The Socrates Café meeting last Tuesday seemed like a sleeper to me. The topic for the evening was, what is a corporation’s moral responsibility in our society? This was inspired by the on-going BP deepwater oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico near Louisiana. Oh, what a surprise; so original. For the first hour or so, I just couldn’t get interested. Montclair is a town for educated liberals, and most of the people at the meeting are . . . guess what? Educated liberals. Thus, the conversation was peppered with anti-business rants and “I heard on NPR today that . . .” If I wanted that, I could have stayed home and pulled up the Huffington Post. I listen to NPR on my drive home from work, and I had already heard most of what the local wanna-be revolutionaries were talking about.

But finally, finally, someone said something interesting and thoughtful. During the middle of a lecture on corporate greed, a woman stopped and reflected on how complex the world had become. About fifteen minutes later, after an anti-Tea Party speech, she ended with an observation on how frustrated everyone seems to be these days with our leaders. Well, I finally woke up and joined the discussion. The moderator graciously gave me the floor, and I suggested to the previous speaker that perhaps the quandary noted in her second comment stemmed from what she had identified in her first. I.e., perhaps everyone is frustrated with our leadership these days just because our leaders are being overwhelmed by complexity themselves. Our leaders aren’t pushing the right buttons, because no one really knows what buttons should be pushed anymore.

(It’s happened before; see The Collapse of Complex Societies, Joseph Tainter, 1988)

A scary thought. Some of the firebrands replied that I was wrong, that the bulk of our problems most certainly stemmed from corporate greed and the machinations of the rich; the solution was clearly more government control. But others seemed more open to what I was saying. We are living in a time of black swans and unanticipated consequences, of huge, startling events affecting millions or billions of people happening with little foreseeability.

Yes, after a 9-11, or a financial meltdown, or a Space Shuttle disaster, or a huge oil drilling spill, there will be plenty of “told you so” stories and “I saw it coming, they just wouldn’t listen” claims. (Coming up, perhaps: an Internet-driven wave of computer crashes, some kind of problem with renegade man-made life forms, and of course, crazy weather and water/crop shortages from greenhouse gasses). The problem is, there are just too many such warnings and stories. If we heeded and reacted to them all (including my own here), if we cautiously regulated every economic or technological venture, the modern world might not be able to sustain almost 7 billion people (with maybe ½ billion of them living according to modern western standards, with its high resource usage). Humankind is in a place where it never has been before, and it is trying its best to cope. But perhaps it is pushing both mother nature and human nature too far.

Unfortunately, both the liberals and the Tea Party people seem to discount this possibility. They say that the solution is more government or less government or a different government. But what if the real problem is that there are just too many of us doing too many complex things to this planet in order to sustain ourselves (including our complex governments), and are thus losing control of the overall scheme of it?

How can we humanely respond to that? I myself don’t see a way; about all we can do is to hope for a miracle, e.g. some kind of tremendous new energy resource that is relatively clean, cheap, portable and easy to use (about the only thing on the radar today even remotely like that is cold fusion, which is an extremely long shot; sorry, but solar, wind and biofuels don’t have nearly the “energy return on investment” needed to make up for what oil and coal did for humankind in the 20th Century).

After our chat was over and BP and the oil industry were roundly condemned, after the heart-wrenching tales of innocent oil-covered pelicans and conniving corporate humans, everyone headed for their cars so as to burn more of the fuel which necessitates aggressive oil exploration in the Gulf. Myself included; so I can’t be all that smug here. But I do believe that I see where it’s all heading right now, and unfortunately I can’t be too optimistic about it. I can only hope that something will come along to prevent humankind from entering a painful era of adjustment, with population levels dropping by 2 or 3 billion people over the next century or two (recall that it gained 4.4 billion in the 20th Century, after taking almost 120 centuries to reach the 1.6 billion level).

I’m sorry, fans of Huffington and NPR, but despite all that you CAN blame on BP (and there certainly is a lot), you aren’t able to blame them for THAT. And woe unto you followers of Limbaugh and FOXNEWS, who blame Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi entirely for the great decline. Why don’t we all stop squabbling, look straight ahead at the brick wall that we are headed for, and try to work together to do whatever we can? People today are more polarized and opinionated and divided than ever. It’s going to take a really huge crisis to bring our nation, not to mention our world, back together.

I think I can see that crisis coming.