By Noni Mausa
We Need To Be Kind To Be Cruel
Aug 15 2015
In press conferences and TV panels, we keep hearing important people discuss budgets, entitlements, deficits, and the big knobs and levers of the economy. Those spokesmen or dignitaries who have positioned themselves as deciders, judging what everyone else deserves, never tire of telling us all about it.
They imply they can control economic and political ups and downs, in order to take credit for the ups and assign blame for the downs, and sometimes they are even correct. But what they seldom do is look at how we we’re hollowing out the living world, burning here, poisoning there, concreting everywhere and trampling the rest with our billions. They like control, but they never claim they any control over core social problems like overpopulation. That would be social engineering!. That would be unnatural and cruel!.
The truth is, we’re heading for a literal world of hurt, and to reverse course, however cruelly and unnaturally, we first need really solid, reliable, almost lavish social supports.
It sounds nuts, eh?. Another of those lefties, laying out a buffet on somebody else’s dime? But believe me, the alternative is catastrophic. A Royal Fork for the world is a picnic by comparison to the fork we have ahead of us.
We’re on the brink of disaster. There are too many of us. We use too much stuff, we make too much mess, we’ve outgrown our resources. We need social deflation– fewer people, less stuff, less waste, less war, more sharing. We need to downsize.
So, who will agree to constrain themselves for the sake of a future they may not live to see?. Who goes first?
To date, nobody has. Oh, a handful of earnest greens per 100,000 may have eschewed the car, grown their own food, converted their toilet to a waterless system, and so on. I know some, I admire them. They’re great people. And they’re sadly lacking in a) money and b) influence. They went first, and they went alone.
Well, not quite alone. Who else has gone first?. The very poorest, and they didn’t jump, they were pushed.
I am talking about the most marginal human beings in the world, living on practically nothing. For these people, paying their life savings to ride across the Mediterranean Sea in the fume-polluted hold of a barely floating junker with their children, or to send those children alone to walk across a desert to arrive in a country not quite hostile enough to shoot them on sight, is safer and more hopeful than staying home. For many, having lots of children, even if they had a choice, is the only wealth they can accrue, and the closest thing to a pension plan they may ever see.
Call it Extreme Minimalism if you’re feeling sardonic. It’s way beyond what any millennial westerner would attempt. And with these horrific examples of downsizing, who wouldn’t try their best to stay as upsized as they can possibly manage?. Scramble for more money by burning off rain forest or poaching elephants. Raise more kids. Run the sea through a colander for one more shipment of fish. Kill the tribe downriver and take their land. It’s self defence. It’s for the kids. I had to defend myself. No one else will.
Without reliable social supports spread across a whole population, how can we expect anyone to go first?. And for this reason a just, reliable government, egalitarian laws and reliable child and elder supports are not frills, but essential to the next stage of the Anthropocene era. We have to be kind, to stand any chance of being “cruel.”
And that’s just individuals. What nation will go first in downsizing population, military, commodities, energy use, industry, and so on?. If everyone does it, okay. If it’s only you doing it, how will you defend yourself from those who don’t give a damn about the future?
So, the only nation that can afford to go first is the nation that has the most. By almost every metric, that’s got to be the US. Their military might is unique, their location easily defensible, their institutions not yet wholly degraded, their people not yet wholly disillusioned. And they have a head start on the population thing, with the numbers of native born children already below replacement, and a whole whack of Boomers heading for the exits any decade now.
But persuading individual Americans to gracefully contract their lives and their impact on the natural world can’t be done without their trust. Not that citizens are too powerful, with all their guns, to fall to government attack. Civilians never are. But, the raw cruelty of nations that neglect or outright kill their excess population has proven ineffective in reducing their impact on the world – rather, this has just led those people to bear more children and ravage the land for anything that might keep them alive another year or day. Look at the Black Death, WWII, or the 1918 influenza epidemic. The loss of life was unimaginable, but we bounced back with barely a wobble. We’re good at that. No, downsizing has to be either destructive beyond anything seen for 1000 years, or else voluntary.
A just, reliable, boring government, egalitarian laws and reliable child and elder supports are not frills, but essential to the next stage of the anthropocene era.
If the US regained her sanity and stability, while still possessing the bulk of her world power, she would be in a position to influence (and learn from!) other countries, defend weaker ones against their more ruthless neighbours, and be, in short, the kind of heroes they have long styled themselves.
Of course, there IS an alternative to voluntary contraction of our demands on our world. We’re seeing it beginning. But, who would actively choose the path we’re currently on?
The Malthusian view (for that is what the post is taking) has been proven wrong for 218 years (the paper was published in 1798). Note that the biggest way to help is to just not reproduce (have no children). SO if one truly holds the Malthusian view one should go childfree. If they have adult children do they encourge their children to go childfree, or do they want grandchildren? Now the crisis may occur but it is not clear what the time frame may be witness the peak oil issue of a few years ago, and now we are awash in oil.
Of course, the problem with that is that it self-selects against such traits as altruism, abstract thought, and self-control, leading to a population with less of those qualities — the very qualities we presumably need to mitigate or navigate the hazards ahead.
Noni
I agree with your “Malthusian vision,” but the problem is not stricltly population, it is something like greed…. bad word but i can’t think of another. We have entered an age where it is literally possible to have anything we want, and we don’t know how to stop ourselves.
global warming causes arctic ice to melt. our response: drill for oil where the ice used to be.
people will not “self control.” i know some people who mean to, but they end up driving back and forth across the country a lot. a reasonably subtle government policy could force a degree of self control if it were able to do it without calling it that* or being voted out by the folks who can make more money encouraging “more.”
usually a more about as satisfying as cocaine but harder on the rest of us.
* people adjust their behavior to costs and scarcity. if gas just cost a lot more (and it could) people would find ways to use less of it… as long as they couldn’t convince themselves it was because of the goddam gummint or the goddam oil companies. the “economy” would not suffer. we’d just find other ways to amuse and enrich ourselves. i don’t know how well china has been doing with its “one child” policy, but you do not want a regime that gets the power to “force” people at that level. bad things… worse things… will follow. the “left” is no kinder than the “right.
Perhaps you need some encouraging news. World poverty levels are down significantly, from 1981 to 2005, “the proportion
of people living in extreme poverty dropped from 52.0 to 25.7 per cent.”
http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/rwss/docs/2010/chapter2.pdf
The report continues:
Notwithstanding the continued growth in the world’s population, the absolute number of people living in extreme poverty has fallen, regardless of whether the poverty-line income threshold is set at $1.25 or raised to $2 or $2.50 per day (figure II.1). This has occurred in the midst of an expanding global economy, which has resulted, on average, in higher per capita incomes in both developed and developing countries (Sachs, 2008; United Nations, 2005a). Since the 1960s, gross domestic product (GDP) in low-income countries has grown at an average of 4.1 per cent per annum, while GDP in middle-and high-income countries has grown at an average of 4.2 and 3.2 per cent per annum, respectively (Soubbotina, 2004).”
Capitalism has pulled a LOT of people out of poverty.
The biggest cause of poverty is government corruption, not lack of resources. Zimbabwe was the breadbasket of southern Africa until Robert Mugabe and his kleptocrats took power. Now, not so much.
Noni asks: So, who will agree to constrain themselves for the sake of a future they may not live to see?
China started the one child policy in the late 70’s. The world would be a different place today if they had not done this.
She also asks: What nation will go first in downsizing population
That would be Japan, the population fell by 268,000 last year. It is projected that Japan’s population will fall from 130m to 70m over the next 50 years.
krasting is right
though i don’t know the details of china and japan policy
people are more “pro social” than the pfree market believers would have you believe. but they have to believe that they are not being played for suckers.
Actually, Japan is trying to find ways to get the birth rate UP.
They cannot support their social programs for the elderly without a higher birth rate.
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2015/04/07/editorials/battling-the-low-birthrate/#.VdEwYXUViko
Warren
this would be extremely short sighted of them. and i hope your source is biased.
paying for the needs of those too old to work is not that expensive. it may mean “transferring” more of the money you earn from “consume today” to “consume tomorrow” but that is merely the sane way that people have done things for thousands of years.
and if you suppose that there were not so many elderly compared to “workers” ten thousand years ago, you may be right, but then the people then had a lot less to share than they do today, and they had more children.
i suspect that if they raise their birth rate in japan they will have to find a way to support more children.
If the question is who will go first, the answer is the western world.
The western and more generally speaking “advanced economies” are the ones with the lowest birthrates by far. Given the ratio against consumption, there isn’t even remotely a balance in place, but a significant reduction in population grown in, say India, would be as significant as an insanely massive jobs program or agricultural revolution would be towards increasing per capita welfare over the course of two generations.
Most of the associations related to lower population growth are well established, more education, reduced religiosity, relative income, women in the workforce, longer lifespans.
But I think there are other things in place that prevent reduced population growth that are related to tribal/village structures. Small communities need a certain (high) birth rate to stay at “critical mass” for society. That birth rate is higher than what is needed in an urban environment, or a society that is urban associated (i.e. one that trades with urban areas). When the birth rate drops below that level, they are likely to collapse as a community or be absorbed or conquered.
There’s a balancing point at each level of development. Too low and you die out, too high and you are forced into expansion to seize resources, or you starve.
The problem in the poor countries is not high birthrate, but high corruption.
That’s weird. There have never been more people, the world has never been richer, life expectancy has never been higher…it seems the data contradicts your argument.
little john
there is more data than you have considered in your argument.
That may be true. But, the post doesn’t rely on data, it’s just the ruminations of someone.
little john
that may be true, but it was you who brought up “data.”
my impression is that the “wealth” you speak of is first mostly in the hands of the wealthy, and second that it is false wealth… trinkets and glitter made by mining the earth beyond its ability to repair itself.
i think you could be right that we could support the present population at the current average standard of living for longer life expectancies… but that average would have to be shared and that would mean that we… the united states… would see a decline in our standard as measured by money.
i think we could find a way to be perfectly happy with that. but we won’t. nor would the rest of the world be happy with a standard of living that they could “improve” by taking away what we have.
Little John:
“… As the market floundered, financial leaders were as optimistic as ever, more so. Just five days before the crash, Thomas Lamont, acting head of the highly conservative Morgan Bank, wrote a letter to President Hoover. “The future appears brilliant. Our securities are the most desirable in the world.” Charles Mitchell assured nervous investors that things had never been better.”
The problem is not how to stay on course, but how to change a disastrous course with a minimum of calamity. We know how to stay on course, but now we have to learn how to steer.
Really, folks, except for the population increase in sub-Saharan Africa, which is increasing the total number people there in extreme poverty despite decreases in the poverty rate there, all the news is good.
https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2013/04/17/remarkable-declines-in-global-poverty-but-major-challenges-remain
Well one thing’s for sure, nobody knows how this will all end. But if human history is any guide things will get better, not worse.
Let’s hope so, Little John.
But Hope is not a strategy. History has many times and many places where things got MUCH worse.
Nice piece.
For the pollyannas, I would suggest taking the time to do some research on just a few of the following:
1. Oceanic Dead zones–they are growing exponentially. Just Google it.
2. Soil Degradation–approximately 12 million hectares of land is “transformed into man-made deserts yearly.”–begin with the U.N.
3. According the latest and most conservative studies, we are in the midst of the Sixth Great Extinction. This is a very big deal. Start with a Stanford study, Paul Ehrlich.
When I was writing, I would often say, “No two-car garages and white picket fences for China.” We are running out of “supplies.” The earth can only hold so many people–there is no escaping that logic.
And, bless me, I did not mention global warming–or abrupt global warming, which will soon be the new buzz word. Oh yeah….all those fires and all that drought. They keep getting worse.
Anyway….great piece!
Thanks, Stormy.
A few of the commenters also seem to think it would be sufficient for us (that is, all of H. sap) to stop growing, in numbers and in impact. This would not be sufficient. I admit that my word “constrain” gives that impression, but “actively reducing” is what’s needed.
When businesses downsize, they can do it the cruel way (“Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry?”) or a somewhat kinder way, through attrition. Or they can undergo unplanned downsizing i.e. going out of business. It is the third option we are facing if we don’t work towards something less painful and less final.
Managing attrition and targeted rehiring to fill necessary roles is not a strategy normally applied to whole populations. And people vigorously resist being downsized from life itself. So the historically novel problem is, how to downsize at the front end, in a planned manner, with attendant social programs that make the whole process fair, rational, comfortable — not only painless but attractive? avoiding as far as possible a worldwide procession of wars, invasions, plagues, massacres and so on?
This planned, compassionate and comfortable downsizing is probably not politically possible. But then we have achieved apparently impossible goals in this last century, though on a much smaller scale. I may never see it, but if we could do it, it would be our greatest achievement as a species, bar none. No other species has managed self-constraint. Maybe we can.
We already have wars, plagues, invasions, massacres etc and most of them currently are not caused by deprivation (at least not directly), instead the associated deprivation is a sign of the supply chain and production disruptions associated with said wars.
China is not building two car garages and white picket fence suburbs, they’re building sleeper cities.
I think there is a misunderstanding what people want when they want a first world or just “better” living standard on the part of many people living in the United States. Then again, many people in the United States are still mentally living in a zone where they are unaware that many young people down own a television, don’t subscribe to cable or satellite, and read lots of books that they got from the library on their trip between work and their apartment on the subway or the bus.
There is a massive gap between the lifestyle expectations of the baby boomers which have only gotten more ostentatious as they have aged, and the rest of humanity.
I wish economists somewhere (The UN? A university? Angry Bear?) would calculate and publish a “resources clock”, similar to the deficit clock, and make it update daily based on projections, and be re-calibrated quarterly, with things like: (total available fresh water)/(world population); (total available usable energy)/(world population); (total available food calories)/(wp); (total topsoil in use)/(wp); etc.. (These could be broken down into subcategories such as energy from coal, energy from oil, energy from wind, food from fish, etc.).
As far as I know, renewable resources such as fresh water and fish are currently being used up faster than they can replenish themselves naturally. We can use energy to increase their stocks (desalination plants, fish farms), but some usable energy sources are also being used up.
Maybe things are better than I think, or maybe they are worse. I would like to have a “resources clock” to measure the problem and assess its trend.
Of course the clock might have sudden jumps, such as an energy jump if practical fusion energy is developed. Such jumps have postponed the Malthusian problem many times (which I attribute more to science, engineering, and education rather than capitalism) but human intelligence is not infinite either, and breakthroughs such as a tea-kettle/fan steam engine are no longer easy to come by.
Goodwin
because i agree with you, let me add what i think will bring howls from my former friends here:
the “left” sees only one answer: tax the rich and give the money to the poor so they can overconsume just like the rich.
there are kinder, more subtle ways to accomplish not a reduction in standard of living, but a shift to a higher standard of living that does not depend on fossil fuel. but hell, i’m just a shill for the rich, so what do i know?
the big impediment to such a shift is that war depends on fossil fuel and the industrial base associated with it. if we don’t control the fuel and create the industry, some one else will.
ultimately the poor will have a choice between being dirt poor dependents on english speaking landlords, or being dirt poor dependents on chinese speaking landlords. both of whom know that once they control the instruments of power they can be perfectly happy with old-fashioned luxury and too bad about the starving peasants.
JimV said: I wish economists somewhere (The UN? A university? Angry Bear?) would calculate and publish a “resources clock”, similar to the deficit clock…
coincidentally, Global Footprint Network does such a computation, and since we exceeded our annual budget for the year last week, there was just a lot of news about it…here’s one:
http://phys.org/news/2015-08-humanity-nature.html
Rjs: thanks for the link!
Lyle,
the Malthusian view is not wrong (it represents the way life is in much of the world today), and the situation is not that we are awash in oil (we are using less, because the world economy is sick). You have a very short term understanding of long term processes.
I am sort of reminded by analogy of the period before the “great recession”. Some commentaries that I was reading, where extremely concerned about the state of the economy. They were mostly written by people who were concerned with examining balance sheets. People who concentrated only on income flows, were generally completely unconcerned. The issue of sustainability is a bit like that.
Consider the old story of the bacterial culture in a Petri dish, that grows rapidly from a small spot, until it suddenly uses all the available resources and collapses. This could happen to us.