According to the US Census Bureau's "POPClock" on-line
global population projector, as I sit down to begin composing this chapter,
there are an estimated 6,497,704,892 human beings inhabiting the Earth.
That's almost six and a half thousand million people. In contrast,
the population of the whole planet was under one hundred million in the
year 1 CE (less than 2% of today's headcount). It took nearly two
thousand years to reach the first billion mark, around 1850. By 1950,
world population had more than doubled to about 2.5 billion. Human
population, since the emergence of Homo sapiens on the planet, took 150,000
years to reach its first billion. The most recent billion accrued in just
12 years.
Current United Nations estimates, however, project that
global population growth is now declining from previous exponential rates,
and is expected to level off by the year 2050 at somewhere between nine
and twelve billion… Good news, right?
Or is it? Let's take a closer look at that "leveling
off" process. Why is it occurring? Why isn't population just
escalating exponentially out of control, as futurists like Paul Ehrlich,
author of The Population Bomb, once famous-ly predicted?
Is human population being “thinned” by rampant war, famine
and disease? The World Health Organization reports that just the
opposite is true – in almost every country on Earth, a significantly greater
percentage of newborns are surviving the first five years of life, and
more adults are reaching old age, than at any other time in history.
Shouldn't that push our numbers up and up and up?
Not if fewer children are being born. According
to the UN and other sources, recent and predicted future declines in human
population growth are the result of steady, and in some cases quite dramatic,
reductions in fertility. More and more, all around the globe, people
are living longer and better, but we are having fewer children.
Why would that be?
Population scholars identify such declines in fertility,
which have occurred on the smaller scale of individual nations and regions
many times throughout history, as a likely result of increased material
prosperity. Following a line of reasoning economists label a utility
maximization process, couples tend to make decisions concerning family
size based on the perceived cost of raising children, weighing the contributions
children can be expected to make to the family, such as increased love
and companionship, the opportunity to grow through the experience of parenting,
physical work and/or income in societies where child labor is the norm,
the continuation of the family bloodline, etc., against the time, attention
and household resources required to raise those children to adulthood.
Fertility tends to decline as prosperity increases because economic development
changes the traditional formula, allowing parents a wider range of options
for pursuing self-fulfillment – education becomes available and affordable,
new professions and business opportunities arise, etc. – while simultaneously
increasing the cost of raising kids. Weighing all these factors,
couples simply decide they want fewer children, and make eager use of family
planning programs that past generations in their own culture shunned.
In brief, rates of global population growth appear to
be declining because life is good. Planet-wide, as a species, we
can afford to produce fewer children, and so we are.
6,497,738,877. In the time it took me to compose the
seven paragraphs above, global population jumped by 33,985 persons.
Another factor to consider here, and one the United Nations
accounts for when calculating its population projections, is increased
longevity. Advancements in medical science have dramatically extended
individual lifespans over the last 100 years, a trend that is expected
to continue. The modern drop in global fertility doesn’t pose anything
like the threat Ehrlich's "Population Bomb" once appeared to embody (i.e.,
we’re in no danger of “imploding” or “erasing ourselves” by not having
children) because we aren’t dying off like we used to. As birthrates
decrease, Earth’s human population is stabilizing, rather than shrinking,
because we’re sticking around longer to personally enjoy the prosperity
that allowed us not to have kids in the first place. The triple-edged
sword of affluence, effective birth control and medical life-extension
technology appears to have set our species on a swift and sure course toward
fulfilling the 1980s American Yuppie dream of living forever without having
to share our stuff with a bunch of bratty kids. On a global scale,
we are spending our children’s inheritance, as the famous Reagan Era bumper
sticker once opined, defusing the "Population Bomb" by working to maintain
our personal physical selves and our present affluent status quo for all
eternity, while essentially eliminating future generations.
Is that a good plan? Is it a consciously chosen
"plan" at all – or is it simply happening?
6,498,105,638. About a day and a half passed between
the completion of the paragraph above and my return to the composition
of this chapter. In that time, world population grew by 366,761 persons,
for a total increase since launching this Key Question of 400,746 – almost
half a million in less than 48 hours.
So long as we remain earthbound, and therefore confined
to a definition of material prosperity that hinges on the size of our personal
"slice" of our planet's limited "resource pie," this contradiction will
continue to covertly fuel all our large-scale meme-wars, as various factions
struggle to realize self-serving "stabilization" or "sustainability" strategies
that shift the burden of population reductions and resource poverty onto
social groups other than their own. The present global Terrorists
VS Infidels Christian/Moslem conflict, the economic/ideological struggle
between Capitalism and Socialism, growing anti-immigrant sentiment amongst
the citizens and governments of wealthy First World countries, and even
New Age "Earth Changes" prophecies calling for the "natural" deaths of
billions as the Earth "balances Humanity's cancer-like spread" are all
the product of memeplexes which, while differing in their surface details,
share deep, common roots in the tension between our human potential for
unlimited growth and an increasingly inescapable awareness of the limitations
to that potential imposed by our species’ seclusion to a single, small
planet.
Within the next 50 years, during the lifetime of the
majority of individuals reading these words, Humanity's infinite growth
potential VS finite planet conundrum, if allowed to simply run its course,
will almost certainly be resolved through the elimination of some segment
of human life on Earth. In the reduction-through-affluence plan,
it's the yet unborn children of the future that are sacrificed. The
religious, economic and cultural variants mostly name their present-day
targets out loud, investing enormous energy in demonizing their perceived
enemies (Terrorists, Capitalists, Leftists, Infidels, Jews, Christians,
Moslems, Gays, the “ultra-rich,” the “useless eater” poor, etc., etc.,
etc.) and making shameless public preparations for their elimination or
forced impoverishment. Reducing population by increasing material affluence
may turn out to be, by far, the most humane strategy for redirecting an
earthbound Humanity toward "stabilization" – but are we on board with its
projected outcome of a planet of rich old people clinging forever to their
stuff (even if we, personally, get to be the “new eternals”), and a stagnant,
long-term future that amounts to little more than a dull continuance of
the status quo into perpetuity? Don't all the other competing
plans out there amount to only slightly more Draconian versions of pretty
much the same thing – idealized and intensely meme-driven wish fulfillment
scenarios of what life in the present “ought to be like,” infinitely extended
into the future, i.e., a future Moslem planet that looks pretty much like
a bigger version of the present Moslem world, a Christianized Earth with
a church on every corner and a Bible in every hand, a Capitalist globe
glistening in space like a giant, blue shopping mall, a post-"Earth Changes"
New Age wonder-world, with tribes of happy homesteaders drumming blissfully
beside bonfires and singing Cum-by-ya across a lush, "naturally-depopulated"
landscape, etc.?
Can any version of “sustainability” that accepts earth-boundedness
as an invariable norm end in anything but death on a massive scale?
Can any population-reducing "sustainability/stabilization" plan, however
successfully implemented, actually resolve our dilemma, anyway? Is
human prolificacy the real problem?
Picture a performing circus tiger, locked securely behind
the long steel bars of its cage. Our eyes, on first glance, see "tiger"
– bright reddish-gold fur, stripes like black lightning, simmering eyes
like glowing coals of jungle fire. The great cat's massive size,
brilliant coloring and fierce expression fill our hearts with awe and wonder…
But, as we watch, the tiger's mouth opens wide in a mighty yawn of caged
tedium, revealing gaping spaces where his saber-like fangs have been surgically
removed. A small door opens and a plate of meat is slipped into the
cage. The great beast slowly rises, then saunters with only mild
interest toward the long-dead offering (no tracking, hunt or kill required).
When his belly is filled, he'll be wheeled to the center ring, there to
leap through fiery hoops, roaring in imitation of his breed's naturally
ferocity for the pleasure of human children, following the commands of
a colorfully-costumed trainer.
The human eye thrills to the sight of a tiger in the
ring – but is it really a tiger? Defanged, de-clawed, denied the
satisfaction of every natural instinctive drive, and condemned to life-imprisonment
pacing hard floors of steel cages and performing tricks with no natural
parallel within the 70 or so million years of tiger evolution, is there
really any true tiger left?
For at least 150,000 years (and, potentially, much longer,
depending on how you define “human”), our species has been in large measure
defined by our wildly prolific talent for unlimited physical reproduction.
Planet Earth, however, is a finite space which is incapable of supporting
long term exponential human population growth. That much is simple
math. But if we respond to the gradual transformation of our home
planet from a wild open space for human expansion into a cage of limitation
on future growth – a change that is a natural result of our species' long-term
success expressing our innate prolificacy, rather than of some unnatural
deficit or failure on our part – by metaphorically and actually de-fanging,
de-clawing, denying and in every way de-naturalizing ourselves in order
to avoid outgrowing our cage, will what we become in the process be any
more worthy of the epithet human than the imprisoned, performing circus
cat can still be properly labeled tiger?
If, in our time, the unstoppable force of Humanity’s
natural biological prolificacy is genuinely crashing headlong into the
unmovable object of our earthbound station, by the direction of what dark
meme have we been led to identify human population growth as the problem
to be resolved, and the culling of our own species as the common sense
resolution to that impasse? Why not, to take one fairly obvious alternative
solution, especially for those of us raised on Gene Roddenberry’s hope-filled
Star Trek vision of the future, name Humanity's containment to this one
small planet as the difficulty to be overcome, and work instead toward
the mounting of an all-out, global rush to break free of our earthly bonds
and inhabit endless space, spreading the human species first to the near
shores of our resource-rich solar system, then on into our inconceivably
spacious galaxy, and eventually, to the unlimited frontier of the whole
vast Universe? What underlies our apparently-common-sensical and
near-universal acceptance of the belief that we must now shrink to survive?
Is that belief serving us?
6,499,311,408. A three-day holiday weekend passed
between the completion of the paragraph above and the drafting of these
closing remarks. In the eight days it took to compose this chapter,
world population increased by 1,606,516 individual human beings (the rough
equivalent of the present populations of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Hamburg,
Germany, or the entire Asian Kingdom of Bhutan!), each of whose lives are
as precious to them and to those who love them as our own lives and those
of our children, our families and our friends are to us. If we choose
to look away from this Key Question, in the course of a few decades at
most, we will see many times their number perish or be inhibited from bringing
their unique perspective and potential into the world at the hand of one
currently-operative or soon to be initiated “stabilization/sustainability”
population culling plan or another. We, and those we love, may well
find ourselves among their number.
Before we can even begin to think seriously about designing
an awakened and genuinely humane and sustainable human culture, on Planet
Earth alone or across the whole vast Cosmos, we must first resolve this
primary question: What is the value of human life? Do we think
so little of real flesh-and-blood human beings that we are willing to support,
or surreptitiously endorse through inaction or willful ignorance, any "stabilization"
or "sustainability" strategy that treats Humanity as, at best, a diseased
organ to be subjected to some variant of a "people-ectomy," the sacrifice
of some part of our number in service to the rest, as a surgeon might cut
away pieces of a cancerous lung in hopes of preserving the "undamaged"
remainder? Following the tiger in a cage metaphor, in the aftermath
of any such surgical population reduction, regardless of the strategy utilized,
would the human remainder preserved remain truly human, anyway?
If, instead, we choose to value every life, including
those of future generations, acknowledging their en-titlement to be born
and to inherit a world worthy of a valued Humanity, and therefore choose
to reject all “stabilization/sustainability” plans that fail to serve and
preserve everyone equally, and to maintain a natural definition of human
that includes prolific procreative as well as imaginative creativity, then
what other options are available to us? Is it even possible to simultaneously
sanctify the value of human life and resolve our species’ infinite growth/finite
planet dichotomy? If we answer yes, then we must not evade the natural
follow-up question – how? If we answer no, then where do we go from
here?
_________________________________
KEY QUESTION EXERCISE #4
Choosing the Slain
This exercise will have a greater impact if you can complete
Part I before reading the instructions for Part II. Part II has been
specially formatted to allow you to paperclip the pages containing it together,
sealing them away until you are ready for them, while allowing you to continue
your first read-through of the book, unobstruct-ed. If you did not
secure the pages when you read the introduction, please do so now.
Part I:
Locate a good world atlas and a current almanac that provides
population totals and demographic statistics, such as percentage breakdowns
of race, religion, gender, age, economic status, etc. for the world’s continents,
countries and individual cities (Internet databases containing the same
information are fine). Your job as a “Chooser of the Slain” is to
reduce world population by 2,000,000,000 (two billion, or two thousand
million) souls – a conservative number in light of the projected outcomes
of some of the “stabilization” strategies discussed above. Your goal
is to, at the very least, buy some time for the human species by reducing
competition for Earth’s limited resources. If you can find a way
to leave an even potentially “sustainable” society in the wake of the destruction,
more the better. If not, at least try to leave a viable civilization
behind to pick up the pieces. You can apply any criteria you like
for choosing who to eliminate and who to preserve. However you mete
out the devastation, you must record in your notebook the actual locations
you cull from, as much as possible naming, at the most specific individuals
you would mark for death, on up to cities, regions, or at the most generic,
the countries you target for destruction (if you take out a whole continent,
record each of the individual countries that make it up), and the exact
number slated to die in each location. Keep working on your list
until you have successfully eradicated your assigned 2,000,000,000, and
you are satisfied that your choices reflect your best efforts to positively
reshape the world, in spite of what you might personally think of the means.
This Page is intentionally left blank to allow Part II of the Choosing the Slain exercise to be concealed until the reader has completed Part I. Part II:
Were you on the list? If you were, in what position?
Were you first? Last? What about your children, spouse, parents,
friends? Were some of them on the list, and not others? What
qualified those who made the list for inclusion? If no one you know
personally made it into the number of the slain, did you simply exclude
them, a priori, from consideration? Or did you articulate reasons
for saving them? Were those reasons justifiable or simply justifications?
Now get out a calculator, and return to your statistical
sources. Look up the locations you culled from again, and tally the
percentages slain in each of the following demographic categories:
Race, Religion, Gender, Age, Economic Status and, if the statistics are
available, Form of Government (i.e., democracies, dictatorships, theocracies,
monarchies, etc). Use only the largest demographic group for the
location, i.e., if a country is 75% Moslem and 25% Christian, use only
the 75% Moslem for you calculations. If statistics are not available
for individual cities, use the demographics of the larger state or country
in which the target is located as likely to be representative of the city's
inhabitants. For each location, simply multiply the number slain
times the largest demographic group in each category.
Example: The almanac shows a location from which
you chose to eliminate 48,000 people to be 80% Caucasian, 60% Christian,
53% female, 40% over 60 years of age, 50% middle class, and 100% governed
by democracy. You killed:
Race: 48,000 X 80% = 38,400 Caucasians
Religion: 48,000 X 60% = 28,800 Christians
Gender: 48,000 X 53% = 25,440 Women
Age: 48,000 X 40% = 19,200 Post-60 individuals
Economic Status: 48,000 X 50% = 24,000 Middle Class
Form of Government: 48,000 X 100% = 48,000 citizens
of a democracy
When you have completed the calculations for all of the
individual locations, compute grand totals for each of the specific demographic
majorities (not the broad demo-graphic categories) to determine how many
Whites, Blacks, Asians, Indigenous Peoples, Christians, Moslems, Jews,
Communists, etc. that you killed. Using this method, your “total kill,”
will appear to be a number vastly in excess of your assigned 2,000,000,000,
but that’s because we counted each person several times, once for each
time they matched a demographic majority. For example, a 65 year old Caucasian-American,
Christian woman earning $50,000 a year would have been counted six times
in the example above, while a 30 year old African-American Moslem man earning
a million dollars a year would have been counted only once, under Form
of Government, since America is a democracy. It doesn’t really matter
for this exercise, though, since you are simply working to identify overall
ballpark trends.
What patterns of prejudice or preference does your analysis
reveal? Who fared the worst? Who, if anyone, was totally spared?
Does the final demographic death-toll of your personal global "stabilization"
plan expose the influence of memes or memeplexes of which you were previously
unaware? Your high-scorer in each demo-graphic category (Race, Religion,
Gender, Age, Economic Status and Form of Government) reveals a deficit
in your personal knowledge of, and compassion for, specific others outside
your habitual social comfort-zone, while simultaneously presenting a golden
opportunity to work toward awakening by consciously challenging the memes
underlying your prejudice.
One of the best and most readily-available tools for
gaining deep knowledge of people very different from ourselves is Literature,
in both its written and cinematic forms. Unlike academic studies
(History, Sociology, etc.), novels and movies created by, and centered
in the experience of, individuals from unfamiliar cultures have a unique
ability to slip past the memetic censors fortifying our habitual illusory
sense of "I." When we suspend disbelief, entrusting ourselves to
the rhythmic narrative voice of a novel or the camera's-eye "point of view"
of a film (a psychic suspension the study of academic subjects does not
require of us), the experiences of the characters impact us psychologically
and emotionally as if they were our own. Our customary "I" VS "Not
I" stance toward other people's understanding of reality is undone, and
we become fluid in relation to the fixed certainties memes rely on to maintain
control over our minds. Story by story, film by film, our experience
of reality becomes more diverse and inclusive, the boundaries of our dream-worlds
expand, and we become freer.
Over the course of the next year, commit to reading at
least three novels and viewing at least three films responsibly centered
in and sympathetic to (as opposed to exploitative of) the cultural experiences
of each of the high-scorers on your "stabilization" death-toll list.
When the year has passed, do this exercise again and see how your demographic
choices have changed. Are previously hidden or newly-acquired prejudices
revealed?
In Key Question Community groups, after everyone has
had opportunity to work through the initial exercise, gather to discuss
your results. Divide the group under the lens of each of the broad
demographic categories in turn. How do the results of members sharing
specific racial, religious, gender, age or economic status profiles compare?
Who were the high-scorers in each category for the group as a whole?
Commit to reaching out to individuals in your community with roots in those
cultures/demographics, and if possible, bringing at least one person from
each into full membership in your group within one year.