Mankind has always struggled to survive. In the past nature rolled the dice. If mother nature threw a drought we starved. If she rolled a flood we drowned. If lightning started a fire all could be lost. Whole cultures disappeared when minor climate variations of a degree or so triggered phenomenon like the ‘little ice age’. If an asteroid hit, a volcano erupted, an earthquake gaped or sea levels fluctuated whole species of flora and fauna (including many a tribe of humans) became extinct. Dead as the Dodo.
Nature threw (and continues to throw) biological curveballs as well. The black plague saw the end of upwards of a third of Europe’s population. Malaria has killed about half the total number of people who ever walked planet earth.
Nature not only toys with us she toys with what we eat. An ‘even’ throw of nature’s dice (in dice folk law, ‘uneven’ throws are the lucky ones) not only saw the potato blight terminate the lives of about 1 in 8 Irish, it also prompted the emigration of an equal number in search for survival. My family left Killarney (in the mid 1840s) to farm at Gundagai for that very reason.
ESCAPING NATURE
Our distant ancestors (including Australia’s First Nations Peoples) wisely built religions, myths and cultures to win favour from the Gods of nature. Recognising the superior power of nature, they sought to act in ways they believed would please the Gods they’d invented, secure forgiveness for their imagined ‘sins’ against those Gods – and, by doing so, encouraged the Gods to smile upon them. By paying homage to those supra-human beings our ancestors hoped they could exert some control over their lives rather than forever remain its hapless victims.
Things were slow to change over tens of thousands of years. But as man’s technological capacities slowly grew so did our self-confidence. The galloping growth and spread of science and technology after the first Industrial Revolution (in England) saw our self-image greatly enhanced. First, we (in what we now call ‘the first world’) moved from seeing ourselves as the servants of nature to being nature’s partner and then (over the last few hundred years) her master. Our hubris cemented itself into a belief that we could bend nature to our will.
Since the middle of the 20th Century each successive generation focused more and more on modernity (the acquisition of new “things”) while dismissing previous generations relevance to history – the lessons of human behaviour. The young increasingly believed theirs was the smartest generation ever, that the lives of their grand and great-grand parents’ ancestors are so primitive in comparison to their own that the past has little or nothing to teach them. The young of today are no exception. And they have ample reason to believe so. Just look at the world around us.
Modern medicine and pharmacology has significantly increased life expectancy, reduced suffering and, provided a plethora of recreational entertainments and mood enhancers that (some would say) greatly reduce the brutishness and prosaicness of life.
Giant strides in productivity-technology spawned new attitudes to work, (again mainly in the affluent west). Work increasingly became viewed as a means for individual fulfilment rather than a means to an end. A ten – or twelve-hour, labour-intensive working days were once the norm. In a few countries like Australia, that became an eight-hour day (for five and a half days a week). Holidays (paid holidays that is) were rare. Not so long ago sick leave was virtually unheard of and stress leave a non sequitur.
And the wages? Unbelievably low (in real purchasing power) by today’s standards.
All in all, many young adults in the West would find those once acceptable working conditions inconceivably unfair, exploitative and tantamount to slavery. Young people now talk as if they believe everyone should be able to afford a nice car, a modern home and overseas travel – by doing jobs that suit their preferences re content, hours and pay.
HIGH EXPECTATIONS
More and more, believe working a four day week from home should be more than enough to earn the money required to enjoy a comfortable lifestyle that includes all the above consumer goods – plus the ‘right’ to a suite of government services including a first class education, free or near free health and hospital care, maternity/paternity leave, subsidised child care, public housing, safety nets for the unemployed, disadvantaged and those impacted by ever increasing natural disasters such as drought, fire and flood – and (when the time comes) a comfortable aged pension. These high expectations rework and its benefits are but the tip of a ‘high expectation’ iceberg.
Shoppers, for example, expect to find a huge array of seasonal and unseasonal vegetables, fruits, meats, dairy products, juices and confections in their local supermarket – all at (mostly) affordable prices. All that’s taken for granted. We forget it took many agricultural revolutions to produce that cornucopia of fresh foods.
The evolution from hunter gatherer societies through successive waves of farming has been hugely beneficial to mankind. Cropping, mass cereal production, diversification and crop rotation, irrigation, domestic livestock farming, the market-gardening of vegetables and staples (such as potatoes and other tubers), the use of fertilisers and herbicides, seed engineering – agricultural – and veterinary sciences, fossil fuel powered farm machinery, refrigerated transport and international trade have all made a contribution to the standards we enjoy.
All are needed to feed the ten billion of us that will soon inhabit this tiny planet. If we’d remained hunter gatherers it would be impossible to support anywhere near such a number, even at a near subsistence level.
First world consumers have forgotten all that. We complain if the avocados on sale in the supermarket are too soft (too hard). We squeeze a tomato (or grape) to see if a bunch is ripe enough to buy (and put it back if it isn’t). Even during times of severe economic distress, such a now, we still buy record numbers of prawns, oysters and lobster for Xmas lunch. Over the weekend of the 23rd and 24th of December 2023 the Sydney Fish Markets alone is expected to sell 120 tonnes of prawns and upwards of 70,000 oysters. Lobsters (at around $100 a kilo) are said to be “good value”. (China’s ban has kept prices down!). The Wayside Chapel (in Sydney’s Kings Cross) has revealed it costs around $25 to provide Xmas lunch to those who would otherwise go without a meal or good cheer. No more soup kitchens here.
No longer are we satisfied with even such a rich bounty. Our expectation of an ever-improving lifestyle prompts us to demand a better everything.
Science (we assume) will work out how to deliver what we demand. Of course it will. Technology and science together can do virtually anything we want it to.
If we want fresher foods, healthier, organically grown (without the use of animal vaccines, chemical fertilisers or weed suppressing herbicides), kinder livestock practices and no additives (including preservatives which have greatly extended the shelf life of foods), why shouldn’t we get them? We want everything to be available in our supermarkets all the time – even mangoes in winter.
Eighty years ago only science fiction writers told stories of space travel and moon landings.
Now plans are afoot for tourist trips to the moon. By the end of 2023 there were between 7,000 and 8,000 satellites orbiting earth. They provide us with better TV, sat-nav in our cars, more accurate weather forecasting and defence systems. They’re also part of the most revolutionary of communication systems, the internet.
The connectivity revolution has changed the way we communicate, the way we think, the way we live, the way we relate to others, how we conduct politics and the way we work. Life without personal computers, iPads and smart phones is no longer imaginable – and not only so in affluent societies. Roughly two-thirds of Palestinian adults (living in Gaza and the West Bank) have smart phones.
A DISCONNECT WITH REALITY
Not so long ago humans regarded food, clean water and shelter as the basic, material necessities of life. Before the start of the Second World War that list of material basics had expanded to include inside toilets, electric power to homes, a minimum income by way of work or pension or welfare. Post war technologies explosively expanded that ‘necessity’ list.
Now we think nothing of having a car (52% of Australian households have two or more), a hot water system, washing machine and clothes dryer, a dishwasher, fridge and/or freezer, microwave, coffee machine, numerous small kitchen appliances, a couple of TVs and radios, an air conditioner or two, solar panels or heat pump, desk top computers etc. All that is but par for the course, the norm. We also see nothing exceptional for newly built houses to include a theatre or media room, multiple bathrooms (and a separate bedroom for each child).
The American Constitution guarantees US citizens the right to “the pursuit of happiness”. In individualistic, consumer-oriented societies like ours we’ve reinterpreted and extended that promise to mean that governments are obliged to provide citizens with the means (both material and social) to achieve happiness.
Not only do we want more and more, we increasingly believe we are entitled to more and more – and that it’s the responsibility of governments to deliver all those real and assumed entitlements, immediately and simultaneously.
A heightened level of impatience (born of the accelerating speed of technological change, consumerism and the thumb-tapping ease of being able to instantly communicate with anyone, anytime from anywhere) has injected greater irritability, agitation and divisiveness into public and private discourse.
The war-cry of street demonstrators across the world is surprisingly uniform, no matter what their cause. “What do we want?” (insert cause here) “And when do we want it?” (to which a chorus of voices responds with a resounding ….) “NOW”. We humans are an insatiable lot, we’re never quite happy with what we’ve got, never have been.
Since the beginning of time we’ve gone to war with each other to get more … to have our way. We talk a lot about peace, social justice and the rule of international law but have never been able to resist succumbing to the temptations of the ‘grass-always-looks-greener on the other side of the fence’ syndrome. Tribes, clans, races, nations, alliances and members of supra-national organisations (such as the League of Nations and the United Nations) have repeatedly promised peaceful coexistence, signed numerous binding treaties, taken oaths, (with great pomp and solemnity) only for its members to try their hand by going to war when they think they have the upper hand. All cultures have proved to be Dr. Jekylls and Mr. Hydes in this regard.
We too easily forget the technologies humankind’s collectively developed over the ages mirror that same Jekyll/Hyde ability to deliver both good or evil …or (more accurately) both good and evil.
JANUS*, THE TRUE FACE OF TECHNOLOGY
The same technologies employed to so greatly lift modern living standards now threaten our very survival. Our use of, and dependence on, fossil fuels to power it all has resulted in a degree of climate change that might see nature shuck-off most if not all humans. Our species could well become extinct. Nature wouldn’t care. The planet would continue on for billions of years without us, just as it did for billions of years before we humans arrived.
[*Janus: Roman God of beginnings, transitions, duality, with two faces often depicted in the arts as ‘comedy’ on one face and ‘tragedy’ on the other.]
The modern human dilemma is that we want to stop climate change while improving both our material and social living standards at the same time.
New technologies might come to the rescue so that this dual goal can be met. The hubris of modern man inclines us toward believing this is the most likely outcome. Let’s hope so. But we should caution such optimism with the realisation that humankind has always overestimated its role in the grander scheme of things. We’ve believed (amongst other things) the Gods made us in their own image, that they care about each one of us, that there’s life after death, that the earth is the centre of the solar system and that the sun revolves around our little planet. We’ve long acted as if our superior ‘intelligence’ entitles us to be masters of all we survey. We too easily forget that we are but mutated apes – an evolutionary experiment that could easily fail because while being smart, we’ve proved not smart enough to support what sustains us.
At best the odds are 50-50 we’ll beat climate change. It could go either way. If we don’t win the climate battle, new ‘race-for-survival’ wars between nations and peoples are inevitable. Think of what that would mean.
Warfare has always been brutal. Technology ensured it became ever more so. Combatants moved from wielding clubs to swords to deploying cavalry, to firing crossbows, to the using of muskets and mortars, then rifles, machine guns, artillery, warships, tanks and airpower. By the end of WW11 two bombs killed between 110,000 (low estimate) and 200,000 (high estimate) people, mainly civilians, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Modern nuclear weapons are a thousand of times more powerful than those bombs – and there are thousands of them sitting in military arsenals of the US, Russia, China, UK, France, India, Israel, North Korea and Pakistan.
If new wars break out a losing side will be tempted to use nuclear weapons to stave off total defeat. Once that line has been crossed the opposing side will feel free to retaliate in kind. If a local war develops into a Word War 111 the result could be Armageddon. Uncontrolled climate change + a large-scale nuclear war = a return to the stone age – or worse.
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (founded 1948) annually assesses the risk of human catastrophe on its Doomsday Clock. Twelve o’clock is ‘end game’ time. In 2023 the Bulletin set the clock at 90 seconds to midnight. In 1962, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis it was set at 120 seconds to midnight. Few young people know how close America and Soviet Russia came to war that year.
In October 1962 an American flotilla of around a dozen destroyers and a carrier were alerted to the presence of four Soviet subs nearby. In spite of the fact all were in international waters the Americans decided those subs were too close for comfort. They started dropping ‘signal’ depth chargers, not to sink the subs but, ostensibly, to encourage them to surface for proper identification. One of those subs (B-59) had been out of radio contact with Moscow. Its Captain thought war might have already broken out and wanted to launch nuclear torpedoes against the American marauders. Approving this course of action required a unanimous vote from the three senior officers on board the Soviet sub. One of those officers, Vasily Arkhipov, was against the idea. Confrontation was averted. Had conflict erupted tensions were so high at the time things could have easily and quickly escalated into a thermo nuclear war. The following year (1963) the Doomsday clock hands were moved back to seven minutes to midnight. Now it’s under 100 seconds for the very first time. That’s how serious things are.
The next major technological revolution (AI) will benefit man in many ways but it is unlikely to improve those 50-50 survival-odds much. If anything, it is more likely to make warfare even more ‘efficient’ – more deadly and polluting.
THE IMMUTABILITY OF HUMAN NATURE
The simple truth is our technologies aren’t the problem. The core problem is us.
While science and technology have strode ahead by leaps and bounds over the past few hundred years man’s nature hasn’t changed much since the beginning of recorded time.
We keep proving we are unable to resist fighting amongst ourselves to win a bigger slice of the pie, to be top dog. We’re hard-wired that way. We’ve never escaped a ‘them-versus-us’ approach in dealing with ‘others’ for very long. Nations continually strive to outfox other nations, corporations likewise and so too our sport heroes. We are never happier than when we compete – and win. Everybody wants to be on top, to win – and to be recognised as ‘a winner’.
In spite of all our ‘do good’ religions (Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist etc), all the wisdom won from millions of hours of philosophising, all the lessons of both ancient and modern history – and the dictates of common sense – we keep doing what we say we’ll never do again, we keep repeating predatory behaviours that inflict suffering on others when we see an advantage in doing so. We humans are very good at rationalising why our warlike actions are both necessary and just in spite of an avowed commitment to peace, equality and justice for all.
If you think this an unkind or exaggerated depiction of mankind look at the state of the world.
The people of Russia support Putin’s ‘justifiable’ invasion of Ukraine. The people of Israel feel justified in protecting themselves by wreaking havoc on all Palestinian civilians (including those who have little or no truck with Hamas). China (under Xi) presses on with its encroachments into both international waters and the territorial waters of nearby nations, China also threatens to take possession of Taiwan by force of arms even though the people of Taiwan vote for their continued independence. Iran is determined to block any rapprochement between the Arab states of the Middle East and the West. Kim Jong Un of North Korea races ahead to develop nuclear missiles that can reach America. Erdogan of Turkey is calling Netanyahu of Israel another Hitler. The tribes of Rwanda (the country the UK pays to resettle illegal refugees to its own shores) are in open, violent conflict again. The West imposes economic sanctions on Russia, Russia fights back by restricting gas supplies to Europe.
It doesn’t look too good does it? So is my reading of the current status of the world too pessimistic? Perhaps, hopefully yes.
The end of mankind has been predicted many, many times before. The difference is that those who made those predictions (the soothsayers, theologians, prophets, scientists and madmen of the past) lived in times when man lacked the wherewithal to self-destruct. Now we have the technology, the power to terminate our existence either unintentionally (eg. by failing to address climate change) or by consciously taking great risks to change the balance of power between nations (eg. by way of nuclear war).
THE FUTURE
Our future as a species is now very much in our own, mortal hands. We’ve got to learn to stop fumbling the ball, quick smart, if we are to survive. That’s a big task, a big ask, given we’ve never achieved our goal of living in peace and harmony with each other for very long.
In the first quarter of this new century the spread of modern technologies helped improve the living standards of billions of people around the world. Not all benefitted, but many did. People in the West have never enjoyed so many freedoms, so many opportunities… or been afforded so many choices. Again, this hasn’t been the experience of all, but it has for most.
Progress over the past couple of hundred years tempts many to believe this upward trend will continue forever. That’s a very dangerous assumption to make. It’s never worked out that way before.
The paradox of the West is we have so many choices, so many options we’ve become very good in tying ourselves up in knots. Our governments have become so tangled in bickering about a myriad of secondary issues they’ve become paralysed, unable to move with conviction (or success) on major issues, the things that really matter.
This is especially so in the established English-speaking democracies (USA, UK, Canada and Australia) where actions in both domestic and international matters appear more confused, weak and directionless than usual. Part of the reason for this is that their citizens expect ever more of ,and from ,those governments . In part it’s because their political classes find it more expedient to react to immediate voter concerns (rather than lead in the nation’s long-term interest) in an attempt to maximise success at the next election (which is never very far away).
Other democracies (Japan, Germany, France, South Korea, Italy, Chile etc) suffer similar but different problems in ways shaped by their own histories and cultures.
The leaders of non-democratic nations have an advantage in that they don’t have to – and certainly don’t -strive to please or placate all of their citizens all the time. They have a greater degree of freedom to move more quickly and decisively (at least in the short run). It’s easier for their ruling elites to take the initiative. China’s recent behaviour (now that it has both economic and military heft) exemplifies this difference between consumer democracies and totalitarian states. Mind you, this advantage is not a permanent one. Sooner or later elites that fail to deliver are despatched (as was the case in many European nations under the yoke of Soviet Russia).
If the big democracies (including India) don’t find a way to act in concert to counterbalance China, the balance of power could sway so far in China’s favour that it’s tempted (either alone or in alliance with Russia, Pakistan, North Korea or Iran) to try its hand. Such a step could well prove the beginning of a very quick end for quite a few of us.
We haven’t the luxury of time on our side. Nor can those of us living in democratic countries do much to change what happens inside China, Russia or any of the other likely allies of those two states.
All anyone who is fortunate to have a vote can try and do is use that vote to reverse the ever-increasing divisiveness and domestic preoccupations within the democracy in which they live, to bring pressure on their ruling class to reorient their own society toward one which thinks and acts more as a responsible citizen of the world than one where its citizens jockey for their own self-gain. Sound utopian? Admittedly the chances of success are low, but what alternative is there? If voters don’t fight to get a better political class who will?
Those in power are not going to abandon the systems on which they’ve built their careers. Change is not going to trickle down from the top except at glacial speed. That’s proved too slow a modus operandi to meet the challenges we’ve so obviously faced over the past two decades.
Voters are going to have apply pressure from below to accelerate the adoption of policies that we (and the world) need to secure any future, yet alone a mutually prosperous one.
How we might do our part in Australia to achieve this end is too big a task to cover here. A second article on this theme will appear shortly on Beyond the Spin. In the meantime, what do you think of the proposition that it’s only 90 seconds to midnight?
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