2639. Who Can Stop the Climate Crisis?

By Kamran Nayeri, June 27, 2017

The transition to a post-carbon society is largely political

In the “100%-Renewables: A Few Remarks about the Jacobson/Clack Controversy” (June 27, 2017) François-Xavier Chevallerau, Founder-Director of the Biophysical Economics Policy Center based in Brussels, has made an insightful contribution to the debate about the technical feasibility of transition to a post-carbon society powered by “clean” renewables by the mid-21 century.  (For Jacobson et. al. papers see here; for Clack et.al paper see here)  Mr. Chevallerau argues the scientific/technical debate is missing the point. The transition to a post-carbon society is mostly political, not technical.  Thus, he writes:

“This debate is or should be, first a foremost, a political debate, and the outcome of the transition will depend, first and foremost, on how we will manage to design, implement, and sustain new economic, social and political balances of power, within and between countries. This, much more than the accuracy of technical roadmaps that we may be able to design today, will determine whether, how and how successfully we will be able to transition to renewables.”

Mr. Chevallerau’s observation is a critical one that I hope will receive recognition among broader layers of the climate justice and ecology movements.  But he leaves the crucial question of who would “design, implement, and sustain new economic, social and political balances of power, within and between countries” hanging. Would that be the world capitalist elite? Or the billions of citizens of the world who by-and-large are excluded from such policy discussions? 

The climate justice and ecology movements lag

Last September in a review essay focusing on action programs to stop and reverse the climate crisis, I welcomed Bill McKibben’s policy essay "A Wold at War" in the New Republic that embraced the Jacobson et.al. plan for transition to a post-carbon society but criticized it for reducing the climate crisis to a technical matter (Nayeri September 3, 2016).  

In my view, the climate crisis is one aspect, a crucial one to be sure, of the planetary crisis, which includes another existential threat, the Sixth Extinction.  The planetary crisis itself is the manifestation of the Anthropocene (Age of Man), a new geological epoch in which human productive/destructive powers have grown so much that they are undermining the life-support systems of the planet. The monstrous growth of productive/destructive forces themselves is the result of the dynamics of the anthropocentric industrial capitalist civilization, itself the latest in a series of civilizations organized to exploit nature and labor for the ruling elite. Some of these civilizations collapsed due to ecological crises.  Clearly, we cannot honestly believe that the planetary crisis, including the climate crisis, can be overcome without transcending the anthropocentric industrial capitalist civilization. 

Would the Democratic Party do it? 

In the same essay, I noted what I considered as progress especially by the authors of The Leap Manifesto: A Call for a Canada Based on Caring for the Earth and One Another but also even by Edward O. Wilson who proposed to set aside at least half of the planet for wildness reserves as a way to stop and reverse the Sixth Extinction, and by The Climate Mobilization’s Victory Plan because it did not limit itself to restoring “a safe and stable climate” by calling for action to reverse the “ecological overshoot” and ending the Sixth Extinction.  The Victory Plan included a laudable transformation of the energy, food, transportation and other systems. They called for a World War II-style governmental mobilization to implement such changes. 

The fundamental problem with these proposals is the “crucial question” posed by Mr. Chevallerau. Who is going to change the world? The world capitalist elite who benefit from the status quo or the billions of working people who must be transformed in consciousness as part of the process to transcend the anthropocentric capitalist civilization? 

During the 2016 presidential election, we learned what McKibben and the 350.org  and The Climate Mobilization opted for. They turned from climate justice coalitions into campaign offices to get the vote out for Hillary Clinton who openly endorsed fracking and was the favorite candidate of the capitalist class (None of the Fortune 100 contributed to the Trump's campaign).  When Clinton did not win the presidency, the climate justice movement experienced a setback because the larger forces in it based their strategy and tactic on the Democratic Party being in power.  Ezra Silk, a leader of The Climate Mobilization, wrote in an email that they are going to revisit their strategy.  That is because their strategy was to elect public officials who would be climate policy friendly.  Of course, anyone interested in political history would know that the labor movement, the women's movement, the balck movement, and the enviromentalist movement, all followed this policy for decades and are all in crisis today.  The "strategy" is a failure. 

The sudden decision by the 350.org and The Climate Mobilization to support Hillary Clinton betrayed another problem.  They turned a climate justice coalition, this is what they say they are, into a vote-gathering machine for the Democratic Party, one the two pillars of power of the American and world capitalist elite, without any discussion among their membership.  In this, they betrayed the trust of those who worked with them.  In 350.org affiliate in Sonoma County, California, several members were left with no choice but to withdraw, including those who supported Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, and myself who supported none of the nationally known candidates.  Clearly, these organizations cannot be leaders of a transformational movement to end the planetary crisis. 

The problem is even deeper. Edward O. Wilson’s proposal to stop the Sixth Extinction overtly relies on the magic of the competitive market economy which he says is the socially constructed parallel of the evolutionary biology. (Nayeri 2017) 

Organizing from below

To be sure, there are reforms that can and should be fought for win under capitalism.  But even fighting for such reforms should be carried out in ways that increase the self-reliance and self-confidence of the working people as it they who must transform Our Way of Life to become compatible with a just and ecologically sound society. 

Suppose the People’s Climate March some 200,000 people in Washington D.C. on April 29 educated each and everyone about the root-causes for climate change and about our own action program forged in a broad and democratic discussion in the movement to stop and reverse it.  Furthermore, suppose that everyone who came to the march would commit to educate, organize and mobilize a family member, friend, neighbor, coworker, fellow student, etc.,  as part of the climate justice movement.  Assume this process is repeated every six month—each person in our movement would recruit a new person over the course of the next six month.  Watch how the number of climate justice activists grow over time.

• April 2017 200,000 participants in the People’s Climate March
• October 2017  400,000 climate justice activists or active supporters
• April 2018  800,000 climate justice activists or active supporters
• October 1,600,000 climate justice activists or active supporters
• April 2019 3,200,000 climate justice activists or active supporters
• October 2019  6,400,000 climate justice activists or active supporters
• April 2020 12,800,000 climate justice activists or active supporters
• October 2020 25,600,000 climate justice activists or active supporters

Would this not be a formidable force in the streets demanding affirmative change according to our own action program, not one cooked up by the capitalist elite, their politicians, technocrats, and bureaucrats? More importantly, would it not also be a transformation in the making in-and-of itself.  Clearly, such activists would live according to what we preach.  A new world would be unfolding as part of our climate justice and ecological movements' daily activities.  

The problem is not that this is not possible.  History tells us this is how radical social change ever happens.  The problem is that too many of us are too tied up in the political and ideological hegemony of the anthropocentric industrial capitalist civilization that can envisage a strategy of mass education, organization, and mobilization truly independent of the capitalist overlords and to break with institutional arrangements that we have grown to feel comfortable with even though they undermine us and eventually us as a species. 

But the planetary crisis is an existential crisis.  There are no saviors from within the system. I invite the reader to offer her/his own view of how to proceed.  

Acknowledgment: Thanks to Bill Henderson for sharing Chevallerau's commentary.  Of course, he bears no responsibility for my views expressed here. 

References:

Chevallerau, François-Xavier. “100% Renewables—A Few Remarks about the Jacobson/Clack Controversy.” The Biophysical Economics Policy Center, June 26, 2017. 

Nayeri, Kamran. “Strategy and Tactics for the Climate Justice Movement: A Critique of 350.org ‘Break Free from Fossil Fuels’ Campaign.” Our Place in the World: A Journal of Ecosocialism, March 31, 2016.
————————. “How to Stop the Sixth Extinction: A Critical Assessment of E. O. Wilson’s Half-Earth.” Our Place in the World: A Journal of Ecosocialism. May 14, 2017.

2638. Philosophy vs. Science: A Dialogue

By Julian Baggini and Lawrence Krauss, The Guardian, September 9, 2017

Julian Baggini No one who has understood even a fraction of what science has told us about the universe can fail to be in awe of both the cosmos and of science. When physics is compared with the humanities and social sciences, it is easy for the scientists to feel smug and the rest of us to feel somewhat envious. Philosophers, in particular, can suffer from lab-coat envy. If only our achievements were so clear and indisputable! How wonderful it would be to be free from the duty of constantly justifying the value of your discipline.

However – and I'm sure you could see a "but" coming – I do wonder whether science hasn't suffered from a little mission creep of late. Not content with having achieved so much, some scientists want to take over the domain of other disciplines.

I don't feel proprietorial about the problems of philosophy. History has taught us that many philosophical issues can grow up, leave home and live elsewhere. Science was once natural philosophy and psychology sat alongside metaphysics. But there are some issues of human existence that just aren't scientific. I cannot see how mere facts could ever settle the issue of what is morally right or wrong, for example.

Some of the things you have said and written suggest that you share some of the science's imperialist ambitions. So tell me, how far do you think science can and should offer answers to the questions that are still considered the domain of philosophy?

Lawrence Krauss Thanks for the kind words about science and your generous attitude. As for your "but" and your sense of my imperialist ambitions, I don't see it as imperialism at all. It's merely distinguishing between questions that are answerable and those that aren't. To first approximation, all the answerable ones end up moving into the domain of empirical knowledge, aka science.

Getting to your question of morality, for example, science provides the basis for moral decisions, which are sensible only if they are based on reason, which is itself based on empirical evidence. Without some knowledge of the consequences of actions, which must be based on empirical evidence, then I think "reason" alone is impotent. If I don't know what my actions will produce, then I cannot make a sensible decision about whether they are moral or not. Ultimately, I think our understanding of neurobiology and evolutionary biology and psychology will reduce our understanding of morality to some well-defined biological constructs.

The chief philosophical questions that do grow up are those that leave home. This is particularly relevant in physics and cosmology. Vague philosophical debates about cause and effect, and something and nothing, for example – which I have had to deal with since my new book appeared – are very good examples of this. One can debate until one is blue in the face what the meaning of "non-existence" is, but while that may be an interesting philosophical question, it is really quite impotent, I would argue. It doesn't give any insight into how things actually might arise and evolve, which is really what interests me.

JB I've got more sympathy with your position than you might expect. I agree that many traditional questions of metaphysics are now best approached by scientists and you do a brilliant job of arguing that "why is there something rather than nothing?" is one of them. But we are missing something if we say, as you do, that the "chief philosophical questions that do grow up are those that leave home". I think you say this because you endorse a principle that the key distinction is between empirical questions that are answerable and non-empirical ones that aren't.

My contention is that the chief philosophical questions are those that grow up without leaving home, important questions that remain unanswered when all the facts are in. Moral questions are the prime example. No factual discovery could ever settle a question of right or wrong. But that does not mean that moral questions are empty questions or pseudo-questions. We can think better about them and can even have more informed debates by learning new facts. What we conclude about animal ethics, for example, has changed as we have learned more about non-human cognition.

What is disparagingly called scientism insists that, if a question isn't amenable to scientific solution, it is not a serious question at all. I would reply that it is an ineliminable feature of human life that we are confronted with many issues that are not scientifically tractable, but we can grapple with them, understand them as best we can and we can do this with some rigour and seriousness of mind.

It sounds to me as though you might not accept this and endorse the scientistic point of view. Is that right?

LK In fact, I've got more sympathy with your position than you might expect. I do think philosophical discussions can inform decision-making in many important ways, by allowing reflections on facts, but that ultimately the only source of facts is via empirical exploration. And I agree with you that there are many features of human life for which decisions are required on issues that are not scientifically tractable. Human affairs and human beings are far too messy for reason alone, and even empirical evidence, to guide us at all stages. I have said I think Lewis Carroll was correct when suggesting, via Alice, the need to believe several impossible things before breakfast. We all do it every day in order to get out of bed – perhaps that we like our jobs, or our spouses, or ourselves for that matter.

Where I might disagree is the extent to which this remains time-invariant. What is not scientifically tractable today may be so tomorrow. We don't know where the insights will come from, but that is what makes the voyage of discovery so interesting. And I do think factual discoveries can resolve even moral questions.

Take homosexuality, for example. Iron age scriptures might argue that homosexuality is "wrong", but scientific discoveries about the frequency of the homosexual behavior in a variety of species tell us that it is completely natural in a rather fixed fraction of populations and that it has no apparent negative evolutionary impacts. This surely tells us that it is biologically based, not harmful and not innately "wrong". In fact, I think you actually accede to this point about the impact of science when you argue that our research into non-human cognition has altered our view of ethics.

I admit I am pleased to have read that you agree that "why is there something rather than nothing?" is a question best addressed by scientists. But, in this regard, as I have argued that "why" questions are really "how" questions, would you also agree that all "why" questions have no meaning, as they presume "purpose" that may not exist?

JB It would certainly be foolish to rule out in advance the possibility that what now appears to be a non-factual question might one day be answered by science. But it's also important to be properly sceptical about how far we anticipate science being able to go. If not, then we might be too quick to turn over important philosophical issues to scientists prematurely.

Your example of homosexuality is a case in point. I agree that the main reasons for thinking it is wrong are linked with outmoded ways of thought. But the way you put it, it is because science shows us that homosexual behavior "is completely natural", "has no apparent negative evolutionary impacts", is "biologically based" and "not harmful" that we can conclude it is "not innately 'wrong'". But this mixes up ethical and scientific forms of justification. Homosexuality is morally acceptable, but not for scientific reasons. Right and wrong are not simply matters of evolutionary impacts and what is natural. There have been claims, for example, that rape is both natural and has evolutionary advantages. But the people who made those claims were also at great pains to stress this did not make them right – efforts that critics sadly ignored. Similar claims have been made for infidelity. What science tells us about the naturalness of certain sexual behaviors informs ethical reflection, but does not determine its conclusions. We need to be clear on this. It's one thing to accept that one day these issues might be better addressed by scientists than philosophers, quite another to hand them over prematurely.

LK Once again, there are only subtle disagreements. We have an intellect and can, therefore, override various other biological tendencies in the name of social harmony. However, I think that science can either modify or determine our moral convictions. The fact that infidelity, for example, is a fact of biology must, for any thinking person, modify any "absolute" condemnation of it. Moreover, that many moral convictions vary from society to society means that they are learned and, therefore, the province of psychology. Others are more universal and are, therefore, hard-wired – a matter of neurobiology. A retreat to moral judgment too often assumes some sort of illusionary belief in free will which I think is naive.

I want to change the subject. I admit I am pleased that you agree that "why is there something rather than nothing" is a question best addressed by scientists. But I claim more generally that the only meaningful "why" questions are really "how" questions. Do you agree?

Let me give an example to put things in context. Astronomer Johannes Kepler claimed in 1595 to answer an important "why" question: why are there six planets? The answer, he believed, lay in the five Platonic solids whose faces can be composed of regular polygons – triangles, squares, etc – and which could be circumscribed by spheres whose size would increase as the number of faces increased. If these spheres then separated the orbits of the planets, he conjectured, perhaps their relative distances from the sun and their number could be understood as revealing, in a deep sense, the mind of God.

"Why" was then meaningful because its answer revealed a purpose to the universe. Now, we understand the question is meaningless. We not only know there are not six planets, but moreover that our solar system is not unique, nor necessarily typical. The important question then becomes: "How does our solar system have the number of planets distributed as it does?" The answer to this question might shed light on the likelihood of finding life elsewhere in the universe, for example. Not only has "why" become "how" but "why" no longer has any useful meaning, given that it presumes purpose for which there is no evidence.

JB I don't know whether it's a virtue or a vice, but in philosophy, there is nothing "only" about subtle disagreements! But given we've got as close as we're probably going to on ethics, let's turn to the difference between "how" and "why" questions.

Again, I agree with a lot here. I am unpersuaded, for example, by the argument that there is never any conflict between religion and science because the latter deals with "how" questions and the former "why" ones. The two cannot be so easily disentangled. If a Christian argues that God explains why there was a big bang, then that inevitably says something about God's role in how the universe came into being, too. But I would not go so far as to say that all "why" questions can only be properly understood as "how" ones. The clearest example here is of human action, for which adequate explanations can rarely do without "why" questions. We do things for reasons.

Some very hard-nosed philosophers and scientists describe this as a convenient fiction, an illusion. They claim the real explanation for human action lies at the level of "how", specifically, how brains receive information, process it and then produce action.

But if we want to know why someone made a sacrifice for a person close to them, a purely neurological answer would not be a complete one. The full truth would require saying that there was a "why" at work, too: love. Love is indeed at root the product of the firings of neurons and release of hormones. How the biochemical and psychological points of view fit together is clearly puzzling, and, as your aside on free will suggests, our naive assumptions about human freedom are almost certainly false. But we have no reason to think that one-day science will make it unnecessary for us to ask "why" questions about human action to which things such as love will be the answer. Or is that romantic tosh? Is there no reason why you're bothering to have this conversation, that you are doing it simply because your brain works the way it does?

LK Well, I am certainly enjoying the conversation, which is apparently "why" I am doing it. However, I know that my enjoyment derives from hard-wired processes that make it enjoyable for humans to tangle linguistically and philosophically. I guess I would have to turn your question around and ask why (if you will excuse the "why" question!) you think that things such as love will never be reducible to the firing of neurons and biochemical reactions? For that not to be the case, there would have to be something beyond the purely "physical" that governs our consciousness. I guess I see nothing that suggests this is the case. Certainly, we already understand many aspects of sacrifice in terms of evolutionary biology. Sacrifice is, in many cases, good for the survival of a group or kin. It makes evolutionary sense for some people, in this case, to act altruistically, if propagation of genes is driving action in a basic sense. It is not a large leap of the imagination to expect that we will one day be able to break down those social actions, studied on a macro scale, to biological reactions at a micro scale.

In a purely practical sense, this may be computationally too difficult to do in the near future, and maybe it will always be so, but everything I know about the universe makes me timid to use the word always. What isn't ruled out by the laws of physics is, in some sense, inevitable. So, right now, I cannot imagine that I could computationally determine the motion of all the particles in the room in which I am breathing air so that I have to take average quantities and do statistics in order to compute physical behavior. But, one day, who knows?

JB Who knows? Indeed. Which is why philosophy needs to accept it may one day be made redundant. But science also has to accept there may be limits to its reach.

I don't think there is more stuff in the universe than the stuff of physical science. But I am sceptical that human behavior could ever be explained by physics or biology alone. Although we are literally made of the same stuff as stars, that stuff has organised itself so complexly that things such as consciousness have emerged that cannot be fully understood only by examining the bedrock of bosons and fermions. At least, I think they can't. I'm happy for physicists to have a go. But, until they succeed, I think they should refrain from making any claims that the only real questions are scientific questions and the rest is noise. If that were true, wouldn't this conversation just be noise too?

LK We can end in essential agreement then. I suspect many people think many of my conversations are just noise, but, in any case, we won't really know the answer to whether science can yield a complete picture of reality, good at all levels, unless we try. You and I agree fundamentally that physical reality is all there is, but we merely have different levels of optimism about how effectively and how completely we can understand it via the methods of science. I continue to be surprised by the progress that is possible by continuing to ask questions of nature and let her answer through experiment. Stars are easier to understand than people, I expect, but that is what makes the enterprise so exciting. The mysteries are what make life worth living and I would be sad if the day comes when we can no longer find answerable questions that have yet to be answered, and puzzles that can be solved. What surprises me is how we have become victims of our own success, at least in certain areas. When it comes to the universe as a whole, we may be frighteningly close to the limits of empirical inquiry as a guide to understanding. After that, we will have to rely on good ideas alone, and that is always much harder and less reliable.

Julian Baggini is a British philosopher and Lawrence M. Krauss is a Canadian-American theoretical physicist. 

2637. A Case for Community-led Sustainable Energy Programs

By Wolfgang Hoeschele, Shareable, June 23, 2017 

The energy infrastructure that we inherited from the 20th century is one dominated by fossil fuels and uranium, mined in relatively few localities in the world. The distribution and refining of these fuels is tightly held by a few large corporations. Electricity generation typically occurs in plants that hold local or regional monopolies, with vast profit potential. While gasoline is burned in millions of vehicles, the distribution system remains within the control of a few corporations, which often have regional or national oligopoly or monopoly control. The environmental impacts of the energy industry are staggering. It is high time for a change.

On the positive side, the need for change to a 21st-century energy system based on renewable sources of energy is widely recognized, the necessary technologies exist (and are often cheaper than conventional forms of energy provision), and considerable progress has been made. We can build locally-based renewable energy infrastructures. Renewable energy from the sun, wind, water, organic waste, and geothermal heat can be found everywhere on the planet. Hence, every city and town can make use of available renewable energy sources that offer economic opportunity and enhance resilience in the face of global economic crises and environmental change. On a regional level, localities can exchange energy in order to even out seasonal or daily imbalances in supply and demand.

A locally based vision of renewable energy generation could eliminate global- or national-level domination of the energy infrastructure by a few large players, and thus the concentration of profits in the hands of a very few. It could also reduce our greenhouse gas emissions to very low levels, comparable to the emissions before the industrial revolution. But the local orientation alone would not ensure that the benefits would be shared among all sectors of the local population, and therefore it would not guarantee widespread and active support. This is where sharing solutions come in. Shared energy infrastructure means that people together own and operate both the distributed energy generation facilities and the infrastructure to deliver that energy from where it is generated to where it is used.

In a sharing vision of a local renewable energy system, many households will generate their own renewable energy (as in solar photovoltaic or solar thermal systems on their rooftops), but many more, for whom this is not an option, will share in the ownership and operation of off-site renewable energy generation infrastructure such as wind turbines. The distribution systems by which energy is delivered to households will belong to cooperatives, municipalities, or trusts that are accountable to their customers and therefore do not take advantage of the potential of supply monopolies to generate economic rents (unearned income, extraordinary profits). The energy infrastructure is built by companies controlled by their employees, ensuring equitable sharing of the economic benefits. The construction and maintenance of this entire infrastructure is financed in such a way that it benefits the producers and consumers (and often prosumers — people who both produce and consume what they produce), rather than simply providing growth opportunities for the finance "industry." Consumers use their buying power to ensure that they obtain renewable energy that is produced under fair conditions.

All the elements of this locally-based, sharing vision of a renewable energy infrastructure already exist. Some have even been brought to considerable scale, as for example in Denmark, where a large proportion of the wind energy generation is accomplished by local wind cooperatives. The challenge is to bring all these elements together into mutually supportive networks, and to establish such networks essentially everywhere.

In many countries, much of the grid is owned by municipal authorities, which is an excellent solution as long as democratic accountability of these authorities is ensured. Unfortunately, there has been a trend in recent years to privatize electric distribution grids, on the basis of the argument that private control is automatically more "efficient." However, this argument is only valid if there is true market competition, which is not the case in most energy distribution systems.

In this context, the best way to ensure that a business serves its customers is for the customers to take over the business. There are different models to do this: in rural areas — as in much of the U.S. — rural electric cooperatives have long played a large role in running the local grids. In large urban areas, however, this model has not been as successful. At the urban scale, municipal ownership or trusts are more prevalent.

Finally, it is important that the workers installing all this equipment get a good deal — and this works best if they themselves own their own companies and make the important decisions. The challenge now is to bring all these elements together and help them to grow, in order to build an energy infrastructure that allows all of us to live well while ensuring good living conditions for all the other species on this planet.

2636. Film Review: John Coltrane Lite

By Marty Goodman, Socialist Action, June 22, 2017

“Chasing Trane,” a documentary film by John Scheinfeld.

“Trane is now a scope of feeling. A more fixed traveler, whose wildest onslaughts are gorgeous artifacts not even deaf people should miss.” — Amiri Baraka, poet, jazz critic, and activist

In July 1967, I heard on a late night jazz radio show in Miami that visionary jazz saxophonist John Coltrane had died at the age of 40 of liver cancer. Doom and gloom was the mood, although the host tried his best to assure us that jazz would live on—somehow. Now, 50 years later, a new Coltrane biopic film, “Chasing Trane,” is out. Written and directed by documentarian John Scheinfeld, it is the first film made in cooperation with the Coltrane family.

“Chasing Trane” is jazz retrofitted for the mainstream—that is, mostly white, middle-class jazz fans. But it is an inadequate and misleading introduction for jazz beginners. It is an anti-jazz avant-garde work that simultaneously lionizes an avant-garde icon. There isn’t one complete performance in the entire film, so people cannot judge Coltrane’s adventurous music for themselves. A “Coltrane lite” film was apparently what director Sheinfeld hoped for. Mission accomplished.

Coltrane was a jazz revolutionary, the avant-garde’s leading persona in an era of civil rights and emerging Black nationalism.

To its credit, “Chasing Trane” tells the story of the musician’s early life in Jim Crow North Carolina. As a boy, John was immersed in Black church music; two grandfathers were preachers. As African American Professor Cornell West explained in the film, ”Black music was a Black response to being terrorized and traumatized … that’s Black music, a response to a catastrophe.”

Coltrane was never overtly political, although he did attend a Malcolm X speech on the recommendation of his first wife Naima, a Muslim. But Coltrane was deeply affected by the Black struggle, Dr. King, and, as the film highlights, the 1963 racist bombing of a Black church in Birmingham, Ala., that killed four African American girls. Coltrane dedicated his mournful piece, “Alabama” to the victims, it is said, set to the cadence of an MLK speech.

In those times, Coltrane and the overwhelmingly African American jazz avant-garde were challenging conventional Western music’s structure, melody, and harmony. In particular, the avant-garde became famous for discordant, unconventional honks and angry screams. The music was sometimes overtly political, sometimes spiritual, often a mixture of both or simply neither. What was always clear was that society must change!

The mostly white jazz old-guard pushed back. In 1962, prominent jazz critic Leonard Feather, writing in Downbeat, the leading jazz magazine, called the avant-garde “anti-jazz,” a shot aimed mostly at Coltrane. Even jazz musicians got up and walked out on Coltrane, as did European audiences in hearing the work of early 20th-century modernist classical composers.

Coltrane’s evolution

After the passing of several family members, John took up music. After high school, he joined his family in Philadelphia, where he enlisted in the Navy in 1945 and joined a Navy jazz band. By ’45 he had caught live jazz god Charlie “Bird” Parker, the center of the be-bop revolution. Parker, and his gifted sidemen, trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and pianist Bud Powell, played a new, fast-paced jazz tempo that was distinctly urban and reflective of postwar Black life. Said Coltrane, “the first time I heard Bird play, it hit me right between the eyes.” John was screaming.

John Coltrane in the U.S. Navy, 1945, when he made his first jazz recordings.

After playing with lesser bands as a would-be Charlie Parker, Coltrane got to play occasionally with his idol Parker in the late ’40s. From 1949-51, Coltrane began traveling with Dizzy Gillespie and then in 1955, with trumpet superstar Miles Davis.

During the 1950s, Coltrane struggled with heroin addiction, as did many jazz musicians. Drugs were glorified by Charlie Parker as a door to creativity. By 1951 Coltrane was booted out of Dizzy Gillespie’s band, and also from Miles Davis’ classic quartet in 1957 (Miles had his own bouts with heroin), and from the band of pioneer bop composer/pianist Thelonious Monk.

Charlie Parker’s drug-ravaged body succumbed in 1955, but Coltrane cold turkeyed on his own. Coltrane was back with Miles in 1958 in time for the all-time classic Miles album, “Kind of Blue” (1959).

But with Miles, Coltrane was feeling a creative impasse. At the risk of oversimplification, Miles represented “cool jazz” to whites, a less threatening alternative to bop and the drug culture of Parker. Trane felt confined artistically and left Miles. In 1958, jazz critic Ira Gitler coined the term “sheets of sound” to describe the unique, evolving Coltrane style as he worked with Miles.

Recording “Blue Train” in Hackensack, N.J., 1957.

In the early 1960s, radical stylists appeared around Coltrane and within the broad avant-garde. The “radicals” (my favorites) included alto sax man Ornette Coleman—on a different path than Coltrane but an anti-establishment hero, particularly after his pivotal “Free Jazz” album (1960). Collaborators with Coltrane were the short-lived experimenter, saxophonist Eric Dolphy; the angry, political tenor sax man, Archie Shepp; the fearless Pharoah Sanders; bombshell innovator Albert Ayler; and pianist Cecil Taylor, whose volcanic style first took shape in the 1950s.

Several of these ground-breaking artists are still alive today—Sanders, Shepp, Coltrane bassist Reggie Workman, and Cecil Taylor. Archie Shepp’s classic first album “Four for Trane” showed Coltrane standing next to him on the cover. Yet Shepp and the others do not speak a word in the film.

A few weeks after the film was released in April, I spoke with David Murray, thought to be the best of the 1970s post-Trane tenors, rooted in Coltrane and the avant-garde. Murray dedicated an album to Coltrane tunes.

Murray was playing at the world famous Village Vanguard with his provocatively named unit “Class Struggle.” I snatched an opportune moment as Murray walked past, sax in hand: “David, quick question. Did they call you for the Coltrane movie?” He answered, “Nope, they went straight to [Wynton] Marsalis!” I shot back, “Why am I not surprised!”

To jazz radicals, trumpeter Marsalis is musical neo-conservatism incarnate, but he appears several times in the movie. Marsalis came into prominence during the Reagan era and is the longtime artistic director of “Jazz at Lincoln Center” in New York. Marsalis has been sharply criticized for his systematic exclusion of today’s talented free-jazz musicians. Marsalis has said, “post-1965 avant-garde playing is outside of jazz,” calling some avant-gardists ‘“charlatans.” That apparently sits well with Lincoln Center’s wealthy funders and cultural Czars.

Also in the film was jazz fan and ex-president Bill Clinton, who represented what Coltrane despised—war, racism, corruption and lies. Clinton, an untalented saxophone player, contributed little other than star power. What is this guy doing here, I asked myself?

Somewhat more palatable was Cornel West, the African American writer and supporter of liberal democrats. But West got with the underlying motif, dissing the avant-garde. West portrayed Coltrane’s late works as indecipherable and ultimately dismissible. “I still don’t understand it,” said West. Okay, but what are you doing in this movie?

Let the music speak for itself!

For those new to Coltrane, his creative highs include: “Giant Steps” (1960), Coltrane playing his own compositions; “My Favorite Things” (1961), a cover of the sappy Broadway tune, radically transformed into a searching, almost eastern sound; “A Love Supreme” (1964), a non-sectarian musical prayer for peace and tolerance that is Coltrane’s most revered album; the daring free-jazz “Ascension” (1965); and “Live at the Village Vanguard Again!” (1966), which includes a soul-stripping solo by Sanders.

In his book, “Black Nationalism and the Revolution in Music” (1970), Frank Kofsky quotes Archie Shepp’s brief but apt description of the music capitalist, “You own the music and we make it.” Kofsky added, “Part of the ownership Shepp refers to includes ownership of the means of mental production,” that is, club owners, the record producers and, of course, jazz filmmakers.

The genius of Coltrane will outlive the cultural mediocrity of late capitalism. Coltrane lives!

2635. U.S. Occupation of Guantánamo Naval Base Territory

By Ernesto Londoño, The New York Times, June 16, 2017

A postcard of the naval station at Guantánamo, Cuba, circa 1910.Credit Allan Seiden/Legacy Archive, via Getty Images

Guantánamo Bay, Cuba — The $4,085 check is delivered each year in April, addressed to the Treasurer General of the Republic of Cuba. That position ceased to exist decades ago. The Cuban government last cashed it in 1959.

Yet by submitting that paltry payment year after year, knowing it won’t be accepted, the United States continues to feel entitled to its oldest overseas naval base, a 45-square-mile sliver of prime coastline in southeast Cuba that is unlike any other military installation in the world.

On Friday, the Trump administration announced a partial rollback of the Obama administration’s opening with Cuba — limiting travel and business interactions. President Trump is once again recasting the relationship between the two neighbors as one of subjugation. Few issues exemplify this toxic dynamic as starkly as the convoluted history of how the United States came to open a naval base in this part of Cuba.

Guantánamo is best known today for the legal travesty it enabled in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, as the Bush administration deemed it the ideal locale to detain hundreds suspected of being terrorists in a territory that was under American control but ostensibly beyond the reach of constitutional protections. Since the prison was established in 2002, the legal status of the detainees has been at the heart of a contentious debate and a source of international condemnation.

What to do about the remaining Guantánamo prisoners remains a vexing, unresolved question. There are bigger ones, though, that American politicians have opted to ignore: Is it legally defensible to hold on to the territory in perpetuity? Have we become squatters in paradise?During the presidential campaign, Donald Trump vowed to keep Guantánamo open and “load it up with some bad dudes.” Since then, though, there has been no word from the White House or from Congress about the future of the prison, where only 41 detainees remain in a facility built to hold several hundred, or of the base, which is home to more than 5,000 service members and civilians. I visited Guantánamo for a few days this year hoping to get a sense of what the next phase for this bizarre base will entail.

To understand what should happen next, a bit of history is in order.

The United States formally acquired Guantánamo after it supported Cuba’s revolt against Spanish colonial rule. In 1901, the United States forced newly independent Cuba to agree to a set of conditions before withdrawing American troops from the island. The terms gave the United States the right to intervene in Cuba whenever it saw fit and to buy or lease lands “necessary for coaling or naval stations.” The initial lease for Guantánamo was set at $2,000 per year, paid in gold coins. The deal can be rescinded only by mutual consent.

Shortly after Fidel Castro came to power in 1959, the Cuban government demanded the withdrawal of American forces from Guantánamo and over the years has inserted increasingly explicit language in its Constitution to make clear it considers the base unlawfully occupied territory.

Is the continued American presence at Guantánamo sound under international law? The short answer is no.

“It amounts to a belligerent occupation,” said Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, an international law scholar who believes the base runs afoul of principles laid out in the Vienna Convention. Yet, he added, there’s no expectation of resolving the clash over Guantánamo mainly because “Cuba is not in a position to throw the United States in the water.”

Even if the base’s legal standing were sound, do we need it? Senior military officials argue that we do. Beyond the prison, they say, the base serves as a transit point for Cuban refugees who are intercepted at sea and manage to articulate a credible fear that they would be in danger if they were to return home. It has also served as a logistics hub to respond to natural disasters.

Adm. Kurt Tidd, who heads the Southern Command, told me that Guantánamo could once again come in handy in the event of a mass migration crisis, a scenario his troops routinely plan for through weekslong simulated drills that cost taxpayers millions of dollars.

Sticking around to triage a future refugee crisis might sound laudable. But as of early March, there were 28 Cuban migrants on base, waiting to be resettled to a country other than the United States. Between direct employees and contractors, the International Organization for Migration employs about 18 people to oversee the migrants’ care. Given the severity of refugee crises elsewhere, and reasonable alternatives for what has become a trickle of Cuban refugees, is this a fiscally responsible endeavor?

Before Sept. 11, Guantánamo had become a sleepy facility run by a skeleton crew. It now includes more than 1,400 buildings, according to the Navy. That makes Guantánamo larger than the naval base in Bahrain, home to the Fifth Fleet, and the naval base in Rota, Spain, which are among the Pentagon’s most strategically valuable overseas hubs.

While rent is certainly a bargain, running a base on territory deemed by the host to be illegally occupied is costly. The Cubans cut off the base from the power grid and water supply decades ago, so Guantánamo has to desalinate its water supply and generate its own power. Since hiring Cuban laborers is not an option, menial jobs are outsourced to Jamaican and Filipino contractors.

The detention task force in Guantánamo costs roughly $80 million per year, according to a spokesman. Separately, Congress appropriated $181 million for the current fiscal year for base operations. The latter figure is just slightly lower than the $195 million allocated for operations in Turkey, one of the primary hubs for the military campaign against the Islamic State. If one assumes the prison continues to be the primary reason to keep the base open, its current budget works out to $6.3 million per detainee. (The average yearly cost of a federal detainee in 2015 was just under $32,000.)

As the detainee population decreased during the final years of the Obama administration — which sought, and failed, to shut down the prison and transfer the remaining detainees to a facility in the United States — the Pentagon has embarked on a building spree at the base. Last July it issued a callout for construction contracts worth $240 million. The month before, the Pentagon awarded a $66 million contract to a firm owned by a Cuban-American family to build a new school on the base for the children of people posted there for long periods.

Congress has not seriously questioned the merits of this buildup. During a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing in March 2016, only one lawmaker argued that the United States should rethink its claim to the land. “This is in my mind something that could be well characterized as colonialism,” Representative Alan Grayson, Democrat of Florida, who is no longer in Congress, said during the hearing.

Might the Cubans be willing to allow the United States military to remain on the base under a new agreement similar to those that regulate the presence of American service members on foreign soil across the world? David Kohner, the chairman of the Maritime History Center at the United States Naval War College, thinks this is the right time to be raising that question, considering President Raúl Castro of Cuba is expected to step down next year.

“This is a difficult history, but history is what it is,” he said, emphasizing the need to move on from the terms of a lease signed in 1903.

Since the Obama administration began normalizing relations with Cuba in late 2014, the two governments have begun cooperating more closely on maritime security, migration flows, counternarcotics and law enforcement matters. Mr. Trump’s shift on Cuba, ostensibly on human rights grounds, is an aberration for an administration that coddles brutal autocrats abroad and contradicts the foreign policy philosophy Secretary of State Rex Tillerson outlined during a recent Senate hearing. “We are motivated by the conviction that the more we engage with other nations on issues of security and prosperity, the more we will have opportunities to shape the human rights conditions in those nations,” Mr. Tillerson said.

The American presence in Guantánamo has long been a thorn in the Cuban psyche, a reminder of an era of American domination that is taught early and often in Cuban schools.

Carlos Alzugaray, a scholar who served as a Cuban diplomat from 1961 until the mid-1990s, told me there had been discussions during his time in government about what the Cuban government could do to challenge Washington’s claim on the territory. For instance, Havana could seek an opinion from the International Court of Justice on the legality of the American presence in Guantánamo or submit a detailed diplomatic note demanding the return of the territory.

“It could be presented constructively,” said Mr. Alzugaray, who lives in Havana. “It would be sensible if they asked us for 10 years to leave.”

Mr. Alzugaray said the prospect of negotiating a permanent American presence in Guantánamo is dim but not impossible.

“It would require finding a solution in which Cuban sovereignty is respected,” he said, noting that whatever happens, it shouldn’t continue as it is forever. “Here, it is something everyone feels hurt by.”