Criticality, Tipping Points, Phase Changes and the Prospect of Transforming Transient Irrationality to Autocratic Lunacy

If you are angry — knowing anger at injustice and cruel stupidity is not a moral fault — you have to find your inspiration for action wherever it appears. For me, when all else fails, I turn to Albert Camus. And this moment in history, six short months from a national midterm election, we are on the brink of a failure from which we might never recover. It’s a moment of “criticality,” or as MIT professor César Hidalgo calls it, “a state” when a system is “ripe for a phase transition… [like] water turning into ice or a cloud pregnant with rain.”

Phase transitions, however, can take positive turns as well as disastrous ones. This Tuesday is primary election day in New Mexico. And one way for frustrated and angry Democrats to start tipping politics in a sane direction is to vote for clear-headed, unambiguously environmental candidates — if you consider, that is, climate change to be the greatest issue New Mexico will face in the future, both as a hair-raising threat to our water supply but also as a generator of domestic refugees.

When it comes to the big races, my choices are Michelle Lujan Grisham for governor and Deb Haaland in the District 1 Congressional race. The Democratic candidate who has the best chance to defeat arch-conservative and anti-environmental Republican Congressman Steve Pearce is Lujan Grisham. The current Republican Governor Susanna Martinez has left New Mexico so wretchedly unprepared for facing the politics and ground-level reality of water disputes in the West that eight more years of Republican climate change denial could dry us up altogether.

Of all the candidates in the District 1 primary, and there are many excellent ones, Deb Haaland is the only candidate with such an unambiguous environmental stance that Bill McKibben, perhaps the world’s foremost expert in global warming, has endorsed her. And that says everything to me. Haaland also has a good chance now to come out on top after former candidate Pat Davis dropped out of the primary race and joined his campaign with Haaland’s — an admirable, remarkably rare, politically astute and selfless move on his part. Why the Democrats chose to run four of their best candidates for one congressional seat is beyond me. Although I did hear one state senator remark that, really, Democratic candidates are on their own in New Mexico, with the party itself “almost non-extant.”

This primary election is the place to start addressing the reality of criticality, one that, at the moment, could see the world as we know it turn from something resembling rationality, stunted though it may always be, to something Camus would describe as a condition of absurdity. Imagine a whole city swallowed up by the ocean, or swept away by sand, all because the mere financial interests of a few fossil fuel moguls have prevailed over the life-and-death interests of millions of children, women and men, stranded in the heat sink of the world.

In our region, this criticality of the absurd is taking the form of a drought so profound that no one can deny it anymore, though many still write it off as a “natural” fluke and not created by the deadly sin of human greed. It also takes the form of a sadistically brutal war on “immigrants” and their children. The “state” of a phase transition is upon us, when we could find ourselves being forced to leave our own homes, driven by the acute absence of water, and join the ranks of immigrants, albeit domestic privileged immigrants, and suddenly feel the foul breath of a democracy phase changing into a carnivorous, corporate, fascist dragon.

It’s not that this November election itself will actually change anything, or do more than slow down the critical phase transition in process now, but it could move us from a situation in which positive change is utterly impossible against the dogmatic forces of the status quo into one in which drastic change might be stimulated and the phase transition moved into reverse. The autocratic Right won’t be changed. The centrist Left might be moved away from the absurdity of collaboration, if nudged, of course, with the proper application of organized, aggressive democratic politics.

If anger or conscience can’t move us in November, the picture is grimmer than anyone could have imagined. Let’s just take water and immigration in the Southwest.

In a remarkable piece by former Albuquerque Tribune reporter Tony Davis in the Arizona Daily Star out of Tucson, we see even one of the most conservative states in the union is having to face the reality that climate change-induced drought could wreak havoc on the economy and way of life of all Arizonans. And in doing so, bring us down with it.

In a deeply researched column, Davis makes it clear that Arizona will do just about anything to keep the water flowing from the Colorado River. In a nutshell, if the water level at Lake Mead, which is fed by Lake Powell, drops to 1,000 feet, which it is close enough to now to cause major worries, then major cuts in water delivery to Phoenix and Tucson would be mandated. If Arizona, California and Nevada can’t come up with a realistic drought contingency plan, it’s possible that the Southwest could see Secretary of Interior Ryan Zinke imposing drastic water cuts in all three states, which could mean that a provision in the Colorado Compact might require New Mexico, Colorado, Utah and Wyoming to curtail their use of Colorado River water until California, Nevada and even Arizona get their shares. This could be the start of a catastrophe for us.

What would happen to international immigration in this country, already acting in legally questionable territory to callously deport or imprison tens of thousands of people, if we added to it a randomized, floating urban refugee situation in the Southwest, as city populations adjust to water scarcity and the business migration that goes with it? I could see situations in which all indigenous Hispanics in the Southwest could feel the pressure of racial profiling, like they do now in Arizona. What if water compacts and bare-knuckle politics make it that some cities get all the water they need and others don’t? We would see fluctuations of urban domestic migration. Because climate change denial has swept aside serious sociological thinking about the demographic impact of climate change, we could get caught by a phase transition in which once-stable urban populations start moving in erratic ways, following the political flow of water and swamping cities and regions not ready to accommodate them.

This is where Camus has much to teach us. Camus’ sense of absurdity was leavened by his devotion to help make life meaningfully better for everyone, even in a world in which meaning is tied to value systems, and their laws, which are falling, or have fallen, apart. He knew that the world had a tendency to fall short of its own ideals, and when it did, minor disputes, fought so heatedly, were inundated by the kind of catastrophic change that no one in their right minds would want.

This year sees us in a similar situation, albeit in utterly different circumstances than Camus experienced in colonial Algeria. It’s time to get serious and remember Camus’ warning: “A man without ethics is like a wild beast loosed upon the world.” The wild beast is among us. We have to use the tools at hand to do the best we can to defend ourselves and the life we love. The November election is the sharpest weapon we have at the moment. It seems pretty flimsy. But it’s what we’ve got.

*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it

(Image derived from photos by mckineey75402 and Sonse)