dhanson
No, actually, what I found was that the UN, and you, were misinterpreting the data. You have also misstated what has transpired in this thread. I have refuted your Pollyanna worldview with data supplied by the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, UN, World Population Council, ZPG and others. You have ignored them, or ridiculed them as the products of “zealots.” They are not the fruits of zealots but of REALISTS. You will not accept my proffer because the reality of the data is unsettling. That is not a good way to treat the problem, which your side has admitted exists.
Five facets of a myth
By Kirkpatrick Sale
I can remember vividly sitting at the dinner table arguing with my father about progress, using upon him all the experience and wisdom I had gathered at the age of fifteen. “Of course we live in an era of progress,” I said, “just look at cars – how clumsy and unreliable and slow they were in the old days, how sleek and efficient and speedy they are now.”
He raised an eyebrow, just a little. “And what has been the result of having all these wonderful new sleek and efficient and speedy cars?” he asked. I was taken aback. I searched for a way to answer.
He went on. “How many people die each year as a result of these speedy cars, how many are maimed and crippled? What is life like for the people who produce them, on those famous assembly lines, the same routinized job hour after hour, day after day, like Chaplin’s film? How many fields and forests and even towns and villages have been paved over so that these cars can get to all the places they want to get to – and park there? Where does all the gasoline come from, and at what cost, and what happens when we burn it and exhaust it?”
Before I could stammer out a response – thankfully – he went on to tell me about an article written on the subject of progress, a concept I had never really thought of, by one of his Cornell colleagues, the historian Carl Becker, a man I had never heard of, in the Encyclopedia of Social Sciences, a resource I had never come across. Read it, he said.
I’m afraid it was another fifteen years before I did, though in the meantime I came to learn the wisdom of my father’s skepticism as the modern world repeatedly threw up other examples of invention and advancement – television, electric carving knife, microwave oven, nuclear power – that showed the same problematic nature of progress, taken in the round and negatives factored in, as did the automobile.
When I finally got to Becker’s masterful essay, in the course of a wholesale re-examination of modernity, it took no scholarly armament of his to convince me of the peculiar historical provenance of the concept of progress and its status not as an inevitability, a force as given as gravity as my youthful self imagined, but as a cultural construct invented for all practical purposes in the Renaissance and advancing the propaganda of capitalism.
It was nothing more than a serviceable myth, a deeply held unexamined construct – like all useful cultural myths – that promoted the idea of regular and eternal improvement of the human condition, largely through the exploitation of nature and the acquisition of material goods.
Of course by now it is no longer such an arcane perception. Many fifteen-year-olds today, seeing clearly the perils with which modern technology has accompanied its progress, some of which threaten the very continuance of the human species, have already worked out for themselves what’s wrong with the myth.
It is hard to learn that forests are being cut down at the rate of 56 million acres a year, that desertification threatens 8 billion acres of land worldwide, that all of the world’s seventeen major fisheries are in decline and stand a decade away from virtual exhaustion, that 26 million tons of topsoil is lost to erosion and pollution every year, and believe that this world’s economic system, whose functioning exacts this price, is headed in the right direction and that direction should be labeled “progress”.
E.E. Cummings once called progress a “comfortable disease” of modern “manunkind,” and so it has been for some. But at any time since the triumph of capitalism only a minority of the world’s population could be said to be really living in comfort, and that comfort, continuously threatened, is achieved at considerable expense.
Today of the approximately 6 billion people in the world, it is estimated that at least a billion live in abject poverty, lives cruel, empty, and mercifully short. Another 2 billion eke out life on a bare subsistence level, usually sustained only by one or another starch, the majority without potable drinking water or sanitary toilets. More than 2 million more live at the bottom edges of the money economy but with incomes less than $5,000 a year and no property or savings, no net worth to pass on to their children.
That leaves less than a billion people who even come close to struggling for lives of comfort, with jobs and salaries of some regularity, and a quite small minority at the top of that scale who could really be said to have achieved comfortable lives; in the world, some 350 people can be considered (U.S. dollar) billionaires (with slightly more than 3 million millionaires), and their total net worth is estimated to exceed that of 45 per cent of the world’s population.
This is progress? A disease such a small number can catch? And with such inequity, such imbalance?
In the U.S., the most materially advanced nation in the world and long the most ardent champion of the notion of progress, some 40 million people live below the official poverty line and another 20 million or so below the line adjusted for real costs; 6 million or so are unemployed, more than 30 million said to be too discouraged to look for work, and 45 million are in “disposable” jobs, temporary and part-time, without benefits or security.
The top 5 percent of the population owns about two-thirds of the total wealth; 60 percent own no tangible assets or are in debt; in terms of income, the top 20 percent earn half the total income, the bottom 20 percent less than 4 percent of it.
All this hardly suggests the sort of material comfort progress is assumed to have provided. Certainly many in the U.S. and throughout the industrial world live at levels of wealth undreamed of in ages past, able to call forth hundreds of servant-equivalents at the flip of a switch or turn of a key, and probably a third of this “first world” population could be said to have lives of a certain amount of ease and convenience.
Yet it is a statistical fact that it is just this segment that most acutely suffers from the true “comfortable disease,” what I would call affluenza: heart disease, stress, overwork, family dysfunction, alcoholism, insecurity, anomie, psychosis, loneliness, impotence, alienation, consumerism, and coldness of heart.
Leopold Kohr, the Austrian economist whose seminal work, The Breakdown of Nations, is an essential tool for understanding the failures of political progress in the last half-millennium, often used to close his lectures with this analogy:
Suppose we are on a progress-train, he said, running full speed ahead in the approved manner, fueled by the rapacious growth and resource depletion and cheered on by highly rewarded economists. What if we then discover that we are headed for a precipitous fall to a certain disaster just a few miles ahead when the tracks end at an uncrossable gulf?
Do we take advice of the economists to