Some thoughts on World Population Day

[GliderGuider]

Last edited Wed Jul 11, 2012, 01:16 PM - Edit history (3)

Modern industrial societies have a lot to recommend them from the human point of view, especially compared to agrarian societies of the recent past.

We have much higher levels of material comfort and physical security, more interesting things to do (and longer lives to do them in), lower levels of illness and debilitation, much less gender inequality, as well as much higher levels of social equality, social mobility and social justice. Added to that is an incomparably broader range of intellectual and philosophical options opened up by literacy and the loosening of hierarchic control over our thoughts and actions.

The price for this advancement and the population growth it has entrained has been our theft of resources and opportunity from future generations of humans as well as from countless other species, the generalized fouling of the planet, the homogenization of culture, our alienation from the natural world, the loss of our sense of community, and a generalized anomie that comes from a loss of a sense of meaning (as a cube-rat I suffer from this a lot). While we've diminished the grip of religious and monarchic hierarchies, we have simultaneously thrown away much of our sense of the sacred - a mode of perception that seems to be necessary at some level for humans to feel in tune with the universe.

Losing population and keeping our technology would allow us to maintain many of the benefits of industrialization, while easing the burden on other species and future generations of people. If we could manage this we might be able to reduce our impact on the planet while not falling back into the ravages of our agrarian past.

On the other hand, cutting our technology (aka consumption) while trying to maintain our population would toss us right back into the maw of an agrarian hell - soaring social inequity, a massive loss of physical comfort and security, a huge increase in our workload, and rising levels of disease and warfare that would reduce our population anyway.

I=PAT tells us that if we want to maintain our affluence and technology while reducing our impact we must reduce our population. As a result I have great sympathy for those who try to do that (I'm childfree, and my familial generation of five people has produced only two children).

However, we don't always get the outcome we want, and I'm pretty sure that the "real" future is going to resemble a mutant industrial/agrarian hybrid. We have a lot of knowledge which we'll keep, but the problem we're about to face is a converging combination of losses: the loss of non-renewable resources (i.e. liquid fuels and some metals); the loss of food production due to climate change; and the loss of social cohesion due to the degradation of our overly complex and corrupt socioeconomic structure.

That converging crisis of energy, ecology and economics will throw some places in the world into chaos. Hardest hit will be those societies that are trying to emerge from a recent agrarian or horticultural past. Unfortunately, because of the penetration of technology the effects "over there" will probably ripple into developed OECD nations (think of the thin white line of a tsunami ripple on the horizon here).

An urgent, voluntary reduction in world population might give us some slight chance to avoid a few of the worst effects of the converging crisis. Unfortunately, it takes a long time to reduce a population, and time is the one thing we don't have any more. There is also the question of enlisting people in such a program. If participation was voluntary, those most likely to sign up would probably be the caring, aware, altruistic ones we might prefer to have reproduce. This probability raises the spectre of an "Idiocracy Effect" on steroids. A global birth lottery would avoid that problem, but if you think instituting carbon taxes is a tough sell, just try promoting a "World Childbirth Lottery and Licensing Agency"...

So in sum, we'll muddle along as usual - keeping what technology we can while natural forces like disease and starvation prune the vulnerable portions of the human population. Unfortunately, in the process, the things that will take the biggest hit is the environment and the other species that share it. In the competition between human and non-human lives, humans win every battle - even if that means we may ultimately lose the war.

[Wilms]

1. ^

[Fantastic Anarchist]

2. Great post.

Definitely some things to think about.

[GliderGuider]

3. Thank you.

It's something more of us need to be thinking about. We many not all come to the same conclusions, but we need to start taking the limits seriously.