I know very well that there has never been a golden age of information, and that there have always been profiteers of people's good faith (the “Ponzi scheme” was born in 1918, not the day before yesterday). Nevertheless, perhaps we have been suffering positivist optimism. We thought that more information was always a good thing, just like a bacterium may think that the more sugar around, the better. We really hoped that having the possibility of accessing so much information, people would have been if not better, at least more aware.

But not for me, as George Gershwin said (*).

Patience, it will be for the next species.

 

 

(*) In the original version, Chiometti referred to the Italian singer Brunori Sas

 

 

 

 

Cataclysms and the Megamachine: Is History a Cycle or a Progression?

This image by the Tuscan painter Piero della Francesca exudes such power that it may truly blow your mind. Apart from the mastery of the composition, the perfection of the details, the fascination of the human figures, a canvas in the hands of a grand master is not just an image: it is a message. In this case, all the figures are static, there is no one moving. Yet, the painting carries the message of a tremendous movement forward in time. It shows a great change occurring: something enormous, deep, incredible: the triumph of life over death. And those who sleep through it are missing the change without even suspecting that it is happening. Just like us, sleepwalkers in a changing world, where gigantic forces are awakening right now. 

"Cataclysms" (*) is a recent book by Laurent Testot (Univ. Chicago Press, 2020) that goes well together with "The End of the Megamachine" (Zero Books, 2020) by Fabian Scheidler of which I wrote in a previous post. 

Both books see human history using the approach that I call "metabolic." It means to take the long view and see humankind in terms of a living entity. Call it a "machine" (as Scheidler does), call it "Monkey" (as Testot does), call it a "complex system" (as it is fashionable, nowadays), or maybe a holobiont (as I tend to do). It is the same: humankind is a creature that moves, grows, stumbles onward, destroys things, builds new things, keeps growing, and, eventually, collapses. 

Bot "Cataclysms" and the "Megamachine" catch this multiform aspect of the great beast and both emphasize its destructive aspects. Both understand that the thing is moving. More than that, its trajectory is not uniform, it goes in bumps. It is a continuous sequence of growth and collapse, the latter usually faster than the former (what I call "The Seneca Effect"). 

So, what's happening? Is history going in cycles, or is it progressing in some ways? It is a question that has been asked and answered in various ways over centuries of historiography, at least from when Edward Gibbon (in 1776) started wondering why the mighty Roman Empire had disappeared. 

For the Christian eschatological view, there was no doubt that the Empire had served its purpose and it had to disappear to leave space for a new world which, in turn, was bound to disappear in the Final Judgement. For the thinkers of the 19th century, instead, a different kind of teleology was at work. It was an interpretation of Darwin's ideas that saw evolution as a movement toward higher and higher levels of perfection, with the white European man as the pinnacle of the trend. 

Later, these ideas started to look naive, and a catastrophistic streak of thought started to grow. The collapse of the Western Civilization was clearly seen for the first time in a telescope aimed at the future in 1972, in the study sponsored by the Club of Rome titled "The Limits to Growth." The study had gone full cycle, returning to the old eschatological view of the end of the world. It was a cataclysm. Unavoidable, unless the megamachine could do something that the megamachine could not do: to stop growing.

But the universe is complex and the best-laid computer models of mice and men gang aft agley. Over the history we knew, no collapse has ever been the final one. After every collapse, there has been a rebound. So, history is both a cycle and a progression. There is something on the other side of the unavoidable collapse we are facing nowadays. All collapses bring change: it may well be their purpose in the universe. Just as the Romans couldn't imagine what would come after that their empire was gone, for us it is impossible to imagine what will come after us. We can only perceive that something enormous is stirring. Now we see it through the glass of our models, darkly: but then we will see it face to face.

(*) I had started this post with the idea of writing a review of Testot's book, but as I kept writing, the text grew by itself and it became something else. But, about "Cataclysms," by all means it is a great book -- not just dealing with catastrophic events but giving you an organic view of history, full of concepts and ideas that you cannot find anywhere else. By all means, do read it! It will change the way you see the world.

The Future of the Oceans: The two Souls of the Club of Rome

 

I was very happy when I finally managed to find a copy of the old report to the Club of Rome, "The Future of the Oceans" by Elizabeth Mann Borgese. A book published in 1986, one of a long series of reports that the Club commissioned to various scientists and researchers. And the only one, so far, that dealt with marine resources. Not so easy to find: I finally managed to dig out a used copy from an obscure bookstore in Michigan. But, eventually, it arrived here.

Of course, my interest in that old book was generated by having written a report on marine resources myself, "The Empty Sea," together with my coworker Ilaria Perissi (you see her with our book in the photo.) So, how do these two books compare, at 35 years of distance from each other?

I must say that I was surprised. Our book can be defined as a little catastrophistic: just the title should tell you what I mean. The one by Elizabeth Mann Borgese, instead, is completely different in tone, approach, and contents: you could define it as cornucopian. The first part of the book is dedicated to describing the abundance of the resources that the oceans contain, the second and third part are dedicated to how the international community was going to develop a "common heritage economics," and about treaties, regulations, and laws needed to manage the exploitation of these riches for the good of all humankind. 

Leaving aside for a moment the question of who is right and who is wrong, you may be just as surprised as I was to discover that the Club of Rome could sponsor two books that took such a different approach on the same subject. Actually, though, it is not so surprising if you know something about the history of the Club. 

The origins of the Club of Rome are in themselves a fascinating subject. Today, everyone associates the Club to their 1972 report "The Limits to Growth." A book that was not so pessimistic as it is often described, but that you surely wouldn't call cornucopian. It was the first study in history that quantified the limits to natural resources at the planetary level. It arrived to the conclusion that the growth of the global economy would come to a halt and start declining at some moment during the first decades of the 21st century (BTW, we are there right now!). 

But how did the Club arrive at the idea of producing such a report? The story is nuanced and it has to do with the personality of Aurelio Peccei, the founder of the Club in 1968. Peccei was a person that you would define as "enlightened" in the sense that he was deeply concerned about the future of humankind. But in the 1960s, not only it was not known what the limits to the natural resources could be; it wasn't even clear that such a limit existed. 

So, as you can read in the books he authored, Peccei was far from being a "catastrophist," and he didn't see depletion as an important point in his vision of the world. His main concern was how to ensure that the world's resources were fairly distributed. The 1972 report was commissioned to a group of MIT researchers with the aim of quantifying the available resources in order to plan for their fair exploitation. Peccei, basically, wanted to know how large the cake was before starting to cut slices out of it. 

Peccei, just as other members of the Club, must have been surprised by the results that "The Limits to Growth" reported. Nevertheless, they understood their importance and adopted them as part of the Club's views. But the earlier idea, the one that saw distribution as more important than exploitation, didn't disappear and it remained part of the way of thinking of many members of the Club, including Peccei himself. And there is a logic in that: abundant resources, even if they existed, would be useless if they were not used for the benefit of everybody. And that is an even more pressing necessity if the results are, instead, scarce. 

Now you can understand the line of thought that led Elisabeth Mann Borgese to write the book "The Future of the Oceans" It was part of the more optimistic section of the way of thinking of the Club of Rome that never was a monolithic think tank (and it is good that it wasn't, and that it isn't). 

So, what made Mann Borgese so optimistic? And are her views still valid, today? Here, unfortunately (and perhaps unavoidably), most of the book didn't stand the test of time. Elisabeth Mann Borgese (1918 - 2002) is a very interesting and multifaceted personality: the daughter of novelist Thomas Mann, she was engaged in many fields: psychology, law, anthropology, and even writing science fiction. Among other things, she was the first female member of the Club of Rome and the only one for several years. But compared to the earlier "Limits to Growth" report, she had a very different approach  to the evaluation of the oceans' potential in producing food and minerals.

So, the first two chapters of "The Future of the Oceans" are, well, as a euphemism, I could say that they are a little outdated. The year before, in 1985, Elisabeth Mann Borgese had written another book titled "The Mines of Neptune," dedicated to mineral resources from the sea. I still have to read that book, but its conclusions are summarized in "The Future of Oceans"in the section titled "Ocean Mining." 

Here, Mann Borgese was clearly influenced by one of the periodic waves of technological optimism that sweep the memesphere about the possibility of extracting minerals from the sea. So optimistic that she even says that these minerals are "renewable" because they are continuously replaced by the volcanic activity at oceanic ridges. Alas, that's really too optimistic. 

I wrote about that subject in a paper that I published in 2010. Basically, it is easy to be led astray by the huge numbers associated to marine resources, but if you do an energy analysis, you see that the costs of extraction are outside the realm of practical possibilities. That's why people have been discussing about that for decades but, today, we are still extracting only those minerals that our ancestors extracted centuries ago, mainly sodium chloride, table salt. Minerals from the sea are like minerals from the Moon or from the asteroids: an incredible abundance that always remains decades in the future.

Something similar in terms of excessive optimism can be said about the chapter dedicated to aquaculture, but here Mann Borgese did identify the remarkable growth potential of a technology that has been, indeed, growing at a bewildering speed: think of a growth of 527% from 1990 to today  (!!) and you will be impressed. A lot. Nowadays, aquaculture produces an amount of food that compares with that produced by conventional fishing. 

So, Mann-Borgese was right on aquaculture, but was that development a good thing? What she missed is that farmed fish is fed mainly from wild fish, so when you sum the production of the two industries you count the same food twice. And the damage done to aquaculture to the environment is gigantic, as we discuss in detail in our book, "The Empty Sea." 

The other two sections of "The Future of the Oceans" are a complex story that would need an in-depth discussion. I am not an expert in economics or international law, so I won't attempt to do that. I can just say that I have the impression that much of what was said in the 1980s on this subject was very optimistic. Over the years, the world of fishing became much more competitive, and the various actors engaged in the effort became much less interested in sharing a scarce result and engaged in defending it aggressively, even by military means. 

So, that's the story of this book. Even though it didn't stand so well the test of time, it is still a remarkable book. Part of the human effort to live in harmony on a planet that's becoming smaller and poorer every day. And, after all, in half a century from now, how many of the books that we are writing today will have passed the test of time?

The Seneca Collapse of Bombing: What Happened to the Mighty Western Military Machine?

 Western bombing campaigns after the collapse of the Soviet Union: actual and threatened.

 

Have you noticed something strange? The last major bombing campaign carried out by the West (NATO or US alone) was in 2011, the one against Libya that eventually led to the assassination of president Qaddafi for the joy of the queen of darkness, Hillary Clinton. But things have been strangely quiet from then on. 

Not that bombing has stopped, and the US drones are still active in various areas of the world. But, for the past ten years, we haven't seen anymore the kind of spectacular "shock and awe" campaigns that were waged against Libya, Serbia, and Iraq. You could see the abrupt stop of the campaigns as a sort of "Seneca Collapse." What's happening?

I plotted the duration of these campaigns as a function of time for the past 30 years or so, that is, after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Before that date, you might argue that the balance of power between the two world empires had prevented this kind of heavy operations on the part of the Western Empire. Indeed, earlier on, the last major military operation that had directly involved the Western forces on a somewhat "even" footing -- that is not a military cakewalk -- had been Vietnam, ending in 1975.

I know that the plot is somewhat arbitrary in how "major" campaigns are defined. For instance, I didn't include the long-lasting, relatively low level, Afghanistan campaign. But even that war is expected to end this year, at least in terms of direct US involvement, after 17 years from its start. 

Clearly, there is a line that separates the past 10 years from the previous 20. Before the line, the West seemed to have no compunction in unleashing all its might against a foreign country of the kind unable to retaliate. But, after the line, something happened. No more spectacular bombing campaigns. 

Think about how, in 2012, President Obama said that President Assad of Syria had passed the "red line" and that he would face appropriate retribution. Everyone was expecting a repetition of the Libyan campaign of the year before, with the probable result of the assassination of Assad. Pope Francis took the threat seriously enough that he called for a special day of prayer and fasting for peace for Syria. I fasted, too.

But nothing happened . Obama said he had changed his mind because he had realized that the public opinion was against the bombing. As if they had taken that into account when they had decided to invade Iraq in 2003!

Then, there came Donald Trump. Lots of warlike speeches, but very little in terms of substance. In 2017, Trump unleashed a missile strike against Syria. It was a joke: a single strike and almost none of the missiles arrived on target. Then, it was silence. 

In 2020, things seemed to be getting serious with the assassination of the Iranian general Qasem Soleimani by US forces. It could be interpreted only in terms of an attempt to create a "casus belli" to start a major war in the Gulf Region. What happened, instead, was that the US and Iran governments collaborated to avoid that the situation could escalate out of control. The Iranians launched a wave of missiles on the US bases in Iraq, but they gave plenty of warning for the Americans who were able to evacuate the target areas before the strike. There was no further military action. Silence ensued.   

And we are in 2021. President Biden started his presidency by encouraging the Ukrainian government to try to retake by force the separatist region of the Donbass. Ukraine massed troops at the border. Russia responded by lining up troops on the opposite side. The US announced they would send two warships to the Black Sea: sitting ducks for the Russian missiles, but an excellent casus belli if the idea was to start a major war.  Everything seemed to be set for a confrontation that could have rapidly escalated out of control. 

And then, strangely, things quieted down. The US declared they won't send warships to the Caspian sea, the Russians pulled back their troops, and the Ukrainian government continued making warlike noises, but no more than that. We can't say that the crisis is over, but things seem to be quiet, right now. 

So, what's happened? How was it that three major wars that seemed to be unavoidable (Syria, Iran, and Ukraine -- and Afghanistan, too) petered out into a nearly deafening silence?

 

I can think of a few answers:

1. Nothing special is happening: the ten-year lull is just a statistical fluctuation.

2. God exists, and the Pope can speak to Him. 

3. Putin has rebuilt the Russian military forces to such a degree that he can credibly scare the Western leaders to the point that they are wary of starting major campaigns.

4. Drones have superseded the traditional massive bombing campaigns, ineffective and expensive. 

5. Something else is stirring in the darkness of the things not covered by the media. It may be what Shoshana Zuboff called the "epistemic coup" on the part of the internet controlling companies: Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and the others. If she is right, power is now in the hands of an obscure coalition of Internet barons who have no interest in showering the military-industrial lobby with money, nor in gaining electoral points by bombing foreigners. Therefore, they actively discourage politicians from starting new wars. And it works.

Time will tell us more.

Everything is Illuminated: The New Middle Ages

 The Enlightened Middle Ages: Prepare for a New Way of Running Society

The concept of "back to the Middle Ages" is becoming more and more widespread. Indeed, we must begin to think seriously not so much about a "return" to the Middle Ages but a "New Middle Ages" that takes its best features from the old, in particular the management of society based on justice and not on violence, the decentralization of governance structures, the economy based on local resources, and economic stability (although not of the population). That's why I have renamed my Italian blog "Electric Middle Ages." Here is a translation of a post that Luisella Chiavenuto published first in "Humanism and Science", where she goes to the core of the problems we face nowadays. (boldface highlights are mine).

 

By Luisella Chiavenuto

Despite its success and power, the credibility and dignity of science are at an all-time low. It is no longer a question of opposing only the management of the covid crisis, but also - and at the same time - opposing a scientistic and dehumanizing technocracy that in the absence of opposition will not step back - regardless of the covid and its variants. In a context of evaporation of jobs, the social order will most likely be based on an extended citizenship income - and subordinated to certain social behaviors. This is to maintain minimum levels of consumption and consensus - and combined with further development and updating of the current economic model - which is destroying the web of life everywhere.



FUTURE PERSPECTIVES: ILLUMINATED MIDDLE AGES?

The perspective is therefore long-term: resistance and elaboration of new models of thought and social organization, aimed at rediscovering the cultural roots of the past, and at the same time oriented towards a future with a human face - in which theoretical and practical knowledge intertwine and they evolve freely, without space-time preconceptions.

It is also important to support the political transversality of intent, which to a small or large extent already exists in people, within every organization. This is to slow down systemic collapses, thus giving time to the emergence of organizations that are radically different from the current ones. And remembering that this transversality exists above all outside parties and institutions - in the majority of the "politically desperate".

To allow maximum flexibility - and "ontological" confidence - in responding to the systemic collapses in progress, one can perhaps think of a sort of "enlightened Middle Ages" in which - to quote A. Langer (note: Langer was an Italian ecologist and intellectual) and others before him - all this is sought which is "slow, sweet and profound" - in a context of material poverty that will be for many an obligatory and painful condition, but at the same time an opportunity for a different rebirth.



CLASH BETWEEN DIFFERENT CULTURAL AND SCIENTIFIC PARADIGMS

In summary, one could speak of resistance against a Technoscience devoted to the bioinformatics and bioengineering reprogramming of nature, and of life, in all its forms - a techno-knowledge in the grip of a delirium of omnipotence and exaltation, in its dark and desperate background,

A new Humanism of Complexity can be opposed to this Reductivist Technoscience, which also includes the best of scientific thought - but on a level of equal cultural and political dignity. And with the awareness both of the greatness, and of the dark side, and of the crimes, which are woven into all cultures and all cultural currents - obviously including all contemporary ones. A Humanism of Complexity, therefore, based on a Wisdom that can be defined as non-dual, as it is oriented to the recomposition of the fractures that cross and fragment our life, our psyche, reality in all its interconnected levels.



MEETING BETWEEN BIO-DIVERSITY COLLABORATORS

Therefore, the clash between opposing cultural paradigms must be, at the same time, also a human and intellectual encounter between people where possible - and beyond the impossible - to overcome and recompose the lacerations. This also means supporting both the freedom of movement for everyone in every place, and the freedom to remain in their land and culture of origin. Ultimately, it means striving to radically overcome the friend/enemy dichotomy, and having the courage to speak of empathy and universal fraternity, as an ethical and political ideal - within a horizon of collaborating bio-diversity.

Ethical ideal, but also intellectual acquisition, unifying and not naive - capable of attempting global and local responses to problems that can only be faced on both interconnected sides. Are we up to these tasks? Obviously not, nobody is, it is useless to insist .... and then we can be - and do - what we can and can, accepting our limits.  But also considering that we are a mystery to ourselves and that therefore our individual and collective resources are ultimately unfathomable, like life itself.

Luisella Chiavenuto April 2021

Peak Water: Are we Running out of a Critical Resource?

"Peak Water" is an idea that has been going in parallel with that of "Peak Oil." Both assume that the production of limited resources, fossil fuels and fossil water, will follow a "bell shaped" curve. The production peak of liquid fuels may have been passed during the past few years. About "peak water" the situation is less clear, but the data indicate depletion problems in several areas of the world. Above, you see the historical and predicted water production from the Texas section of the Ogallala Aquifer. The data approximately follow a "Bell Shaped" (Hubbert) curve, typical of the depletion of non-renewable resources. In this case, the peak seems to have arrived in the late 1990. 

Freshwater is a fundamental resource in our world, even more than crude oil. Without freshwater, it would be impossible to maintain the current agricultural production that manages to feed nearly 8 billion human beings. Most of the world's agriculture, nowadays, is based on irrigation. It means that production depends on water that has been stored somewhere, naturally or artificially. And once you start depending on a limited stock of resources, you face a problem. Even though your resource may be renewable, if you exploit it faster than it renews itself, you will eventually run out of it. It is the phenomenon called "overexploitation"

There lies a truly nasty problem that we may be facing in the near future. A lot of water used for irrigation nowadays is "fossil water." It means it has been stored underground by natural processes that may have been active only in the ancient past or that may be very slow, sometimes of the order of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of years. Underground water deposits are called "aquifers." Some are fast replenished by natural phenomena, but in most cases, the rate of water withdrawal is much faster than that of the natural flow into the aquifer. That's a recipe for disaster.

A classic case of an agricultural region that ran out of fossil water is that of Saudi Arabia. Starting with the 1980s, Saudi Arabian farmers started extracting water that had been lying underground for hundreds of thousands of years, from a time when the Arabian peninsula was green. That was true fossil water in the sense that the replenishment rate of the aquifers was practically zero. The result was a boom in agricultural production that quickly peaked in 1990 following an evident bell-shaped curve. The curve had a second cycle during the 2010s, but that changed little to the situation. Right now, Saudi Arabia's agricultural production is reduced to practically zero and all the food must be imported.

 

 

Saudi Arabia's freshwater production was a classic case of a "Hubbert cycle." That is, water production followed the same kind of "bell-shaped" curve observed for crude oil and other mineral resources. The "Hubbert Theory" (the one that generated the concept of "Peak Oil") is far from being perfect, but it is true that in most cases oil production cycles generate bell-shaped curves. 

 

With aquifers, the core of the question is the same: you exploit a limited resource, you make a profit, you invest part of it in more exploitation. And that leads to depletion. The result is expected to be the same kind of curve. 

It doesn't matter that, in most cases, aquifers are partially replenished by natural phenomena. The curve will be the same, although it will not go to zero at the end of the cycle, but will return to the natural groundwater recharge rate. (source)

 But that may be an optimistic estimate: with aquifers, there is always the issue of subsidence. It means that once you remove the water from porous rock, the rock becomes more compact and it won't be filled again with water. It happens also with oil wells, but in that case, you don't care: it is known that oil is a one-time resource. Some aquifers may be in the same category, and may be gone forever after that they have been emptied. As an additional effect of subsidence, your home may sink into a hole in the ground. (image: subsidence in Jakarta).

So, it is perfectly possible to run out of water, even though water is theoretically a renewable resource. During the first millennium CE, an entire civilization, that of the Garamantes of central Sahara, disappeared when their supply of fossil water ran out.

So, how do we stand today? Overall, one would tend to say that the situation is not so good (to say the least). Most of the aquifers in use are being overexploited. The table below, from Wikipedia, is impressive (again, to say the least). 

 

If we continue in this way, it is unavoidable that sooner or later humans will run out of freshwater. It will be"peak water," but when could it happen, exactly? 

The problem with freshwater is that we don't have the same wealth of data for water resources and consumption that we have for crude oil. There exist a large number of aquifers, most of them are exploited only locally and it is difficult to obtain reliable data on what is being done in all the regions of the world. Nevertheless, we have some rough estimates: the total amount of freshwater accessible to humans is estimated as some 200,000 km3. The total consumption of freshwater worldwide is estimated at around 1,000 km3 per year. 

That these estimates are such round numbers tells us something about the uncertainty involved. But we can still say that aquifers contain huge amounts of water, about one thousand times more than the estimated volume of the world reserves of crude oil (about 200 km3). Even just the Ogallala aquifer in the central US is larger, estimated to have contained some 3,600 km3 of water before pumping started, in the 1950s. Then, we also consume huge amounts of water. We can compare again with crude oil, and we find that oil consumption (about 4 km3/year) is again dwarfed by water consumption that turns out to be about 250 times larger. 

Unfortunately, these data are not enough for an estimate of when peak water could occur. Not only there are too many uncertainties involved, but the main point is that water is mostly a local resource, unlike oil, which is global. It means that the depletion cycle is spaced differently in different regions, depending on the rate of consumption to reserves. So, the fact that Saudi Arabia mostly ran out of water during the past decade had no significant effect on the world's agricultural production. But if a truly major agricultural region, such as the Central Plains in the US, were to run out of water, then the situation would quickly become dire for all the regions in the world that depend on food imported from the US.

So, what's happening in the US in terms of water production and consumption? The good news, here, is that consumption has been declining. That happened not because of water depletion, but because of the switch from coal to natural gas as the main energy source for electricity production. Natural gas plants are more efficient than coal-fired plants and the result is a reduced need for cooling water. (data below from USGS)

So, it is possible to reduce the consumption of water and that leaves plenty of it available for agriculture, but that doesn't solve the problem. As you see in the figure, the second largest sector of water consumption is irrigation and that sector has been declining, too. Nobody can say for sure if (or when) the wells of the Ogallala aquifer will run dry, bur these data are worrisome. 

Then, can we find new aquifers? Maybe, but even here the situation is not promising, to say the least. In 2013, the discovery of a new, large aquifer in Kenya was reported with much fanfare in the media. The aquifer was described as containing 250 billion cubic meters of water. Less than one-tenth of the Ogallala aquifer, but still a remarkable discovery.  Too bad that it was soon found that it was brackish water, not freshwater. So is life, you can't have everything, you know?

But we can desalinate brackish water, can't we? We can desalinate seawater, too. And you won't tell us that we will run out of seawater, will you? Sure we can. But that's not a panacea, either.

Agriculture is an economic activity that lives on very small profit margins. You increase the cost of some agricultural inputs and a lot of things change and farmers go in the red. Water for irrigation is often subsidized and farmers can't usually afford to pay it much more than $0.01 per cubic meter. In comparison, desalinated water may cost around one dollar per cubic meter, maybe a little less but not much. It is a factor of 10, at best. How much would an eggplant cultivated using desalinated water cost? More than most people would be able to afford.

As things stand, there is no way to use desalinated water in agriculture: we should go back to the dreams of "energy too cheap to meter" and that doesn't seem to be closer today than it was in the 1950s, when it was proposed. Besides, as long as our energy supply comes mainly from fossil fuels, using a substantial fraction of it to produce the huge amounts of freshwater needed for irrigation would be an environmental disaster.

That doesn't mean that desalinated water is a bad idea. Not at all and, in the future, it may cost much less than it costs right now. Just think of the possibility of producing freshwater using the excess energy that renewable energy plants generate at some moments during the day. It would be a smart way to store energy that otherwise would have to be wasted.  

Smart, yes, but problematic in many ways. One is that at present we are still far away from having excess energy production from renewable plants sufficient to produce the huge amounts of water needed in agriculture. The second - probably worse - is that desalinated water is mostly produced from seawater, near the seashore. But agriculture is mainly performed inland, so you would need a gigantic infrastructure to transport enormous amounts of water where it is needed. Again, not an impossible task, but a steep barrier to overcome, and the costs would be gigantic, too.

In the end, the problem is not so much having sufficient energy to desalinate water. It is that irrigated agriculture is just not a good idea. In most cases, it is a trap that leads to the destruction of the fertile soil, something that the ancient Sumerians already experimented around 2,200 BC. It seems that the Sumerians depleted the aquifers they had been using for about one thousand years and couldn't avoid the soil to become too salty to be cultivated. 

Are we facing the same destiny? Maybe. But there are many ways open for a kind of agriculture that's more respectful of the soil and that doesn't need so much water as the current methods do. It is to be seen if we can change fast enough to avoid having to adapt the hard way, that is rebuilding after collapse. In this field, as in many others, the Seneca Cliff is awaiting.

Saudi Arabia Goes the way of the Garamantes. Google Earth Confirms the Collapse of the Water Supply

 

In 2008, I noted the decline in Saudi Arabian water production and I published an article in "The Oil Drum" titled "Peak Water in Saudi Arabia." Using a simple version of the Hubbert model of resource depletion, I noted how the supply of "fossil water" had peaked in 1990 and had been declining ever since. This is the typical behavior of "fossil" resources: they tend to peak and then decline. It had already happened to the ancient Garamantes, inhabitants of central Sahara, who had developed sophisticated technologies of water extraction during the 1st millennium BC. That had allowed them to prosper for about one thousand years, but then depletion had its revenge and they vanished among the sand dunes. Something similar (but probably much faster) is going to happen in the Arabian peninsula. 

 

The old Hubbert model was developed to describe the cycle of extraction of crude oil. It may be oversimplified if you want to use it for detailed predictions. But, as a quick tool for understanding the situation of the production of a non renewable resource, it tells you a lot of what you need to know. That first stab of mine on water production in Saudi Arabia turned out to be correct. 

It is impressive how, today, you can use Google Earth to look at the situation "from above." You can see the collapse of the agricultural fields as depletion progresses. Here are the images of an irrigated area for a region East of Al Jubail, in Saudi Arabia,  26°48'29.60"N and  49° 8'47.58"E. 

Let's start with an image of the desert in 1984. There is absolutely nothing there:

One year later, 1985. Someone has started extracting water and irrigating the land. There are two active fields there. 

Below, you see an enlargement of the 1985 situation. Someone has built a road and you can see six irrigated areas, of which two are active. Each circle is almost exactly 1 km diameter. It is called "center pivot irrigation" -- there is a long arm that turns around the central pivot and irrigates the area.

Below, the situation in 1986 -- there are now 31 active circular fields. 

And now the area in 2002. There are now 46 active or partially active fields. Note the dark spots among the circular green areas. It is not clear what they are, could they be small ponds of brine? The water they are using probably has a high salinity and they have to dispose of it, somehow. 

 Below, the situation in 2015. The cultivated area is clearly declining. There are now only 17 active fields.

 

And, finally, the situation in 2020. It is gone. No green fields anymore. They simply ran out of water.

That doesn't mean that agriculture in Saudi Arabia is completely over. Scanning the desert using Google Earth, you can still find irrigated areas. Here is a place called Qariat al Olaya

There are several irrigated circles, but note the number of "ghost" fields, not irrigated anymore. It may be a seasonal effect, but it may well indicate big problems with water supply. 

Finally, some data about wheat production in Saudi Arabia, the most recent I could find (from "actualitix")

As you see, they had two peaks: the first one is the one I had already noted in my article on the "Oil Drum" of 2009. The second one was ca. 2005. As it often happens, when a resource starts declining, people tend to apply more capital to keep things going. It happens also with crude oil, the case of "shale oil" is a classic example. In Saudi Arabia, they succeeded in creating a second peak. But now, it seems to be the final decline. 

Just like the ancient Garamantes, the Saudi Arabians were able to overcome the aridity of their land by using fossil water. But when they ran out of it, it was time over for them. The Saudis still have crude oil and can import food despite not being able anymore to produce it. But oil is a fossil resource, subjected to depletion just like fossil water. And the destiny that befell the Garamantes is going to befall all those who depend on fossil resources.