A review with excerpts of Professor Jeremy Walker's instant classic 2020 book: More Heat than Life: The Tangled Roots of Ecology, Energy, and Economics
What remains under-recognised is the significant fact that neoclassical economics and systems ecology, the paradigmatic core disciplines of their respective fields of knowledge, both anchored their claims to the status of science in the energy physics developed by combustion engineers as the thermoindustrial revolution gathered momentum in the mid-nineteenth century. The claims to epistemic authority of both ecology and economics (and thus ultimately of environmentalists and neoliberals) can be traced to a foundational relation to the thermodynamic laws of energy and entropy, and in turn, to older concepts
of equilibrium and natural law.
Oh yeah this is the logarithmic natural law evil of Platonic Philosophy with its concomitant exponential growth mandate!!!
Whilst concepts of ‘natural law’ are deeply rooted in the Western tradition, in the nineteenth century the quest to elaborate them scientifically was profoundly realised in the development of the modern physics of energy—thermodynamics— a science which arose in tandem with the fateful development of the coal-fired steam engine, and which remains foundational to the corpus of
scientific materialism.
Oh yeah....Equilibrium Lie of Economics from Energy conservation!
Formalised in 1847, the law of the conservation of energy (from energeia, a Greek term approximating ‘work’) states that the quantity of energy of a closed system is constant: energy can neither be created nor destroyed in all the transformations we observe, only converted from one form to another.
The neoclassical synthesis of the 1870s consolidated the style and claims of orthodox economics, as its founding authors—including Leon Walras, William Stanley Jevons, Vilfredo Pareto, and John Bates Clark— appropriated the mathematical format of the law of the conservation of energy in their portrayal of ‘market forces’ operating according to law-like principles of general equilibrium. 3 Modelling the ‘subjective utility’ sought by hedonistic individual market participants as a universal field
of value analogous to ‘energy’ as described in the 1st law of thermodynamics, the neoclassical economists aimed to excise the ‘political’ from political economy and develop a pure science of economics on par with physics. This agenda was to be pursued through the construction of mathematical models of the economy as a frictionless, ahistorical market setting in which the ‘price mechanism’ automatically equilibrates the forces of
supply and demand (Fig. 1.1). The equilibrium concept at the core of...
The 2nd law of thermodynamics, despite being the most directly relevant principle of physics to our economic existence on Earth, has never been integrated into the canon of economic theory.
Ecology from entropy compared to economics:
Tansley appealed to the laws of thermodynamics in
applying a systems approach to the blooming, buzzing confusion of life,
beginning with the proposition that ‘all living organisms may be regarded
as machines transforming energy from one form to another’....
If both systems ecology and neoclassical economics laid foundational
claims to the achievements of energy physicists in identifying laws of
nature to which there have been found no exceptions, there are crucial
differences....
systems ecologists have sought to ground their
account of life’s complex order and planetary unfolding in the phenomena
of solar radiation, heat, and energy transformation by fire and photosyn-
thesis.7 By contrast, orthodox economic theory has systematically excluded
from its account of the economic process all the phenomena accounted for
by the 2nd law of thermodynamics: the historically irreversible dissipation
of energy inherent in all processes of production. This disciplinary exclu-
sion of the physics of fossil-fuel combustion, of the solar ecology of the
Earth as ‘one physical system’, 8 and indeed, of scientific materialism tout
court—means that economics has no viable theory of ‘production’,
‘growth’, or ‘development’. The actual physics content of economics is
zero.
Chapter One: Fascist Business Backs NeoLiberal Economics as Energy Physics:
Without the long-term consolidated support of big business, and in particular of US-based corporations concentrated in fossil-fuels, petrochemicals, mining and other pollution-intensive industries, the intellectual output of MPS scholars would never have achieved the influence and pre-eminence it now enjoys....
In September 1970, Milton Friedman (MPS) of Chicago University warned that any
firm spending more on pollution controls than the absolute minimum
required by law ‘in order to contribute to the social objective of improving
the environment’, was practising ‘pure and unadulterated socialism’.
This book may be read as a genealogy of the claim that ‘the free economy’,
operates according to natural laws (somehow) analogous to those revealed
by physics, and the consequent political claim that the laws of the state
must be subordinate to the laws of the market revealed by economists,
practitioners of a universal science that (somehow) resembles physics. For
now it will be enough to note that von Mises’ claims to the rigour of the
physicist run directly counter to the enterprise of modern science to
understand causes and effects through rigorous, testable theories built on
empirical observations of material phenomena. Perhaps it is the method-
ological approach of the Austrian brand of economic science that has
attracted the considerable investments by Koch Industries and other US
fossil-fuel interests to build academic institutions and respectability for the
latter-day Austrian School on American soil.
Chapter Two: The Incommensurability of Economics and Ecology as Paradigms:
E.O. Wilson’s call for interdisciplinary coherence revives something of the project of logical positivism advanced by Rudolf Carnap,
Otto Neurath and others of the Vienna Circle in the 1930s—a project
which was for Hayek of a piece with ‘socialism’, and against which the a
priori subjectivism of Austrian economics would be mobilised. For Carnap,
science was not merely a store of confirmed facts or ‘correct information’
derived from rigorous empirical contact with natural phenomena, but an
entirely comprehensive epistemological and moral system of knowledge
that could ‘encompass the whole range of human thought on all sub-
jects’.10 As Carnap put it, ‘When we say that science is unlimited, we mean
that there is no question whose answer is in principle unattainable to
science.
Consider that the Swedish Rigsbank Prize in Economic Science in Honour of Alfred
Nobel conferred upon Solow is not a Nobel proper, but a parallel prize
established in 1968 by banking interests opposed to parliamentary control
of central banks. Nobel’s original 1895 endowment did not consider eco-
nomics a science, nor a worthy contribution to ‘peace’ or the humanities.
Contrary to popular belief, there isn’t really a ‘Nobel Prize in economics’,...Beginning with Hayek (in 1974) and Friedman (in 1976), MPS members have been awarded a significant proportion of the prizes, and MPS members and their students have frequently served on the prize committee.
Economics Assumes there is NO Land foundation of resources!
His model economy produces but a single undefined commodity ex nihilo, in it ‘there is no
scarce non-augmentable resource like land’. This is immediately followed
by another remarkable assumption: ‘[c]onstant returns to scale seems the
natural assumption to make in a theory of growth’. [emphasis added] 15 A
‘natural’ theory of ‘constant’ growth must surely encounter the objection
that no biotic entity (e.g. the ‘industrial organism’ implied in the biologi-
cal metaphor ‘growth’) can live without land, nor increase in size the more
it increases in size without consuming ‘resources’ and encountering some
limit, whether spatial, epigenetic, or environmental. It is surely a matter of
the most elementary empiricism that economic growth or ‘production’ is
a cumulative, history-making material phenomena which transforms ‘the
environment’ into the artefacts and infrastructures of ‘the economy’ in the
process. Here is a fundamental point of incommensurability between the
natural and the social sciences of the oikos.
Pollution can not exist due to "free markets"!
Writing in the journal of the Cato Institute (founded by the MPS oil billionaire Charles Koch), Wildavsky declared that ‘for the libertarian [...] there can be no pollution’ [my emphasis]. Citing the ‘theorem’ of Ronald Coase (MPS) that unregulated mar-
kets naturally optimise the social allocation of environmental goods and
bads, Wildavsky declared a culture war against the environmental sciences:
[...] once one understands that saying ‘the environment is polluted’ is
equivalent to saying that ‘markets are dirty’, the charge that environmental
pollution is ubiquitous can be understood for what it is—a fundamental
attack on libertarian culture....
Milton Friedman affirmed this when he argued that so long as
predictions hold true, it is perfectly fine for economists to reason from
assumptions that would not endure empirical testing, ‘as if’, for example,
human behaviour is equivalent to the mathematical solution of a con-
strained optimisation problem....
Machines provide technological proof that science ‘works’—even the wonkiest
science-deniers fly Boeings to the conferences of the Heartland Institute.
Thus machines can be taken to speak with the clear voice of an objective
Nature. Conversely, economic theory devotes itself to analysing Adam
Smith’s ‘system of natural liberty that arises of its own accord’ in terms of
a ‘price mechanism’ governing a system in dynamic general equilibrium.
The machine metaphor is upfront, but there is no account of the material-
ity of machinery. The invisible hand operates an invisible machine.
Chapter Three: Ecology as Photosynthesis Entropy (any mention of Hazel Henderson)?)
Photosynthesis is the complex process by
which algae, plants, and certain bacteria harvest the energy of sunlight,
separating carbon from atmospheric carbon dioxide and binding it to
hydrogen and oxygen from water to form the carbohydrates which store
chemical energy in the molecular bonds of organic molecules (e.g. sugars,
or carbohydrates), expelling oxygen as a waste product. Combustible fuel
has photosynthetic origins: whether carbohydrates formed recently
(wood), or anciently, long since mineralised into hydrocarbons (coal, oil,
and gas).
NO mention of Hazel Henderson's book Politics of the Solar Age! wow. Too bad - she passed on last year - I didn't know!
She wrote nine books, perhaps most notably “The Politics of the Solar Age” (1981), which heralded the environmental movement’s embrace of sustainable energy sources as a substitute for fossil fuels like coal and oil...
Back to the book:
The oxygen concentrations in the atmosphere which make fire possible (16% or higher, currently at 21%), accumulated there as countless generations of photosynthesising
microbial seas exhaled. The Great Oxygenation took a while: roughly, for
concision, over the period from 3.4 to 0.6 billion years ago. Around
541 million years ago, complex multicelled organisms appeared, including
plants on the seabed. Fire then, is an emergent effect of biological life’s
transformation of the Earth. The first fire—on land, amidst air—was long
preceded by photosynthetic life....
Carbon is remarkably stable from a thermal point of view, having
the highest melting temperature on the periodic table, and yet is the most
promiscuous of the elements in terms of its openness to novel chemical
couplings and combinations. The number of compounds that contain car-
bon vastly exceeds all other compounds combined....
The Great Oxygenation of the atmosphere was also its Great Decarbonisation.
According to Lovelock, had the biosphere never existed the Earth would have an oxygen-less atmosphere of 98% CO 2 , and a mean surface temperature of 290 °C.6 Obviously this would not be a pleasant environment for human beings, whose lives depend on
their core body temperature not departing too far either side of 37 °C for
too long, a feat we accomplish at all latitudes by the social technologies of
food, clothing, shelter, heating, and cooling
Aristotle did better in interpreting nomos as an ‘original distribution of land’. From here, Schmitt identifies the constitutive foundations of the law of the land in ancient
customary rights to grazing grounds. This is implicit in the Greek word
for the herdsman (nomeus)...
Part Two: Economics as Fake Nature:
Firstly, to conceive of economics as the study of ‘the
mechanics of self-interest’ is to portray the economist as a physicist or
engineer, cool and rational, as immune to pious moralising and political
bias as to utopian eschatology. Secondly, the dominant machine metaphor
of economics—the ‘price mechanism’ automatically coordinating ‘forces
of supply and demand’—excludes from economic analysis the actual forces
of the heat engines which ‘drive’ ‘the economy’, and from the study of
which the most confirmed of the ‘laws of nature’ were derived.
Under the Coin Act of 1696, which made counterfeiting a crime of
high treason, Newton exercised police powers, tasked with the detection
and prosecution of those dishonest smiths, the coin-clippers and
counterfeiters.
The goal of the scientist was to eliminate time, to gain the perspective of
immortal deity by transcending the circumscribed evental time of biologi-
cal life. This is why, Prigogine says, classical and basic science has no time,
although time is phenomenologically present to us at all times.28 With the
exclusion of temporality, classical science presents the world as an automa-
ton, a perpetual motion machine. As Isabelle Stengers and Prigogine have
elsewhere commented:
To the extent to which dynamics has become and still is the model of science
[...] it is still the prophetic announcement of a description of the world seen
from a divine or demonic point of view. It is the science of Newton, the new
Moses to whom the truth of the world is unveiled; it is a revealed science
that seems alien to any social or historical context identifying it as the result
of the activity of human society.29
It seems to me that all of these remarks apply directly to the intellectual
underpinnings of the image of ‘the free market’ at the core of orthodox
economic discourse, an image of natural order which has been deployed
by the neoliberal project....
In the case of economics, the current faith in infinite growth and the contradictory idea that economies timelessly tend toward an equilibrium state akin to a physical law—assumptions latent in all exponents of general equilibrium theories from Adam Smith down to
the present day—suggests both explanations are credible....
The historian Donald Worster has dated the earliest contemporary uses
of the word ‘oeconomy’ to around 1530, when it referred not to a thing
(‘the economy’), but to the political administration of a moral community,
or of a state’s resources for orderly production. Christian theologians had
an older tradition of using the word oeconomia to describe the ‘dispensa-
tions’ of God toward Man and Creation through successive ages or cove-
nants.34 By the seventeenth century the term was used routinely by theistic
naturalists to describe the order of Creation. ‘Oeconomy of nature’
remained the term used to refer to the totality of biological and abiotic
nature until 1866, when Haeckel proposed the scientific term Öekologie
to bring the oeconomy of nature into secular alignment with the geology
of Hutton and Lyell, the biology of Darwin, and the energy physics of von
Helmholtz and Clausius. The origin of economics in ‘moral science’—
concerning the divine covenant aligning a law-governed Creation with the
‘natural law’ of a just society as presented in Thomas Aquinas’ Summa
Theologiae—is fully consonant with this usage.
Aristotle, who distinguished between oikonomia
and chresmatica. The former term refers to the productive arts of steward-
ship on the freeman’s estates, and the latter, disparagingly, to profiting
from unproductive and disordering speculation on changing prices and
interest rates in the agora. In the ancient world, debts were secured against
the person: failure to pay would result in the debtor’s enslavement.
Containing a basic ambiguity between the moral sense of value as that
which is good and just in and of itself, and the fluctuating values of money
prices, controversies over value theory are as old as the phenomena of
money, merchant trade, and interest-bearing debt. Insofar as the writing
systems used by the temple scribes of the early Mesopotamian city states
were developed to account for grain taxes, wages, tributes, and debt ser-
vice, the problem of value theory may well be as old as written speculation
on social life itself.....
The idea of an automatically balancing dynamic mechanism was implicit
in the liberal critique of mercantilist trade theory, with its demands for a
rigorous policy of naval policing and protective tariffs to ensure that colo-
nial and international trade led to a net inflow of precious metal currencies
(or a positive ‘trade balance’). Liberals such as David Hume argued that
increased flows of metal currency into national circulation did not corre-
spond to increasing wealth, as currency inflows had destabilising effects on
local industry that counteracted their benefits. The agriculture and indus-
try of Imperial Spain, after all, had been laid waste by inflationary influxes
of silver and gold from the New World. Trade accounts would better bal-
ance ‘automatically’.
The chief concerns of the liberal movement—the dena-
tionalisation of commerce, the fostering of industrial production, the
devolution of government to a body of propertied men, the constitutional
protection of liberal rights and freedoms including the fortification of
exclusive property in land—were reflected in the machine metaphor that
eventually came to dominate the subject of political economy, as it in turn
came to be dominated by British liberals. This was the metaphor of an
automatic balance, or dynamic equilibrium.
The transition from the clock to the steam engine as the epistemologi-
cal totem of modernity brought with it a revolutionary re-imagining of
political and economic systems, suggesting their fundamental unity withthe laws of nature revealed by scientific materialism. The idea that a society
of autonomous individuals motivated by pecuniary self-interest could pro-
duce automatically the most perfectly regulated and harmonious of social
orders can, according to Mayr, be traced to the dramatic technological
advances that accompanied combustion engineering:
The eighteenth century machine was a product of the Newtonian universe
with its multiplicity of forces, disparate sources of motion, and reversible
mechanism. Engineering problems in the design of steam engines had led to
the discovery that under certain conditions, dynamic systems can be capable
of regulating themselves, maintaining themselves in equilibrium upon their
own resources—without the external intervention of higher forces. [my
emphasis]44
Adam Smith likened the system of natural liberty to ‘a great, immense
machine, whose regular and harmonious movements produce a thousand
agreeable effects’.
The steady output of early steam engines was dependent on the tacit
skills of the engine-driver, who would carefully time the shovelling of coal
into the furnace to maintain a relatively constant level of heat. If the fur-
nace became too hot, expansive pressures built up in the boiler, and the
engine could accelerate beyond control. Boilers often exploded with
extreme violence, an occupational hazard for those working in proximity
to steam-power that was not substantially eliminated until design safety
regulations were codified in early twentieth-century social legislation.
Amongst other decisive improvements in the efficiencies of existing engine
designs for which he is credited with launching the Age of Steam, Watt
resolved the problem of over-speeding engines with an ingenious device.
Adapted from an invention of Huygens which modulated the transmission
of rotary force from windmills to grindstones, Watt’s governor automati-
cally adjusted and controlled the heat, pressure, and speed of steam
engines, maintaining a near constant output of mechanical work. As the
speed of the engine increases, the central spindle of the governor rotates
at a faster rate, and centrifugal forces push the two flyballs upwards and
outwards. This motion is translated by connecting rods to a throttle valve,
reducing its aperture. The rate at which the working fluid (steam) enters
the cylinder is thus reduced, and the speed of the prime mover falls.
Colliers could not leave without an explicit
authority signed by the coal-estate owner transferring them to another
coal master. A collier absent without leave could be charged, imprisoned,
and punished: for theft. Children, women, and men were listed as part of
the property in legal documents leasing or selling coal mines. Vagabonds
and beggars could be seized and pressed into servitude. It was not until
1799 that an Act was passed that finally emancipated the Scottish coal
miners, and then only with punitive ordinances forbidding ‘combination’. 49
Thus it is likely that the prototypes and early installations of Watt and
Boulton’s patent steam engine were fuelled with coal hewn and hauled by
enslaved fellow Britons.
Steve Coll describes ExxonMobil—an integral funder of the equally transnational
Atlas Network—as a vast ‘private empire’ through which American power
is exercised globally.51 Frequently, hydrocarbon resources are appropriated
through the ‘piratical economy’ or ‘primitive accumulation’ of neo-
colonial plunder—witness the violent environments visited by oil compa-
nies and their client-states upon the people of the Middle East or the
Niger Delta....
This was a response to the
agricultural protectionism of England’s landed oligarchy, manifest in the
Corn Laws. As the Napoleonic wars drew to a close in 1815, existing stat-
utes regulating the grain trade were amended to maintain the high war-
time prices of grain. Imposing steep duties on imports, this was to the
political and financial advantage of the landowning class, but at the cost of
high prices for food for common people. The following year, Mount
Tambora erupted in Indonesia, filling the upper atmosphere with ash par-
ticles which reduced the influx of sunlight to the Earth’s surface. 1816 was
cold and dark, a ‘year without a summer’. This catastrophic climate event
caused major reductions in crop yields, leading to widespread famine and
bread riots across the Northern hemisphere. In 1818, Ricardo purchased
a seat in Parliament, where he would pursue the case for free trade until his
death. With the repeal of the Corn Laws by the Parliament of 1846, free
trade became the general policy of Great Britain, and support for its doc-
trine almost by default the definition of what it meant to be an economist.
In this chapter we consider the nineteenth-century famine events in
Ireland and India, ‘natural’ disasters that expose contradictions in the ‘nat-
ural laws’ and ‘freedom’ of liberal economics, and its opposition to ‘gov-
ernment intervention’. In the following chapter I will turn to the moment
in which political economy was transformed into economics, as the neo-
classical economists of the 1870s claimed to erect an objective science of
universal laws analogous to those revealed by physicists
....
Nassau Senior’s 1847 lecture as the inaugural Professor of Political Economy at Oxford, in which he described political economy as a ‘moral science’, a science founded on the notably un-Christian proposition that
[...] the pursuit of wealth [...] is to the mass of mankind, the greatest source
of moral improvement.
the potato, recently introduced from America, offered the greatest yield of food for the smallest amount of land.
The evangelicals believed in a providential God, one who
built a logical and orderly universe, and they saw the new industrial econ-
omy as a fulfilment of God’s plan. The free market, they believed, was a
perfectly designed instrument to reward good Christian behaviour and to
punish and humiliate the unrepentant....Lord Russell’s incoming Whig administration, staffed by evangelicals, promptly halted Peel’s famine relief programme on the grounds that it was an ‘artificial’ intervention in the free market.
The forcing off the land of the unproductive Irish by bailiffs, bank-
ruptcy, and starvation would liberate the countryside for more economically
rational (lucrative) uses by its Protestant owners, such as raising cattle and
wool for the world market. The depopulation of the countryside would
establish a flexible, low-wage urban labour market that would attract
investment and trigger the rapid development of industrial manufacturing,
Up to one and a half million Irish perished as a result, with
another two million going into exile in the United States. 1846....
‘Lassez-faire’ (or ‘classical’) liberalism depended upon the
sovereign violence of state intervention to maintain the ‘natural’ legal
order of land appropriation, in and through the social catastrophes it
wrought. As much was clear to Benjamin Jowett, the respected master of
Balliol College. Recalling his Oxford colleague Nassau Senior, ‘moral sci-
entist’ and economic advisor to Lord Russell’s government, Jowett con-
fessed that: ‘I have always felt a certain horror of political economists since
I heard one of them say that he feared the famine of 1848 in Ireland
would not kill more than a million people, and that would scarcely be
enough to do much good’.
evolutionary defence of laissez-faire liberalism, widely disseminated
through the free-trade journal The Economist (est. 1845). For Spencer, the
laws of the market were in perfect accord with the natural principles of
biological evolution. These were couched in Lamarckian terms, despite his
standing as the prototypical Social Darwinist
Chapter Six: Back to Fire as the quest for alchemical free perpetual motion energy
In his Reflections On the Motive Power of Fire (1825), Carnot identified the
fundamental process by which the energy of heat is converted to kinetic
energy, or ‘work’. This slender volume, ignored until after his death, initi-
ated the thermodynamic revolution in physics, with all its profound impli-
cations for our contemporary existential predicament on a heating planet.
Here I follow Jacques Grinevald’s historical trajectory of ‘the Carnotian
revolution’, which was realised for the Earth sciences in Vernadsky’s solar-
energetic account of The Biosphere (1926), in the social sciences by
Georgescu-Roegen in the 1970s, and in the political sphere in the wide-
spread confirmation of the anthropogenic greenhouse effect in the
early 1980s./.....
Lavoisier disposed of ‘phlogiston’, the older substance theory
of heat, by demonstrating that the heat involved in a chemical reaction
had no effect on the mass of the material before or after the reaction. He
proposed ‘caloric’ as an alternative term encompassing heat, light, and
fire. This lead to his statement of the Law of the Conservation of Matter
in his Trait ́e El ́ementaire de Chimie (1789):
Nothing is created, either in the operations of art or in those of nature, and
it may be considered as a general principle that in every operation there
exists an equal quantity of matter before and after the operation; that the
quality and quantity of the constituents is the same, and that what happens
is only changes, modifications.1
......
Helmholtz posited a relationship between heat, light, chemical affinity, mechanical force,
electro-magnetism and bio-physical phenomena by treating them all as
manifestations of a continuous field pervading the entire universe, which
he named Arbeitskraft: ‘labour power’. Rigorously combining several previ-
ously separate areas of inquiry under the doctrine of energy conservation,
Helmholtz united the search for the mechanical equivalence of heat with
rational mechanics, doing away with earlier substance theories of heat and
the vitalist notions of vis viva or Lebenskraft (‘living force’) that had been
central concepts of physiology (‘animal economy’) and the Continental
Naturphilosophie tradition.
.............
Helmholtz and his peers showed most rigorously that the quantity of energy was fixed: energy could not be created and could not be destroyed, but was constant through
all transformations. Heat, matter and motion were unified in the concept
of energy and subjected to a system of mathematical equivalents. Nature,
it would seem, balanced her own accounts and could not be cheated.
......................
The possibility of a perpetual motion was first finally negatived by the law of the conservation of force, and this law might also be expressed in the practical form that no perpetual motion is possible, that force cannot be produced from nothing; something must be consumed.
...................
Helmholtz referred to the physiological research of Edward Smith, who studied work efficiency,
diet, and stress amongst convicts forced to work treadmills in the much-
feared Coldbath Fields Prison. The British penal code of 1775 defined
‘hard labour’ as ‘labour of the hardest and most servile kind [...] such as
treading in a wheel, or drawing in a capstern for turning a mill or other
machine’. In most cases the treadmill was used purely for the punishment
of inmates, its rotating axle unconnected to any industrial application—a
miserable pedagogical device for communicating the labour theory of
value.28 Smith’s studies were taken up by reformers calling for the aboli-
tion of treadmills and improvements of diet in prisons and workhouses.
Helmholtz, by contrast, praised the new ‘sciences of work’ for showing
that ‘the best method of getting the greatest amount of work out of a
human being is the treadmill’. Equivalent to continuously walking uphill,
Smith’s studies had shown that one quarter of the effort resulted in
mechanical work, while the rest was lost as heat. This was more efficient
than the conversion ratios achieved by steam engines, and so for Helmholtz
‘[T]he human body is [...] a better engine than the steam engine, only its
food is more expensive than the fuel of steam engines.’
...................
Here Helmholtz did not ‘reduce’ the organism to a thermodynamic
motor, but posited their formal equivalence in the physical terms of energy
conversion. In so doing, the heat engine was metaphorically transposed to
the entire universe, its essence anthropomorphised as ‘labour power’.
........................
Prior to the Russian revolution, Lenin criticised
Frederic Taylor’s system as a ‘science of sweating’, emblematic of ‘man’s
enslavement by the machine’.31 Once the Bolsheviks had seized power,
American methods, advisors and engineers were imported wholesale in the
massive industrialisation drives of the 1920s and 1930s....
Transcending the exploitative class relations of capitalism meant the
redemption of the social value of labour, this would come by the progres-
sive liberation of workers by machine power from the burdens of physical
exhaustion and mindless, repetitive, soul-destroying work. In the mature
Marx, the inevitability of a more scientific, humane, and just modernity
can be detected in the teleological roar of the forces of production explod-
ing into the future.
..........
This problem ricocheted around the halls of science for many years until Ervin Schrödinger, in his 1944 work What is Life?, first set out clearly the relationship of biological life to the rigorous limits of entropy. 62 .... suggesting that ‘the device by which an
organism maintains itself stationary at a fairly high level of orderliness (=
fairly low level of entropy) really consists in sucking orderliness from its environment.’63 Organisms maintain their ‘orderliness’ by importing what
Schrödinger referred to as ‘negentropy’ (negative entropy—e.g. sunlight,
or food) from the environment and exporting or externalising back to it
waste, disorderliness and heat (entropy).
................................
the elimination of ‘land’ via the a priori method of economists
from Nassau Senior to Friedrich Hayek is an essential and abiding feature
of economic agnotology, one which diverts attention from the land appro-
priations necessary to the operation of extractive industry. As we have seen
in the case of the Irish and Indian famines, ‘methodological individualism’
allows economists to ignore the ‘state of nature’ on the ground and to
deduce natural laws of the market with which to naturalise politically con-
structed economic arrangements, to which it will then be claimed that
‘there is no alternative’
.................................
PART III: Ecology as Social Physics:
Ecology’s tendency to construct a pure nature, in equilibrium and
external to social relations, was largely the result of early efforts to docu-
ment and reconstruct the pre-industrial order of nature in order to predict
and control future transformations of the environment, in the interests of
disaster-aversion through scientifically rational progress.
.........\
Organicism has long been applied to
social institutions: from Hobbes’ analysis of the commonwealth as a ‘body
politic’ through to Hayek’s evolutionary theory of the market as an emer-
gent, undesigned ‘spontaneous order’ too complex to understand or
rationalise—a thesis which represses its heritage in the ultra-liberalism of
Herbert Spencer’s account of ‘the social organism’. There is also an ele-
ment of organicism in Hegelian or Marxist inspired theories of historical
progress, insofar as society develops, by analogy to the organism, from
infantile or embryonic forms through a succession of stages to more
mature and complete forms.
In Clement’s application of the organic metaphor to organise ecology,
the interdependent interactions between different species in the ‘economy
of nature’ pointed to the existence of a larger whole, an entity variously
termed the ‘climax community’, the ‘complex organism’, and the ‘super-
organism’. Whilst such theoretical concepts proved unable to withstand
empirical scrutiny, Clement’s paradigm nevertheless advanced ecological
science in its attempts to answer the problems that distinguish ecology
from biology.
............
thus ‘information’ was reconceived of as ‘negative
entropy’ or ‘negentropy’. The concept of negentropy deployed by the
physicist Ervin Schrodinger in his What is Life? (1944) would contribute
to the discovery of molecular DNA as the biophysical concentration of
morphological order in the compressed format of the genetic programme.
........
vision which finds its zenith in the Silicon Valley eschatology of the com-
ing event-horizon of ‘the Singularity’—a concept first advanced by von
Neumann—after which select individuals will achieve immortality by
uploading consciousness to a networked post-human artificial intelligence
destined to expand throughout the Solar System, and even beyond. The
origins of this particular manifestation of the cybernetic paradigm—as an
ascent-trajectory of escape from the dependence of ‘meat machines’ on
the biosphere—can be seen in the origins of the term ‘cyborg’. The term
was coined by Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline to describe to a US Air
Force conference the possibilities of experimental augmentation of labora-
tory animals that might allow them to engage in feedback stabilisation and
control of an artificial metabolic environment.
..............
For
Bell, the economic process was driven by the need of ‘men’ for status, and
as status by definition requires inequality, ‘growth’ is ultimately a psycho-
logical arms race of conspicuous consumption, which due to the insatiabil-
ity of desire can never be completed. 14 This Hegelian subjectivism mirrors
the underlying creationist ontology of liberal economics, which denies any
necessary role for the appropriation of natural resources in the production
process: ontological greed and ‘technology’ produces an endlessly expand-
ing stream of commodities ex nihilo
.............
Exceedingly remote from any concept of the ‘balance of nature’ or
‘optimal welfare’, this notion of ‘equilibrium’ rather reproduces the ther-
monuclear strategy formulated in a 1958 paper by RAND strategist Albert
Wohlstetter, who criticised the idea that an ‘automatic balance’ or techno-
logical stalemate between the nuclear powers would ensure peace, arguing
instead for a militant policy of actively ‘maintaining the delicate balance of
terror’ amidst a situation of ‘extreme instability’.23 Formalised by US
Secretary of State Robert Macnamara in the early 1960s as the policy doc-
trine of MAD (mutually assured destruction), this led not to a ‘balance of
forces’ or an ‘optimal’ level of expenditure on nuclear security but to the
runaway feedback of the ever-expanding arsenals of the nuclear arms race
...............
The most important ‘input power flows’ to the economy in energetic terms, solar
radiation embodied in crops and natural ecosystems and fossilised sunrays
released by hydrocarbon combustion, are conventionally considered to be
free, priced not in terms of an inherent ‘energetic value’ but, as in the case
of oil, only in terms of the monetary costs borne by the corporation in
extracting, refining, and marketing it at a profit.10 Thus in monetary terms
the utterly vital ‘free energy’ of low entropy natural resource inputs (sun-
light, soil, hydrocarbons, forests, coral reefs) has an equivalent monetary
value as the useless exhaust flows and damaging pollution accumulated at
the entropic end of the economic process.
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