Contents | Book Of Values | Next
Predicament of Mankind
The institutions and patterns of thought of the World-Machine have created an interconnecting set of world-wide problems of an ecological, economic and political nature. The energy shortage, the rise of food prices, and the scandals in government are the first harbingers of the approaching crisis. There are two routes from here: The route of stagnation (fig. 16) and eventual total collapse, and the route of flexibility and growth, which could lead to a golden age. The dangers and the possibilities are as great for us in this century as they were for the men in the sixteenth Century.
ECOLOGY/ECONOMICS: With exponential (geometrically doubling) growth rates in the world for the past 500 years, we are now beginning to use up non-renewable resources so fast that many will very abruptly disappear in the next few decades: (sic) oil in 1990, natural gas in 1992, silver in 1983, tin in 1985, zinc in 1988, copper in 1991, lead in 1991, mercury in 1983 (THE LIMITS OF GROWTH, table 4). Even coal and iron will disappear in 100 years, at exponential growth rates, which, it must be emphasized have characterized economic growth all over the world for 500 years. All the available world's arable land will be required to feed the world's population by 2000. (THE LIMITS OF GROWTH, fig. 10). Even with perfect world-wide systems of land use and distribution of food, there will inevitably be mass famine, if population continues to grow beyond the 2000 year level. Even if productivity is quadrupled it will only give us 50 more years. Once all the land is used to full capacity, there is simply no more land. Once the non-renewable resources are gone, that's it. The geological processes which created those resources took hundreds of millions of years. We are using them all up in a few decades.
The dangerous effects of pollution are less well charted. But it is known that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is increasing exponentially with unknown effects on the Earth's greenhouse effect. Waste heat in urban areas, release of nuclear wastes from nuclear generators, lead in the Greenland ice cap and DDT in the human body fat are all known to be increasing exponentially. Oxygen content in small seas has been decreasing exponentially (THE LIMITS OF GROWTH, figs. 15-12). The disappearance of free oxygen in seas and lakes is a result of pollution in the form of nutrients for algae which comes from detergents, chemical fertilizers, and human wastes. The ecosphere is flexible, but not infinitely so, and we are beginning to make massive assaults on it with little understanding of the ultimate effect. Sudden increases in the temperature of the earth and melting of ice-caps and death of the oceans and rainforests that produce our oxygen are two horrible possibilities that such world-wide pollution would produce if exponentially continued long enough.
We are so used to having our cake and eating it too that we assume there are technological solutions to all these problems. One early sign that this is not so is the collision of pollution control requirements and energy conservation in the design of automobiles. It is possible to reduce pollution technologically, but each further improvement is exponentially more expensive in non-renewable resources (such as platinum for catalysts), and in gasoline used, and in performance and cost of the automobile. This kind of collision is typical of the world predicament. No one problem can be solved in isolation, and attempts to approach it that way only aggravate some other problem. Indeed, it is this isolating, specialized, nationalized approach to things which has led to the present crisis.
WAR: We have lived with the means of Armageddon for 28 years without much ill effect, and with the detente among major powers, we may be lulled into a false security. But, the ecolo-nomic crisis above has already begun to interact in dangerous ways with the world political system, and these effects will rapidly become intensified.
The root cause of devastating global conflict could be the intense resentment of non-Western 'third world' peoples at centuries of defeat and submersion at the hands of scientifically and technologically superior Westerners. The intense resentments of Arabs and Asians and Africans at the industrialized West has so far been impotent, not a factor in global affairs. This is already changing with dramatic suddenness. By some strange irony of history, those third world nations now find themselves the owners of most of the remaining supplies of certain crucial non-renewable resources, which are suddenly in short supply, which means high prices, which means the economic shoe is on the other foot. As everyone knows, the Arabs have most of the world's remaining petroleum, and are beginning to control enormous reserves of money as a result. It was largely this Arab money sloshing around the money markets which caused the last dollar crisis. As for the other items in short supply, China has most of the tungsten, southeast Asia most of the tin, Russia and South Africa most of the platinum group of metals, Cuba the largest reserve of nickel, Chile much of the copper, Zambia and the republic of the Congo most of the cobalt, South Africa most of the chromium and gold and manganese. (table 4, LIMITS OF GROWTH). This is a catalog of nations who are alienated in one way or another from the industrialized West. What if they should organize together with the Arabs? By judicious use of boycott of sales of these raw materials, they could exert economic blackmail....the first effect of which will be to give them the most modern weaponry and the means to deliver them.
It is hard to predict how historical resentments and sympathies and new found power will come together and produce war or the threat of war. One thing we know: the continuing middle East conflict will have the gradual effect of educating the Arabs to modern Western techniques of war. So with the continuing Southeast Asian conflict. The second thing we know is that there are many psychic prophecies down through the centuries, by otherwise proven prophets, of a great world-wide war which will end this period of history. The third thing we know from the government theorem is that when social groups become about equally powerful and equally dangerous to each other, it is time to put them under a common government, and a synthesized civilization. And if we are to avoid the specialized way of thinking that has blindly led our age to such a frightful collision, we must have a humanist government.
CORRUPTION: Western civilization of the World-Machine has lost its direction and vitality in the Twentieth Century (figs. 14, 15). There are numerous symptoms of this, ranging from crime in the streets, to the ugly unlivability of modern cities, to political corruption, to the pandering tendencies of the information/entertainment industries, to the thickening rigidity and irrelevance of schools and universities. There is no longer any higher center in Western civilization, not religiously, aesthetically, or politically. Christian religion ceased to be vital in the 17th Century; Faustian consciousness has produced a fragmentation of 'higher' cultural worlds and Practical consciousness gives us the total impoverishment of the ordinary aesthetic environment that is one of the chief reasons for the boredom and alienation that most people feel in our cities. The first sign of rigidity in the schools and universities probably came with their reaction to psychical research in the twenties and thirties. Today, swollen hierarchies of administrators absorb half the budget and contribute nothing but obstruction and useless regulation for faculty and students. No alternatives to the World-Machine materialism/Christianity nor to its specialism nor to its teacherism can be explored. Humanist, empirical religionist, open learning schools are actually illegal most places.
One of the symptoms of the corruption of Western civilization is that no one feels any higher responsibility anymore. This is especially evident in the publishing industry and in the information/entertainment industry. The importance of an idea for mankind is of no relevance at all in determining if a book or article is published or reviewed. Things are judged from a very narrowly (and in the long run stupidly) commercial viewpoint. Thus, what is published and made famous are trashy, trivial, intellectually flyweight books about future schlock, massaging the media, Dr. Blank's new fad diet, or some white specialist's universalization of his latest rat studies (or studies of human sexual plumbing). Significant books like the LIMITS OF GROWTH or TWENTY CASES SUGGESTIVE OF REINCARNATION only get published because someone pays to have them published, and they received no publicity. This kind of pandering is typical of industry which first does motivation research, then invents and sells a product, not because there is any prior desire or any real need for such a thing, but simply because it is something people can be manipulated into believing they want. Such pandering produces degraded tastes. The final result of capitalism and democracy is the same decadence suffered by late Hellenic (Roman) civilization.
The method of value science is to judge things not by whether they are approved by a majority (as in democracy), but by whether they are of genuine value to all in the group. How do we know something is of genuine value? By the test of life, by experience. The laboratory of the value scientist is the intentional community. The value scientist (experimental) is an active participant, committed to the trial community.
The eleven theorems of value science all deal with community action, where a community can be as small as a village and as large as the universe. In analyzing any particular problem, of morality, of aesthetics, or of politics, the first thing is to see exactly what action, by whom, to whom, under what circumstances, is in question. Not all ordinary value talk is directly related to action, but the value scientist does so confine himself. He is also mainly concerned with obligations, orders, directions, instructions, etc. The community's action may result in the creation of obligations, orders, instructions or whatever, and create a social situation which motivates them being followed. But what is directly justified is always an action of value.
The justification is always relative to a particular actor (an actor may be a particular group). Values are guides to actions, not properties of things or situations. Thus, you always need to specify the actor, and must be aware of the possibility that a particular sort of action may be justified for one actor but not for another. This is the principle of relativity of values. As mentioned, the theorems are concerned with community action. A group action must be of value to every member of that group. This is the group value axiom, and essentially defines the meaning of "community." In order for such justification to be possible, there must be some common value all members of the community share. There are only a few universal personal values, such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and all the theorems are based on them.