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Chicken Little
My friend the left-wing newspaper columnist admits, in his latest column, to being a pessimist. "Given today's world, who wouldn't be?"
No surprise: all leftists are. Yet there is an irony here. Those who call themselves "progressives" are mostly distinguished precisely by this disbelief in human progress.
But the more important point is that, in this, the leftists are clearly wrong. Granted, any thoughtful person sees that the world is a mess, and the pace of progress can be terribly frustrating--two steps forward, one step back. Nevertheless, progress seems clear, over the broad sweep of known history.
What, really, could be clearer than the general material progress over the last several thousand years, and especially over the last few hundred? The gradual elimination of disease and growth in life expectancy? Whatever happened to smallpox, leprosy, scarlet fever, TB, polio, and the plague?
There has also clearly been a gradual spread of more democratic and less autocratic government, of greater legal and civic worth placed on every individual. Cannibalism, human sacrifice, slavery, caste, are mostly gone, and formally renounced everywhere. No government these days would dare to publicly defend the idea that humans are not equal.
There has also, over the long haul, been development in religion and philosophy. Shamanism and polytheism have generally fallen to ethical monotheism.
Henny Penny
"Wars inflame new terrorist groups."
"Population growth increases."
"Food shortages increase."
"Cleanup from the worst oil spill in history still awaits."
"Deforestation continues unchecked, especially in tropical zones."
"Industries sow toxins, and use the world as guinea pigs for genetically-manipulated foods."
"Glaciers are melting faster than ever."
"Even as we suffer the hottest summer in recorded history, naysayers deny global warming."
"More species are dying daily than at any time since the extinction of the dinosaurs."
"World economies seem poised for a second plunge into chaos. Entire nations hover on the brink of bankruptcy."
"Human rights are sacrificed on the altar of national security."
"Intolerance, especially among the fanatic fringes of Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism, seems to be growing."
In the old days, "We saw prosperity as a human right, 'Freedom 55' as a universal goal." [But no longer.]
Wow; things really do look terrible, don't they?
Falling?
1. "Wars inflame new terrorist groups."
I take it this is the politically correct way to say that both wars and terrorism are growing in frequency or severity. Putting it this way removes the blame from the terrorists.
Touch wood; but wars actually appear to be getting less frequent over time, and also less bloody. Hunter-gatherer societies seem to be at war at all times.
http://www.troynovant.com/Franson/Keeley/War-Before-Civilization.html
http://ironlight.wordpress.com/2010/04/22/the-peaceful-primitives-of-opposite-land/
And, contrary to what you might think, improved military technology has actually led to lower, not higher, casualty rates in battle.
http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/gabrmetz/gabr0022.htm
Consider this next time you hear someone say they wish they lived on Avatar's "planet Pandora."
I think it is necessarily true that "terrorism" is increasing; in an important sense, "terrorism" is a creation of the media, and improved communication, improved dissemination of information, creates it. Without the press coverage, there is no terror. The real question is whether it is really worthwhile to take down all our modern communication systems in order to reduce it.
At the same time, the growth in terrorism is also probably less than we imagine; our perspective is somewhat distorted, I think, by one spectacular attack, on 9-11. But whatever happened to the FLQ, the IRA, the German, Italian, and Japanese Red Armies, the Weather Underground, the Moluccas separatists, the Black Panthers? All were active only forty years ago. The Tamil Tigers are also now gone, it appears. We tend to forget about the terrorists of yesteryear, and their causes--perhaps the ultimate proof that, in the end, terrorism does not work.
2. "Population growth continues;"
Growth in human population is obviously a good thing, from the human perspective. It is hard to put a negative spin on it. Even so, the UN's figures predict that world population will grow only until 2050 or so, and then begin to decline. This, not population growth, ought to worry us--so long as we forget that health technology is also improving. I expect improvements in life expectancy to hold these figures to steady state or better in the end.
3. "Food shortages increase."
Not according to the Global Hunger Index. According to them, over the past ten years, "The ... GHI had fallen by 13% in Sub-Saharan Africa compared with the 1990 GHI, by about 25% in South Asia, and by 32% in the Near East and North Africa. Progress in Southeast Asia and Latin America was especially great, with the GHI decreasing by over 40%." Don't those figures sound rather promising? World hunger has really not been a going concern since the "Green Revolution" of the 1960s. Typically for conservatives, the modern left is apparently living in the past.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Hunger_Index
4. "Cleanup from the worst oil spill in history still awaits."
"The worst oil spill in history"? I know just a little about that. It happened in this part of the world, in the Persian Gulf, during Saddam's retreat from Kuwait. Happily, twenty years later, there is no longer any trace of it.
Or was he referring to the recent BP blowout? Nowhere near being the biggest oil spill in history. Only about 50 million gallons, tops. Even some large oil tankers have spilled more.
And there are reports the cleanup crews are having trouble already in finding anything major to clean up.
Hint: oil evaporates.
This illustrates, I think, the modern left's fear of all change. Any significant event looks to them as though the sky is falling.
This is typical of the attitude of any ruling class. When you are on top, any change is necessarily frightening--you have nowhere to go but down.
When you're poor, the opposite is true.
5. "Deforestation proceeds unchecked, especially in tropical zones."
Have you noticed that deke, how what used to be "global deforestation" has become "tropical deforestation"? There's a good, but never-stated, reason for that. The clear evidence is that the forest cover is actually growing throughout the developed world.
As for the tropics, the clearest truth is that we lack sufficient data to be sure. Some studies suggest they are shrinking, some that they are growing, some that they are remaining about the same. I fail to be alarmed--especially when I see that a tree in the tropics can reach a height of twenty feet within a couple of years. That's why you so often see the qualifiers "old growth" or "virgin" forests.
Me, I think you need to be pretty short of worries to get terribly upset over the virginity of trees in the tropics.
But, given that forest cover is growing in the developed world--
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn10521-forest-growth-is-encouraging-say-researchers.html
--it seems likely, with progress, that as the rest of the world also develops, forest cover will probably grow overall. This is mostly due to improved farming technology. But with increasing computerization, we can also expect a decline in the use of paper.
This has actually already begun. Newsprint production has been falling at 5% per annum over the past decade.
http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/business/story.html?id=a6c0e52d-3e87-467e-bbe9-819d4b2afcf9
6. "Industries sow toxins,"
Strictly speaking, industries do not sow toxins; people do. The gimmick here is to word the matter in order to suggest that this is somehow intrinsic to "industry" per se--to the business of making a living--as an excuse to block development, to block material progress.
Of course, in the real world, no business wants to produce waste--waste means lost productivity, and toxins mean bad public relations. Accordingly, allowing free rein for development, for industry, will always reduce toxins and pollution, not increase them. The proof of this is the quickest glance at the developed world: in Europe, North America, and Japan, everything is ridiculously clean. Compare India, China, Africa, Mexico...
7. "and use the world as guinea pigs for genetically-manipulated foods."
A bit of a contradiction here? Above, our correspondent seemed concerned about word hunger. So what happens as soon as something is proposed to prevent it--a little multinational factory here, a nuclear plant there, a seal hunt, a genetically-modified crop? All hell breaks loose, doesn't it? Those damned rednecks can eat cake.
The resistance to genetically-manipulated crops is a classic example of the left's innate conservatism. All change is terrifying. Is there really a danger? If there is, can it really be enough to negate all the obvious advantages? If there is, are we not already doing enough to prevent it? Have we really, as our correspondent suggests, never looked at GMOs in controlled conditions before we fed them to humans?
Obviously, the claim as made is simply false. Possibly reasonable men could argue we should do more.
8. "Glaciers are melting faster than ever."
We don't know whether this is true or not; we have insufficient data. Some glaciers are melting, some are growing.
Overall, the earth's ice cover seems to be fairly stable. Shrinking in the Northern Hemisphere, growing in the Southern.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/
Note the graph, "global sea ice area."
9. "Even as we suffer the hottest summer in recorded history, naysayers deny global warming."
The global warming believers are the first to insist that weather is not climate: for good reason. We know perfectly well that we cannot predict the weather beyond 48 hours in advance or so--so how can we pretend to predict the weather a hundred years hence?
The claim is dubious. But, by their own logic, one hot summer is not evidence of anything in terms of climate change.
And if it is, mind, it must be weighed in the balance with the fact that there has been no detectable rise in global temperature over the past 15 years.
As it happens, there is an interesting alternate explanation for the current hot summer, and for the coolness of the last fifteen. The sun is just awakening, spectacularly, from a period of dormancy. From today's news:
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/08/03/spectacular-northern-lights-signals-sun-waking/
Of course, all of this leaves aside a very basic question: why would a warmer earth be a bad thing? This comes down again to the left's aversion to all change.
10. "More species are dying daily than at any time since the extinction of the dinosaurs."
This is a claim often made, but, like global warming, it is based solely on a computer model. Once upon a time, if you told people a thing was done on a computer, they thought it was necessarily true. The left, still unfamiliar with computers, apparently still believes this. The rest of us know about "garbage in, garbage out." If the assumptions are correct, the model will work. There's a 50-50 chance if there are two alternatives. For a very complex system, like any ecosystem, it is extremely unlikely that the computed result is anything but random.
The truth is that we have no idea. It is virtually impossible to document a species's extinction; it requires proving a negative. But every year, species thought to have been extinct are actually being rediscovered.
Note that the notion of species extinction is based on the assumption that humans are gradually encroaching on the habitat of other species. And note that this assumption itself does not hold up. As we have seen, forest cover is growing in the developed world--hence non-human habitat. And another contradiction in the left's claimed logic: as a general rule, more heat means more life. If global warming is real, those who worry about non-human species extinction should encourage it along by all means necessary. As a matter of fact, this goes as well for deforestation: nothing is better for forest growth than a little extra CO2 in the air.
11. "World economies seem poised for a second plunge into chaos."
This could well be true; and unpleasant to get through. Still, what does it have to do with the overall trend of history? Does a recession, or a depression, mean an end to all human material progress?
And, if it did, isn't this just what the left has wanted and worked for all along?
12. "Entire nations hover on the brink of bankruptcy."
As above; and as above, isn't this directly as a result of leftist policies?
Note this recent chart of state debts across the US.
http://money.cnn.com/news/storysupplement/economy/state_debt/index.html
The "bluest" states are precisely those with the heaviest state debt burdens: Massachusetts, California, Hawaii, Connecticut, New York...
What does 2 plus 2 equal, again?
13. "Human rights are sacrificed on the altar of national security."
While perhaps unnecessary, any security measures taken today to combat terrorism pale beside what was done, in the leading democracies, in the American Civil War, the First World War, of the Second World War, by folks like FDR, Woodrow Wilson, Churchill, Lloyd George, and Lincoln--usually considered champions of human rights.
Lincoln suspended habeus corpus, seized private property without compensation, and shut down hostile newspapers.
Wilson imposed press censorship, deported foreign-born US citizens, shut down 60 newspapers.
Lloyd George bloodily suppressed the Easter Rebellion in Ireland, and had the leaders shot.
FDR interned all citizens of Japanese descent.
Churchill's suppression of a rebellion in Bengal during the Second World War may have resulted indirectly in as many as four million civilian deaths. He also suspended elections for the duration of the war.
Each of these acts may or may not have been justified by the requirements of war; but they are all a good deal more extreme than anything we are dealing with today. Can you imagine Obama deporting or interning all Americans of Arab or Muslim descent? Shutting down Fox News? (Well, maybe.)
Suspending the 2012 elections?
Probably not.
14. "Intolerance, especially among the fanatic fringes of Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism, seems to be growing."
Here's the false moral equivalence for which the left is justly famous. Intolerance growing in Christianity?
In Christianity, I see exactly the reverse. When I was a child, most Evangelical Protestants seemed more or less openly hostile towards Catholics; now Catholics and Evangelical Protestants seem to be more often the best of friends. There have been significant steps toward reconciliation between Catholics and Lutherans, and between Catholics and Orthodox. Ecumenicism is all the rage.
As for Islam and Hinduism: there was a jump in intolerance in the last few decades, but there are some signs it has already abated. The public has rejected the Islamists in Iraq, Egypt, Algeria, where they once seemed electorally powerful. The Islamist government in Iran seems to be under popular siege. The "Hindutva-ist" government in India was defeated in the last election.
Nor were these examples of religion-based intolerance ever in the same league as the politically-inspired intolerance of Marxist and Nazi regimes of earlier decades, who murdered millions solely on the basis of race, or class, or political views. Even Islamist Iran makes an effort at being a democracy.
15. In the old days, "We saw prosperity as a human right, 'Freedom 55' as a universal goal."
This last lament is significant for revealing the true base of the modern left. I doubt many in the working class ever expected to retire at 55. That's a privilege always restricted to those living off the public purse--broadly, those in government, the real ruling class.
It also seems to me that retiring at 55 makes one, by definition, one of the idle rich, at least from that point on.
If I were a member of that class,perhaps I too would indeed fear for the future. Changes brought on mostly by the Internet do indeed suggest their days may be numbered.
But I doubt that is bad news for humanity as a whole.
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