All of which raises the doomsday scenario. With our global climate hanging in the balance, could competitive society be humanity’s final undoing? Is not the game already set—the game of working for money, scored in paychecks, cars, and houses, with weekends and vacations for “work-hard-play-hard” ecologically disruptive leisure, instead of easy surfing? Will we thus only worsen the warming problem? Will our perpetual and restless striving to prove our worth cease only in death, block our attunement to the foreboding new condition of scarcity, and literally court the end of human civilization as we know it? It certainly might. Must it? What would be the alternative?

  We must search for an answer.

  * * *

  *1 Note that here “fuck off” indicates an attitude of alienation, but not radical alienation. A surfer would count as having “fucked off” simply by leaving the zone of competition for waves. He might be back in the thick the next day, with memories of yesterday quickly fading.

  *2 No Exit (1947), in No Exit and Three Other Plays (New York: Vintage, 1989), p. 45.

  *3 This is the guy (they are mainly men) who takes special advantages in cooperative life out of an entrenched sense of entitlement that immunizes him against the complaints of other people. The “special advantages” here would be easy right-of-way; you get whatever wave you paddle for, because people steer clear. See my book Assholes: A Theory.

  *4 Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in Economics for her study of “common pool resource” schemes worldwide, in fisheries or forests or even international relations (for example, the successful Montreal Protocol manages the ozone layer by regulating standards for chlorofluorocarbon usage).

  *5 The other two greatest works ever are Plato’s Republic and John Rawls’s Theory of Justice, at least according to the late G. A. Cohen, a fierce Marxist turned socialist critic of all three.

  *6 Or instead of “bro,” which is continental American, it may be the South African “bru,” or the Hawaiian “brah,” or the Australian or Kiwi “mate.” There’s less variation in the localism BS around the planet.

  *7 One village in Nicaragua close to quality surf breaks does have a murder culture, though I wasn’t told that it seeps into the water when I was taken through the village harbor on the way to the waves. An even larger murder culture in nearby Guatemala is found in a city inland.

  *8 See Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977). And on “cooperative sovereignty,” see Abram Chayes and Antonia Handler Chayes, The New Sovereignty: Compliance with International Regulatory Agreements (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995).

  *9 Of the Social Contract (1762), in Rousseau: The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

  *10 Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality Among Men (1754), in The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pt. 2, para. 16, p. 166.

  *11 Ibid.

  *12 Of the Social Contract.

  *13 Though legal action is more recently under way. See “Lunada ‘Bay Boys’ Surfer Gang Hit with Another Class-Action Lawsuit,” Los Angeles Times, Aug. 5, 2016, http://www.latimes.com/​local/​lanow/​la-me-ln-lunada-bay-boys-lawsuit-20160805-snap-story.html.

  *14 This wouldn’t solve the traditional problem of how one could have evidence of another mind. Yet as Thomas Nagel explains, it does speak to the deeper problem of how we could even understand the proposition we might or might not have evidence for, that another mind exists. How, as Sartre puts it, could I understand a “self which is not myself”? This cannot be constructed on the basis of our knowledge of ourselves. As Nagel explains, “The cogito is not a compound built up out of the prior and independent concept of the I together with the idea of thought. Rather, the I is revealed only as the subject of this thought. Similarly, the concept of the Other is extracted from the more basic experience of shame, which is a form of the experience of being seen.” “Sartre: The Look and the Problem of Other Minds,” in Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament: Essays, 2002–2008 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 168.

  *15 Actually, if what’s recognized is the Other’s freedom, the idea may be closer to Simone de Beauvoir’s version of mutual recognition. In breaking from Sartre, she draws on Hegel’s (and perhaps J. G. Fichte’s) view that a slave can command a sort of recognition of his basic freedom from his master, simply by speaking to him and being understood. That idea was in turn inspired by Rousseau’s provocative claim that being recognized as a political equal “forces us to be free.” See Nancy Bauer, Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), p. 155.

  *16 On waffling between a demeaning acquiescence and a personally disappointing and ineffectual fit of rage, and how to find a middle path, see my book Assholes: A Theory, pp. 120–43.

  *17 Arthur Danto makes this criticism, noting that shame (perhaps unlike guilt) is essentially a matter of social appearance, in Jean-Paul Sartre, p. 122.

  *18 According to the philosopher Casey Hall, shame differs from mere humiliation in its moral aspect: “The belief that characterizes experiences of humiliation is, ‘I am in fact seen as lessened or diminished in the eyes of others whether I deserve to be seen in this way or not.’ On the other hand the characterizing belief in instances of shame is, ‘I deserve to be seen as lessened or diminished in the eyes of others whether I am in fact seen that way or not.’ Shame relates to one’s values in a way that humiliation need not, and shame has a moral component that humiliation lacks.” “Shame, Humiliation, and Punishment in the Liberal State” (Ph.D. diss., UC Irvine, 2013).

  *19 That great friend of surfers and the last major liberal environmentalist, the Republican U.S. president Richard Nixon, opened the Trestles area on the north end of Camp Pendleton to the public, after years of MPs confiscating the surfboards of desperate wave-seeking surfers. Nixon had a house—the “Western White House”—there on Cotton’s Point. The Secret Service still tried to outlaw surfing while Nixon was in town, for reasons of security (I guess even surfer dudes could incite his paranoia). See David Morris’s “Surfing in Nixonland,” New York Times, Sept. 6, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/​2016/​09/​06/​opinion/​surfing-in-nixonland.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-iphone-share.

  *20 John Rawls distinguishes such “legitimate expectations” under a practice (of being given a promised reward) from secondary ideas of desert according to moral worth or reward for virtue. Theory of Justice, sec. 48.

  *21 Flame is a pyrotechnician—though only coincidentally. The nickname (his name is Michael Robinson) derives from a surfing accident to his groin in Mozambique. What was then a new surf break was subsequently dubbed “flame balls.”

  *22 I’ve heard of (but never experienced) an arrangement in which one person calls out numbers. Each person takes whatever wave is coming when his or her number is called out. This will only work in a small common wave zone, but the system was presumed to cover the whole surf break. Those who preferred to hunt waves around the margins, without taking a number, were called “scabs.” In this scenario, I’d probably wait in line for a few waves and then scab.

  *23 This was done more from zeal and obliviousness than from any sense of entitlement. I didn’t try to defend my greater share, so I hope I was merely being a pig and not an asshole.

  *24 In “Toward Perpetual Peace” (1795), Kant focused on economic integration as the basis for peace, which turns out to be less important than democracy, though perhaps still a contributing factor. Immanuel Kant, To Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003).

  *25 Michael W. Doyle, Liberal Peace: Selected Essays (New York: Routledge, 2011).

  *26 Elizabeth Anderson, “Common Property,” Boston Review, July 25, 2016, https://bostonreview.net/​editors-picks-us-books-ideas/​elizabeth-anderson-common-property.

  *27 In his Marxist phase, G. A. Cohen argued advanced capitalism is inherently biased against reducing toil and extending leisure. Business competition is inherently biased toward expanding output instead. The bias against leisure is only by “broad empirical generalization,” which admits exceptions. I’d say the forty-hour workweek is a huge exception, even if “antagonism” is the rule. Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), p. 311n1, and the section “A Distinctive Contradiction of Advanced Capitalism.”

  *28 See his wonderful Law, Legislation, and Liberty, vol. 1, Rules and Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973).

  *29 See his not-so-wonderful Law, Legislation, and Liberty, vol. 2, The Mirage of Social Justice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976). He still bought a version of Hobbes’s bad dichotomy between the sovereign’s rule and anarchy, simply being more bullish about “anarchy,” which could generate “spontaneous order.” Still, arguably even the purest capitalism must be “embedded” in institutions that regulate property and other rights within judicial, administrative, and legislative systems. See the sociologist Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957).

  *30 Dani Rodrik, The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011); and One Economics, Many Recipes: Globalization, Institutions, and Economic Growth (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007).

  *31 We might define capitalism in general as an economic system mainly of private property that relies largely on markets for the production and allocation of goods, services, and capital. A system that has more public property and relies less on markets would still be capitalism until it shades into a society much further along the spectrum that mainly has public property and largely doesn’t rely on markets for economic decisions. Every advanced society today lies somewhere in the middle, as do most developing countries.

  *32 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).

  *33 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 70.

  *34 Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality Among Men.

  8

  Nature

  You cannot step in the same river twice.

  —Heraclitus

  DESERT POINT WILL BE among the first surf breaks to be swamped as sea levels rise with global warming. I’m sure its unusual geo-situation there on the west edge of Lombok, in the Lombok Strait, a southern passage of the Indonesian Throughflow, has something to do with the extraordinary quality of its long, tubing blue-green walls. Indian Ocean swells mount suddenly upon the shallow reef, having traversed the depths of the strait, which is itself a small part of the global heat conveyor belt that regulates our planet’s average temperature, as warm freshwater flows through from the Pacific into the Indian Ocean. But the warming trend in that very system won’t be kind to Deserts. The spot needs a low and preferably rising tide to turn on, and with the predicted three to fifteen extra feet of water on the reef from rising sea levels, depending on the scenario, the majestically reeling wave walls will be transformed into high-tide-like mush—what French surfers call merde.

  Nearly all of the world’s surf breaks require certain tides if the waves are to be any good for surfing. Whether high, low, or somewhere in the middle, the tidal level at a given time determines how shallow the water is over the reef or sand bottom, and so how the waves refract, mount, and peel as they arrive from deeper water. Although each surf break works under its own set of conditions, which local surfers obsessively track (with sophisticated surf forecasts, which they check and recheck, amid much voyeuristic peering at the waves), a higher tide will leave most breaks fat, shifty, and lethargic.

  Even a surfer can fall into despair at the thought that any of this would actually happen. Desert Point and a whole raft of low-tide breaks will be gone with only a few extra feet of water, and most of the half-decent spots we’ve surfed and loved since our youth will be swamped eventually. What took thousands upon thousands of years to form into just the right wave structure will become merde, forever. (Or at least for thousands more years, which comes to the same thing, humanly speaking.)

  Structure and Flow

  A flow, whether a breaking wave, a flowing stream, or the Indonesian Throughflow, always flows through something that is not flowing, a structure that shapes how the flow flows, allowing it to have a flowing dynamic.

  In a flowing river, the riverbed shapes the water, perhaps in a bending or switching path. At the beach, the bottom contours and sea level combine to structure and shape how each wave breaks. The various islands and waterways and bottom topography of the Indonesian Throughflow shape the flow of freshwater from the Pacific into the Indian Ocean. Throughout nature, flows depend, physically and metaphysically, on an underlying structure.

  People and society are of course part of nature, and so the metaphysics of flow and structure applies to them as well. On a wave, a surfer can go along with a wave’s flow only because certain other things are in alignment—only because, as the breaking wave peaks and shifts, certain other structural contours remain relatively fixed. While riding along, a surfer will have given a flowing performance only within the constraints of the wave itself and the rough repertoire of evolving surfing practice. In surfer society, surfers flowingly cooperate, more or less, within the structure of wave etiquette, together adapting to their changing environment, much as societies have always adapted, lest they perish.

  And if consciousness itself flows as we feel it must, its subjective feel certainly depends on underlying mental structures. Kant thought that basic “categories” of understanding (space, time, and causation) had to structure any human experience or “intuition,” no matter how spontaneous it seemed. Experiencing beauty worked differently, in a “free play” or “free harmony” of thought in imagination, in a freer-flowing consciousness, which is less constrained and more enjoyable than observing a cup on a table. Yet even Sartre was a Kantian at the deepest level. Consciousness flows very freely, but still within our structured physical makeup (our “facticity”).

  A flow is only as permanent as its underlying structure, and so may or may not be lasting or dependable. For a flow to flow for a time, a structuring relationship has to be there over that span of time. Yet the relationship may itself be dynamic. A structure will give a flow its shape at any instant, or over a stretch of flowing, as when a kink in the riverbed turns the water flow over an afternoon or a week. A flow can also shape its own shaping structure as time passes, as when the flow of river water gradually erodes the kink. The two can change each other in a larger environment, as long as the basic structure/flow relationship doesn’t change too much all at once. When big changes come too quickly, we lose the crucial difference between change and disappearance. A big enough flood won’t change the stream’s water flow, but simply wash the whole stream away.

  And therein lies the problem of climate change. The relationship between crucial ecological flows and their structures is changing too quickly. Although average temperatures have always varied from epoch to epoch in the planetary scheme of things, the Industrial Revolution brought a sudden burst of heat-trapping emissions. And because the carbon dioxide, methane, and other gases we’ve pumped up into the atmosphere cannot be fully reabsorbed by natural processes (for example, by sea algae, which is a major carbon sink), they linger and trap the sun’s rays, steadily raising average global temperatures. So while our capitalism and sources of energy have created wealth at once unimaginable levels, they have also permanently and radically changed the way our climate and oceans structure earthly life and society.

  Here I just stipulate the going scientific consensus about planetary warming trends, their human causes, and the risks that range from major to cataclysmic as givens. I personally take the science at face value. More skeptical readers might note that our present concern is simply the philosophical question of ethics under uncertainty. If we assume for the sake of argument that our planet is warming, potentially with catastrophic consequences, the question is, what follows, ethically speaking? It’s at least an interesting thought experiment. And if there’s any real chance that climate science is onto something major, it seems fair to say we shouldn’t slough off any question of our responsibility, like some lazy and oblivious surfer.

  “Bru, Don’t Stress”

  My dear South African friend Graeme, a consummate surfer, isn’t excessively sunny as a person. So even aside from the edgy style of South African political argument, I was surprised to hear that in a conversation about the potential end of surfing with his fellow South African surfers, they became rather pissed off by his note of cautious optimism.

  The others were apparently voicing existential despair at the very thought of rising sea levels. I’m sure they do worry about the risks of increasing droughts, famines, floods, hurricanes, resource wars, migrations, the millions of deaths to ensue, and the woman on the Bangladeshi floodplains who will be cast to the four winds, having lost everything. But for the moment these surfers, being surfers, were preoccupied with the fact that with rising sea levels, the world’s great and half-decent surf breaks will be submerged, indefinitely.