This past weekend the NYT regaled us
with a little piece of unexpected nostalgia, running a report (and a retro one
at that!) about the 1968 classic “The Population Bomb”, by Stanford biologist
Paul R. Ehrlich. You can find the article here The unrealized horrors of population explosion,
and although it is a fine piece of journalism as you would expect from what I
only half jokingly call the NoRoOT (Newspaper of Reference or Our Time), of
much higher interest was (for me at least) the comments of the readers, the
vast majority of whom are just to enmeshed within the framework of desiderative
reason and the need to justify their own lifestyles (lifestyles that, as the most
cogent of them realize, could only be shared by a tiny fraction of Today´s humanity)
as to unthinkingly rush to the defense
of Mr. Ehrlich basic tenets (there are just too many of “us”! –actually, behind
that war cry I always distinguish a hidden protestation that what there are
really is too much of “them”; Everybody should
stop reproducing immediately, even if they have to be forced to do so!) although
such defense required somehow ignoring the obvious recognition that every
single statement of fact contained in his famous book has turned out to be dead
wrong… For most of the very liberal readers the author may have not gotten the
timing right (England still exist, and no American has died of hunger due to an
overall lack of food since his tirade hit the presses), but he must still be right
in his main contentions, and unless we do something urgently all the grim
predictions he made will come to pass sooner rather than later (no matter how
soon they eventually happen, ol’ Paul would still be at least 50 years off the
mark, as massive famine was prophesized to cripple most world’s governments in
the 70’s).
So essentially what we have here is
a guy that makes a number of easily testable, clear cut predictions in the not
so distant future, none of them actually happens, but he is essentially
undaunted by such failure (he just tells the reporters he stands by all his
predictions, and he considers them as valid today as they were almost half a
century ago –without a hint of irony and apparently without realizing how much
that undermines his whole argument!). And what is more sociologically
significant, droves of apparently well educated readers rush in his defense,
and criticize the tone of the report for being too harsh on him, and for daring
to question if all that hubbub about a “population explosion” was not a bit
overblown after all, as for them it is clear as water that the planet is
already overpopulated and Ehrlich was, if something, too tepid on his
admonishments. Wow! Talk about cognitive dissonance, and a belief system that
doesn’t seem to be a) falsifiable or b) open to reevaluation when it conflicts
with reality. Evidently, there is something seriously amiss here, and I intend
to devote the remainder of this post to try to find out what it is, and why it
is so extended. To that end, I’ll first present a little parade of statements
of famous thinkers and opinion makers about impending doom that happened not to
be as prescient as their authors believed (so we can have some perspective on
common weaknesses), then I’ll advance my argument about why Ehrlich position is
as wrong as all the rest, and finally I will state why I think it is still so
popular between certain (pretty wide) segments of the citizenry.
Let’s start then with a “top of my
mind” recount of intelligent people being abjectly wrong about where the
society was heading:
·
I
distinctly remember the shock when I read in my early teens a paragraph by Bertrand
Russell (I humbly confess I have endeavored to find the exact book for decades
in my father’s labyrinthine library, to no avail, so you will have to trust my
feeble memory on this one) that in the
struggle between socialism and capitalism the first was surely to prevail, as
it could devote all its energies to produce a single model of whatever product
was best (let’s say a car), more efficiently and with less cost, while the
second dissipated countless energies in developing and marketing multiple
brands, with no clear advantage. Already in the early 80’s it was clear that
capitalist Volkswagen (or Renault, or Fiat) were vastly superior to its Trabant
and Wartburg socialist equivalents, but I was utterly convinced for some time,
as Russell was undoubtedly a genius, and a genius surely knew better than poor
pre-adolescent me. With time I became less impressed with Russell predictive
powers, as he espoused a one sided pacifism as only road to avoid total
annihilation that ended up not being the only alternative to a more stable world
system (but it may have been too much to ask from him to admit the possibility
of socialism crumbling from inside, even with the advantage its non competitive
state-branded cars conferred to it)
·
Founded
in 1968 under the auspice of an Italian precursor of the consulting profession
(Aurelio Peccei) the Club of Rome issued the direst warnings in its 1972
publication Limits to Growth, in
which it forewarned that industrial society was (most likely) facing
(relatively imminent) collapse. I’m writing all those caveats in parentheses because
the report highlights the results of a computer simulation (run on 1972
computers, which had the computing power you can nowadays find in a corkscrew)
that contemplated multiple scenarios, and some of them were compatible with society
more or less standing up to 2050 (however, the date of the beginning of the
collapse in that central scenario was 2015, which has some environmentalists
all giddy identifying our current crisis as the parting shot of the final great
flush down history’s toilet of our consumerist and evil society, look no
further than here for an example: Is global collapse imminent?).
What caught the attention of the majority, of course, where the more
pessimistic scenarios where the collapse happens by the end of the 20th
Century, a lack of happening that badly undermined the whole enterprise and
tarnished a bit the reputation of most doomsayers of similar persuasion
(including Ehrlich)…
·
Although
I read it later, it was shortly thereafter (still within the whole zeitgeist of
a society rapidly approaching its natural limits and close to total collapse),
in 1979, when Hans Jonas published his Das
Prinzip Verantwortung (translated as The
Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age).
In it he stated that to remedy the unacceptable inequality between countries a
world dictatorship would need to be imposed that forced the advanced economies
to renounce to a good deal of their standard of living so the less developed
countries could catch up (it was also the only way he could foresee to avoid
total war, famine, ecological impoverishment and the advent of Disco music…
well may be I’m making the last one up, although I see it as a much graver
danger to human flourishing than the previous ones). A good thing such
dictatorship was never imposed, as starting about five years after the
publication of his book those very same developed countries happily and
voluntarily started shedding their industrial base, moving it under no kind of
compulsion to those very same third world places that were more than happy to receive
them (it has to be noted that the whole scheme didn’t work so well as Jonas
expected, as the receiving countries have met with very unequal successes
regarding the reduction of their wealth and income gap)
By now you have probably noticed a
common theme running through all those predictions, which we could have traced
back to the (in) famous essay of the Reverend Malthus in 1798 stating that
population grew exponentially (a concept the report from the Club of Rome
spends a lot of pretty boring pages expounding) whilst the ability to generate
resources to feed and shelter it could only grow linearly. In all of them we
are essentially screwed because of the inability of our finite planet to check
the population growth all by itself smoothly, and left to their own impulses
the unenlightened masses will keep on reproducing like rabbits until that
growth comes catastrophically, apocalyptically, and very, very painfully to a
halt, so we need the intervention of an enlightened elite who knows better to
check it for us, because if not, the end of the (social) world is always at
most fifty years away (probably the prognosticators all realize that larger
timeframes for certain doom are not as effective in focusing people’s
imagination). As it happens, Malthus was
wrong way back then, Russell was wrong, Jonas was wrong, Ehrlich was almost
absurdly wrong (as much as it seems to pain him to recognize it) and all the
clever guys of the Club of Rome (which have kept regularly updating their
report to show that they were not so wrong after all) were equally wrong (the
amount of things their model had to leave out due to lack of processing power
is almost comical, which does not prevent it from still having some defenders,
but then again so does psychoanalysis).
And they were all wrong by a simple
reason, elegantly stated by none other than Sir Karl Popper in a little tract
written in 1936, although not published until 1957 (in time for all our
doomsayers to have read it… alas, if they did it was to no avail), entitled The Poverty of Historicism, in which he criticized
every attempt of the human disciplines to forecast the future based in the
impossibility of taking into account one single factor that has demonstrated
once and again during human history to be of some passing importance in determining
how societies organize themselves, as is the level of scientific and
technological development. Indeed, no ideology (or computer simulation) can
properly predict what technologies will be available, at what costs, in the
future, because to be able to accurately forecast them would mean to know them,
to discover them in advance, and that is a logical impossibility. And just that
little unknown has showed once and again that any model, or simulation, or
prognostication that doesn’t takes it into account is essentially invalid and
bound to generate false predictions.
Just to put things in perspective,
we could read, the very same day the NYT published their report, this article
in “The Economist” about the global decline in population of almost any big
city outside Africa (which indeed understates the extent of depopulation, as
cities are the last bastions of demographic growth, which can keep on
attracting inhabitants long after the countryside has become a ghostly, empty
landscape): Cities plan for shrinking populations
. It seems after all the “population explosion” is rather coming to an end
without any compulsion whatsoever (I’ve already harped about the inability of
our current socioeconomic system to entice its citizens to find their lives
worth reproducing, a phenomenon I call “gonadal vote”), as Philip Longman
noticed more than 10 years ago (The empty cradle).
The bomb Ehrlich warned us about has already been defused, and most evidence
points to a peak of 9 to 10 billion human beings between 2050 and 2100, and then
a more or less precipitous decline, depending basically on how fast we can
fully incorporate the remaining African nations (North of South Africa and
South of the Sahara) within the western liberal consensus, so they also realize
that life is not basically worth it, neither for them nor for their potential
children, and so give up having them in the first place. The question that
remain to be answered then is why so many people are still alarmed about high
birth rates as to throng the comment section of any enlightened newspaper that
dares to give some voice to the opinion that maybe, only may be, we are not so immediately
doomed after all (not just the NYT, see also this article in the Grauniad: Coming population crash will kill the economy - good for the planet
which met with similar vitriol from most readers when published). But that
question will have to wait for another post, as this has already run for too
long…
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