Where are we?
Part one.
General Overview.
Of course the question of Where are We is not a difficult one if it is a matter of location, especially if we are the proud owner of a GPS instrument. A few years ago I rented a car in the Netherlands on my way to visit relatives in a country with such a maze of streets that exact destinations are difficult to find, so I used a GPS and the voice directed me perfectly to the correct address.
The question Where Are We is a little harder to answer when we include (1) politics or (2) economics or (3) the environment or (4) food supply or (5) even religion. Yet it is exactly to these fields where I will venture to go in my explorations of this topic: in other words a discovery tour where we are in 2014 in the greater context of the world’s happenings.
This year, 2014, is exactly 100 years after the start of The Great War that was primarily fought in Belgium and France on the West front and along the Russian frontier in the East. It lasted from 1914 till 1918 and involved almost all European nations, plus from 1917-18 the USA as well.
When the strife started, Europe still had two Emperors: Kaiser Wilhelm II of greater Germany and Franz Joseph, the ruler of Austria-Hungary. His realm included not only Austria and Hungary, with Vienna as the capital, but also Bohemia, Moravia, Hungary, Galicia, Transylvania, Bosnia and Croatia: too much of a mix to be stable. Once that war was concluded on November 11 1918, millions of soldiers had been killed, nothing concrete had been achieved, but two emperors were gone, together with their empires, and finally the 20th Century had begun, which ended in 1989. Now the long interim period to Century 21 is over, and we have arrived at the final stage of humanity. The Final Stage? Yes.
Exactly 100 years after WWI, war rumblings are again everywhere. In Margaret MacMillan’s book The War That Ended Peace, the road to 1914, I read (page 440): “Across the (European) Continent in 1911, economies were sliding into recession. Prices had been going up while wages had been falling behind, something that had hit the poorest classes hard.” That sentence scared me, because it depicts exactly our situation today. Are we now at that same point in 2014 as Europe was just before World War I? Are the great nations, Russia and China on the one hand and the NATO countries plus Japan on the other hand, manoeuvring themselves in such a situation about the current flashpoint of the Ukraine, where backing off becomes impossible?
Margaret MacMillan starts her book with two quotes, one by Albert Camus, “There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet always wars and plagues take people by surprise.” The other quote is by Elizabeth Bowen: “War is not an accident: it is an outcome. One cannot go back too far to ask, of what?”
Are we in for both wars and plagues? The Spanish Flu, emerging when World War I was winding down, killed as many civilians as there had been battlefield casualties: both events took more than 20 million to the grave, and that in a world with less than 2 billion inhabitants, the majority small settlements dwellers. Now most people live in cities, perfect disease breeding grounds, with a world population in excess of 7 billion and unmatched mobility, where obesity and diabetes are reaching epidemic proportions, all perfect conditions to propagate a pandemic. Already MERS- Middle East Respiratory Syndrome – and EBOLA, both highly contagious and dangerous diseases, are making the rounds in Africa and the Middle – and now Far East.
Where are we? Are we concerned? Do people talk about the current threats, such as Climate Change, resource depletion, fragile economic conditions? Not that I have noticed: on the contrary. Mentioning these distinct possibilities, bordering on certainties, is a sure way to become unpopular. As long as we can watch inane TV and see silly film stars and increasing nakedness we are satisfied with that pure insanity. Fact is that when civilizations start to die they go insane, and indeed craziness is evident everywhere. We don’t mind that the ice sheets in the Arctic are melting. We don’t care that temperatures are rising. We pay no attention to the scary scenarios the scientists tell us about, with the poisoning of air, soil and water. Let the forests die. Let the seas be emptied of life. Let one useless war after another be waged. Let the masses be thrust into extreme poverty and left without jobs while the elites accumulate vast fortunes through exploitation, speculation, insider-trading and outright theft. Jesus has something to say about this: “We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we sang a dirge and you did not mourn.” (Matt.11:17). If there ever is a time to mourn, with the death of species, the global spread of pollution, cancers proliferating, fraud more frequent than ever, it is now. Where are the real eyes that realize real lies?
How did we get to the point we are today?
Of course it’s ‘the frog in the slowly boiling pan’ symptom all over again. It all is happening so gradually. I remember spending time at my maternal grandparents’ farm in the 1930’s: a dozen cows all milked by hand, the milk processed the same day in the nearby plant. No refrigeration, of course, so small was not only beautiful, but the only way to go. No carbon footprint whatsoever. My paternal grandparents had a grocery store, selling sugar, coffee, tea, often in exchange for eggs, thus partly a barter economy. The church was at the centre of life.
Now everything and everybody has changed. The church is at the margin for most. Society at large evolved from religious authority to secular rule, from agriculture to industrial, from rural to urban, from local to global, from periphery to centre, from decentralized to centralized, from low-density energy to high-density energy, from wood to coal to oil/natural gas, from industrial to communication technology, from gold to fiat currencies, from local scarcity and high cost to global abundance, from islands of prosperity to continents of prosperity, from cash to credit, from collateral to leverage, from productive to consumerist and from sustainable to unsustainable. That’s where we are now.
Here’s why. In today’s world the resources needed for our technological pursuits are being used at breakneck rates and thus are either already facing depletion or will do so in the near future. When coal has already been mined so heavily that sulfurous, low-energy brown coal—the kind that miners in the 19th century used to discard as waste—has become the standard fuel for coal-fired power plants, for example, it’s a bit late to talk about a coal-to-liquids program to replace any serious fraction of the world’s petroleum consumption: the attempt to do so would send coal prices soaring to economy-wrecking heights. Richard Heinberg has pointed out in his book Peak Everything, that a great deal of the coal still remaining in the ground will take more energy to extract than it will produce when burnt, making it an energy sink rather than an energy source.
Where are we?
In the early 20th century, there was an abundance of everything, allowing the development of autos, highways, aircraft, radio, telephones and most recently the Internet. This progress started slowly, picked up speed, creating a period of widespread adoption and technological leaps, followed by a maturation phase allowing the advancement of refinements rather than leaps. Now we enter a mature economy with no or little growth, stagnated development and, in a world with a growing population, a shrinking job market.
Take air travel. The leap from open-cockpit aircraft of the 1910s to the long-distance comfort of the DC-3 in the 1930s was enormous, as was the leap from the prop-driven DC-3 to the greater capacity and speed of the 707 jet airliner. But since the advent of the Boeing 727 in 1964 and the jumbo-jet 747 in 1969, very little about the passenger experience of flight has changed (or has changed for the worse): the envelope of speed is little changed, and efficiency has improved, but these are mostly invisible to the passengers.
Cars too are a good example. I bought my first one in 1952, an Austin, which lasted exactly one year. Improvements in the past 60 plus years since have been gradual: my current car, a diesel, is still excellent, even after 12 years, but the basic concept has remained the same. The same is true of computers. Once computers reached the Mac OS X/Windows XP level, improvements have been of marginal utility. All this suggests that we are at the end of technologies.
In the meantime the costs of our lifestyle continue to go up due to higher energy costs, bureaucratic bloat and weather related crop failures. At the same time, with stagnant wages and interest income lower than the inflation rates, more of our collective consumption is being funded with debt, which is another way of saying that present consumption is being paid for with future income.
Ever since 1800 one invention after another has created more wealth and more jobs, while plenty of cheap energy led to an exponential increase in population. This ever upward rise in production moved to lower-labor costs and with automation and mechanization gave us higher-value services.
Now no longer is there the Next Big Thing that generates more jobs. On the contrary: the next big thing is ROBOTS, taking away whatever manufacturing jobs there still are, and new soft-ware, that can do almost anything, may make accountants and lawyers disposable too. The logical Next Big Thing is De-Growth, forcing us to consume less and do more with less. But there is only one problem with this: our system cannot cope with De-Growth, because it is built on Growth, depends on only one pathway: higher consumption, higher costs and higher debt. Any reduction in any of these three collapses the system. The current Big Thing–the world-wide web–is the first technology that is not creating more jobs than it eliminates. But how safe is this new trend? The recent appearance of the Heart Bleed virus shows that the Internet is extremely vulnerable.
Where are we?
Basically we are at the end of the line because we have placed all our bets on continuous growth, which means that we are on a one-way street to exhaustion. Our pensions, our labour market, our entire merchandizing set-up depends on more sales, growing revenue, increasing tax revenue to pay for the medical expense, old-age pensions and repairing and maintaining our infrastructure, roads, bridges, electrical system and education on all levels.
We cannot imagine a world that consumes less, generates fewer conventional jobs and reduces debt rather than creates more debt. The only strategy left is to do more of what has failed before, until it collapses. And sooner or later our Capitalist system will go the way of all systems before it, because, simply put, many of the problems which we see today in the world, economic problems, political problems, strategic problems, geo-political problems, are due to the fact that resources everywhere are running out because of natural limits. Some of these boundaries are pollution-related, such as climate change. Others are cost-related, such as the need for deeper wells or desalination to provide water for a growing population, and the need for greater food productivity per acre because of more mouths to feed. The extraction of oil and other fossil fuels are another good example as resource extraction becomes more complex, requiring a larger share of our shrinking pay cheques.
When limits hit, governments are especially likely to suffer from inadequate funding and excessive debt, because tax revenue suffers if wages and profits drop.
Let me give a simple example: imagine a few persons in charge of a million dollars. The interest is higher than their outgo, so for a while the capital increases, but as the number of dependents grows the income of that huge amount is no longer sufficient, so they start eating into the capital, something we as the human race have been doing now for decades. Now the original sum is almost gone. Then what? The only outcome is collapse.
We have made a deal with the Devil.
Why does this happen? We have made a deal with the Devil. We have become hooked on the heroin of carbon-fuels. We have become carbo-holics, offered our very selves in exchange for diabolical favours, such as supposedly unlimited energy, unlimited wealth, unlimited convenience, unlimited luxury and unlimited economic growth. The devil has sold us an illusion, still perpetrated by electioneering politicians.
Where are we?
More about that next week.