I tend to think, like George Monbiot,
that the only appropriate moral reaction to the various forms of ecological
trauma the world is experiencing - the mass extinctions, the hideous
despoliation of our oceans with plastic and our air with toxins, the horrifying
juggernaut of climate change - is an attitude of very intense concern,
and to begin doom-mongering in desperate hope that we might be able to reverse
these horrifying trends before we fuck everything (and not merely out of
concern for other species, but out of concern for our own). The case that this
is the only appropriate moral reaction to the environmental degradation we are
carrying out has to be made, of course, and maybe in this post I'll briefly
sketch that case. The primary purpose of this post is not this, however. The
primary purpose is to cover in detail an old bugbear of mine that falls within this universe. I've written about this bugbear before, within other posts, but
I don't think I've ever dealt with it properly. The bugbear is the following
Neoliberal/Libertarian/'New Optimist' anti-environmentalist rhetorical
manoeuvre (I hope what follows isn't too Straw Man-y):
Step A) Neolib makes the correct point
that Malthus' famous and very simple model of population growth (assuming no
improvement in agricultural technology, assuming that with prosperity would
come increased fertility, when it has proved the opposite) stopped being
applicable after the Industrial Revolution because we began to consistently
improve our agricultural technology and because it turns out that the
liberation of women is the panacea to a dangerously high birth-rate (a correct
point they typically supplement with some predictable references to falsified
1960s predictions of collapse, Silent Spring, the
supposed errors of Limits to Growth, and (if it's Pinker or a
Pinker-influenced person) some discussion of how cognitive science gives us
reason to think that we are biased towards such extreme reactions, and how the
media amplifies these biases).
Step B) Neolib uses some graphs and
some Hans Rosling statistics to make the point that, taking a very high-level,
aggregate perspective on the world, the last thirty years have been really
good! Poverty, health, education - everything has seen improvement. Question
posed to 'Malthusians' [[even though none of the prominent environmentalist
activists and academics who write books and deliver talks about the threat of
climate change and ecological catastrophe see Malthus as an inspiration, or
even cite Malthus as a source (because they know that his model was highly
flawed as a guide to today's world (see, for example, Jared Diamond's
discussion of this point in Collapse)), ppl like Michael Shermer
seem to think it makes sense to use this label to describe anyone very
seriously worried about what we're doing to the environment]] : 'Science/the
data says things are getting better, so how can you maintain such a
pessimistic attitude? The null hypothesis is that we're going to continue using
human ingenuity to solve our problems! Look at the data!'
Step C) Neolib says 'Yes, we need
carbon taxes but because of [A] and [B] there is absolutely no need to panic
(and no need to vote for anyone like Bernie Sanders!!!)
A lot of people buy into this line of
argument, but it’s actually unsound. First of all, Hans Rosling’s statistical
summaries (and others like them) do not show that things are ‘getting better’.
What all of us now know, thanks to people like Mr. Rosling or Steven Pinker, is
that the level of extreme poverty and illiteracy in the world has gone down a
great deal over the last thirty years (what’s underemphasised, of course, is
that the most astonishing leaps cluster in those South East Asian countries
that defied IMF advice on capital controls and liberalisation, which casts
serious doubt on the narrative that it has anything at all to do with Neoliberal
policy (especially seeing as, in the West, many of the same trends over the
same period look negative! (see my previous post on Ann Pettifor called “Hans
Rosling shit does not vindicate global neoliberalism”))). This still leaves it
open as to what level of credence one should have that those happy trends will continue. Your credence should be high
that these happy trends will continue only if you have reason to think that the
mechanisms that underlie these trends are stable. However, I think that it is
irrational to maintain high confidence that human ingenuity and human capacity
for social cohesion in the face of adversity will triumph over the effects of environmental
degradation.
Why do
I think this? Well, let me just say that it seems to me like the assumption of
continuity in this case is the extraordinary claim. What reason does one have
to have high confidence that even as climate change and pollution wreaks a
greater and greater toll on our planet – even as coastal cities are
increasingly beset by floods, even as formerly crucial agricultural areas are
stricken by major drought, even as millions of people in countries like
Bangladesh are forced to migrate to escape flooding, even as the perennially desperate
drought-situation in the Horn of Africa becomes yet more desperate, even as our
major world cities acquire increasingly toxic air and respiratory diseases
skyrocket, even as the microplastics in our bodies reach the point that they’re
doing serious damage – our societies will remain more or less stable, there
will be no war between major powers, and there will be no major political
crises? Why have high confidence that disaster does not await? Why have even
moderate confidence? Maybe people will say something about geo-engineering, or
they’ll say we’re going to get to Mars. Well, geo-engineering is actually fucked
up and a total last resort; and nobody is going to have a successful pregnancy
and birth in the massively irradiated, bone-density-thinning, muscle-atrophying
atmosphere of space (and any baby that survived would be fucked up, probably physically
and mentally impaired). No, as awkward as it is, we kind of need this planet to
not be like Venus; we kind of need to avoid making everywhere on earth look like Henderson Island.
Here’s
another reason why the graphs don’t suffice:
One
rather disturbing fact about the data on wars over the last few hundred years (which
Steven Pinker completely elides for the sake of his grand narrative) is that,
even as the frequency of major conflicts is seemingly ‘on the slide’, the
intensity of these conflicts, the scale of the bloodshed and the amount of
deaths, is increasing (‘technology’ is a more or less adequate one-word
explanation for this “power-law” distribution). In fact, it is probable that
the knowledge that another world war could wipe out the world helps explain why we saw such a historically
unprecedented level of international co-operation and diplomacy after World War
II (but, if I recall correctly, Pinker does not even entertain this thought).
One
of those classic quotes attributed to Einstein which I mention often in my
posts on this blog really sums up my thoughts on this: “I know not with what
weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with
sticks and stones.”
Albert
Einstein, in an interview with Alfred Werner, Liberal Judaism 16
(April-May 1949), Einstein Archive 30-1104, as sourced in The New
Quotable Einstein by Alice Calaprice (2005), p. 173.
Also,
as Chomsky details in Who Rules the
World? there were actually several major nuclear near-misses and it’s kind
of crazy that we’re all still here (anthropic principle? Are there many
worlds?).
As
usual, this is a structureless blob of a post. At least it’ll have a spicy
ending:
I feel
like, in my time, I have seen several Ted talks by people who love talking
about ‘the data’ (https://youtu.be/-yFhR1fKWG0?t=7m25s) where they discuss the ‘surprising
fact’ that you can seemingly plot human ‘technological progress’ as an
exponential starting from roughly 100,000 years ago.
Why do
they never discuss the fact that all exponential growth patterns in nature end
abruptly?
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