 A lot of my friends and readers are technophiles. They believe that social networking and other technologies can make the world a much better place. I’d like to believe it, but I don’t. The industrial economy is rigged. It is not a ‘market’ economy or a ‘free’ economy. It is designed to reduce us to mere, insatiable consumers — of politicians’ promises with our tax dollars, of overpriced, imported crap products, of ‘education’, of packaged information and entertainment ‘products’, of health treatments etc. We are given just enough cash and credit to keep us addicted, and we are isolated from serious social interaction to make us compliant. No great conspiracy. That’s just how the world works best when the objective is to maximize profit and GDP. We are not people in this economy. We are consumers, taxpayers, students, audiences, patients. Numbers. Demographics. The natural economy, the one we keep striving towards because it’s, well, natural, is inherently social, which is one of the things we like about it. It engages us as customers, citizens, learners, participants, as peers in the collective enterprise of living and making a living. It disintermediates the robber barons, the corrupt politicians, the boring teachers, the mindless media, and healthcare professionals who profit from our illness. They are not needed in a natural economy. There is no place for them. It is not surprising, then, that we are attracted to entrepreneurship, to networked rather than hierarchical organizations, to the idea of community. Small is beautiful, and we are social creatures by nature. The idea of a World of Ends is that we don’t need middlemen to do what is important. With the Internet, with social networking, we can co-produce what we need together, for ourselves, with nothing skimmed or suboptimal. It is suggested, and we would love to believe, that the World of Ends is evolving, slowly, under the corporatist radar, waiting to achieve sufficient momentum that it cannot be stopped. In a fully developed natural economy, we would all be members of self-selected, self-managed natural enterprises, and of self-selected, self-managed natural intentional communities. Natural enterprises and our natural community would be self-sufficient and self-governed, and as members of them we would look after our own learning, recreation, health and well-being. It’s a great idea, and we need to work towards it. But there are two problems with how we’re approaching it now:
I know this is hard to explain, which is perhaps why I keep putting off trying to express it. I understand the two problems above intuitively more than intellectually. We can develop software virtually, and we can undertake artistic collaborations remotely. But we cannot build a whole economy on fragile, multiple virtual relationships. Most of what our economy is about is atoms, not bits. It is quality, locally produced food and clothing and building materials. It is creation and recreation that we participate in, in person. Ultimately we will have to abandon the illusion that we can be part of a global, virtual, ever-changing ‘electronic’ community, that we can be citizens of the whole world, that social networks and technology can change the world. Eventually we have to come back to place, to true community, and make it work, face to face. The world we will face by the end of this century, a world of cascading crises and horrific scarcity, will not allow us to play with technology. This technology is fragile and needs huge amounts of energy stolen from future generations to work at all. We cannot afford it. This future world, a world of rust and reclamation, will force us to face hard truths. Our future social networks will be held together with flesh and sweat, not messages and VoIP. It’s time we got down to the business of figuring out how our descendants will live, and make a living, when the ephemeral constructs of our rapacious, delusional age are gone. It’s important to get started, withlove and without illusion. Here, now, in this place. The time for toys is over. Category: Technology and Society
|
July 19, 2007
Technophilia, Virtual Communities and the World of Ends
July 18, 2007
Plenitude on Any Terms
 In today’s NYT, Verlyn Klinkenborg laments the lack of attention to the fact that California’s population (like Canada’s) is expected to nearly double to 60 million by 2050 (both populations, barring crisis, will reach 100 million by 2100, with US total population expected to remain about ten times that amount, one billion by 2100). Klinkenborg notes that, even with a moderation in the growth of consumption and average house size, the increase in total use of land and resources, and waste produced, will increase at a considerably faster rate than population. He concludes:
Population growth of 1-2% per year is so slow that we tend to ignore it, and assume that it can be simply or naturally absorbed. But 1% growth compounded adds up to 60% in 50 years and 170% (a near-tripling) in 100 years. And 2% growth compounded adds up to 170% growth (a near tripling) in 50 years and 620% (over seven times current population) in 100 years — that’s what’s (still) occurring in most of the world’s struggling nations. It’s the proverbial ‘boiling frog’ situation – nothing seems to be happening, but suddenly you wake up and the place you love is gone.
I live just outside the Greater Toronto Area, in an area, the Oak Ridges Moraine, that is, for now, supposedly, protected wetland and greenbelt (see map above). The GTA, home to half of Canada’s new immigrants, is growing by more than 2% per year, so even if this slows somewhat, we’re looking at a population of six million today exploding to 15 million by 2050 and over 40 million by 2100. Since most of the new residents want single-family homes on private lots, we’re talking about a quadrupling of built-up area by 2050 and a ten-fold increase by 2100. This is precisely what has happened in most of the cities in the struggling nations in the last century. The New Yorker has chillingly described what urban life is like there.
A recent post by my friend Joe Bageant explains the sense of fatalism, disbelief, denial and indifference that most of us feel when we look at such forecasts. He likens us to ants who, up until the day their colony dies off suddenly from lack of water, continue to do what they have always done, unaware or unresponsive to the pending disaster. Do they sense, know it is coming, and just shrug their thoraxes that these troublesome signs are not their business, something in the Queen’s or the Ant God’s hands? Joe writes:
And that brings us back to 60 million and then 100 million Californians, a like number of somewhat colder, somewhat less drought-stricken Canadians (nearly half of them in the GTA), and a billion Americans, still looking for “plenitude on any terms”.
I know, you don’t believe it will happen. Previous neo-Malthusians, after all, have been wrong; their dire predictions never came about. Why should it be any different this century? We’ll figure it out, you say. We’ll adapt. We’ll voluntarily reduce our fertility. We’ll close down immigration before it gets to this. Technology will allow us to live better with less consumption, to collaborate on solutions. And what more can we do anyway? We’re already being more frugal, driving greener cars, having fewer children than our parents. We’re doing our part. So shut up about it already. Like Joe’s ant colony, we don’t believe in Armageddon. And those who do also believe in salvation from a higher power. We do what we must, then we do what’s easy, andthen we do what’s fun. If only those needs, those comforts, those joys didn’t come with such a huge, and inevitable cost. Category: Overpopulation
|
July 17, 2007
Is Mexico About to Fail?
 The sign (erected by Zapatista rebels in MÈxico) says “Here the people lead and the government follows.” It prohibits the sale of arms, drugs and unlicensed logging and concludes “No to the destruction of nature”. Image from Wikipedia. Over at the Oil Drum, Jeff Vail has been predicting that MÈxico, as a functioning nation-state, may not survive the year. He cites the collapse in that country of oil production (a Peak Oil phenomenon), attacks by anti-government forces on oil infrastructure, growing poverty and inequality, inability of the state to provide for the essential needs of the nation, growing power of organized crime, corruption and desertion of police forces, the assassination of judges and officials with impunity, and the growing bankruptcy of farmers due to the distortions of subsidized globalization and phony ‘free’ trade. Jeff argues that the very existence of functioning nation-states (in contrast to non-functioning, nominal nation-states like Afghanistan) depends upon their ability to meet the needs of the people, to a degree sufficient for the people to continue to support (with their political and military allegiance, their willingness to respect and uphold the law, and their willingness to pay taxes) the nation-state.
Nation-states that are struggling to do so will often try to create a need, and a sense of urgency, for the nation-state to continue, by conjuring up an imaginary crisis (e.g. weapons of mass destruction) or an imaginary enemy ( e.g. immigrants, or unstable or covetous neighbours). If the people are sufficiently ill-informed, governments of nation-states can keep the country together, and ravage its wealth for the personal gain of themselves and their supporters, for a long period of time by doing this.
It is much easier to create a sense of urgency for self-defence, especially as the world becomes geopolitically and economically smaller every day, than it is to create a sense of urgency for, say, decent health care or equitable distribution of wealth, particularly in large nation-states where the lack of the latter can be blamed on ‘bureaucracy’ and ‘inefficiency’.
As Jeff points out, nation-states don’t collapse suddenly. They erode, bit by bit, until you wake up one day and find that you live in a country where:
We have reached the paradoxical point where the nation-state has probably outlived its usefulness, but we face global challenges that dwarf anything we have had to face since civilization and the idea of the nation-state began.
Those who have not paid attention to the lessons of history would have us believe the answer is one global government, that will take away the manufactured outside enemy because there will no longer be an outside. There is no reason to believe that a single global nation-state would succeed any better than the balkanizing, mostly struggling nation-states of today. In fact, without an outside enemy (and, no, we cannot convince people that global poverty or global warming is the enemy; we’ve tried that), it is unlikely such a global nation-state would last as long as it would take to put it together.
Devolution of power to provinces, counties, or regional states has also been tried, and while it generally has the advantage of ethnic, linguistic and/or cultural homogeneity of population (and hence less likelihood of civil war), there is no history or reason to believe it can be any more responsive and able to meet the needs of the citizens than larger nation-states, and there is every reason to believe it will be less able to cope with any real outside enemy, should one emerge (and because of the growing inequality of wealth and resources between regions, and general overpopulation, ecological devastation and resource scarcities, they are more than likely to emerge).
That leaves us with more old-fashioned alternatives: anarchy or self-managed communities. These models both worked for millennia, but we have long forgotten how they worked. It took centuries and staggering bloodshed for us to make nation-states work, in some places, for awhile. Downshifting to anarchy or self-managed community models is likely to be just as tumultuous. For one thing, most of the world no longer has genuine communities, and to create them would require a lot of large-scale musical chairs as people sought others with whom they could hope, and want, to create community.
In areas that have, or can find, real community (including, as I reported yesterday, some areas of MÈxico), this model is already working to some extent, and can work in more places, especially if and when nation-states and their regional surrogates collapse for lack of support from the people that once made them work, and give up trying to suppress community-based ‘independence’ movements.
I am less optimistic about anarchy (by which I mean not the propagandized version of endless chaos and violence, but the libertarian ideal of no government at all, where people agree to get along with, and work with, their neighbours because it is in their interests to do so). My pessimism is due in part to the fact that such a model takes a lot of practice to get right, and in part to the fact that it takes a lot of room and other abundance of resources, to preclude our all-too-human predilection to resort to gang behaviour and banditry at the first sign of resource scarcity. There are just too many of us, and we have used up too much of the Earth’s abundance, for this model to work.
And although I am also pessimistic about the re-emergence of community as the primary social, political and economic unit of our society, just because of the enormous amount of re-learning and practice (and making monumental mistakes) it will entail, I also sense that we have no other choice.
When the circumstances described in the bullet points above prevail in more and more countries (and this is well underway), I think Jeff is right to predict that we will see the (agonizingly slow, but steady and irreversible) collapse of the nation-state, and in the vacuum that this collapse produces, the only viable ‘re-placement’ for conducting social, political and economic activity I can foresee are self-managed communities. Jeff even wryly suggests that this relocalization may help us cope better after the End of Oil.
The process of getting there, alas, is not going to be pretty.
And I wonder what the collapse of MÈxico means for NAFTA and the SPP? Category: The Political Process
|
July 16, 2007
Towards a New Process for Learning What is Important
 What is the purpose of education? Those of liberal bent tend to assert it is to allow us to become what we were intended to become — fully capable individuals and members of community. Conservatives are more inclined to believe it is to acquire the essential survival skills of modern society, efficiently. And there are practical souls who think its purpose is to learn how to make a living. How would we ‘score’ the current formal education system of affluent nations on its ability to achieve these purposes? I would grade it rather poorly:
Institutional education has no time, ability or flexibility to help us realize our full capability. Besides, its methods — teaching in the abstract in classrooms disconnected from the ‘real’ world, to bums on chairs — are not effective because this is not how we learn. As Gustavo Esteva says, we learn better when no one is teaching us, by doing and observing, not by being told.
The survival skills we need in a modern society are not addressed by the teaching of obedience, numeracy, literacy, and ‘management skills’. As the chart above indicates, to survive we need to learn how to learn, we need to understand how the world works, we need to learn to think, critically, creatively and imaginatively and adapt, how to work together, and how to self-manage — to take care of ourselves and each other. Formal school systems teach us none of these things. Because they are so artificial, inflexible, and predicated on 1-to-n knowledge transfer, and because they depend utterly on the passivity of students, they cannot possibly hope to teach us these things.
My book on working naturally, in Natural Enterprises, has the daunting task of giving readers – in the context of guiding and facilitating them through a process for learning how to make a natural, responsible, sustainable living — enough survival tools to do this effectively and successfully. And much of the book aims to give readers the courage to learn how to use these tools.
But no book or classroom can teach people how to use these tools. You learn how to understand your strengths and passions, how to find partners for an enterprise, how to do research on what people need, how to innovate continuously, how to imagine possibilities, how to collaborate, by doing, by practicing, by discovering what works and by making mistakes.
Our formal education system has no time for practicing and allows no room for making mistakes. In this system, practicing is remedial work for those not competent enough at rote learning and not blessed enough with native skills to get it right the first time. And in this system, making mistakes is fatal, carrying the unbearable stigma of failure.
It doesn’t matter that Inc Magazine discovered that the only attribute that correlated strongly with exceptional entrepreneurial success was previous business failure. These ‘exceptional’ entrepreneurs had either the good fortune to fail quickly and inexpensively, or the inherited wealth to be able to bounce back from ‘failure’.
It doesn’t seem to have occurred to the proponents of our education system that if students aren’t succeeding, it is the teachers who should be given a failing grade.
The greatest critics of the formal education system — people like Ivan Illich, John Holt, and John Taylor Gatto – would have us believe that the designers and proponents of this compulsory system deliberately conspired to make students helpless and dependent (incompetent to make a living for themselves, and hence frightened and compliant to the point they will put up with the drudgery of wage slavery). Whether or not this is true, the reality is that now, thanks to automation and other technology, we no longer need that fear and obedience to keep the industrial economy humming along.
In fact, that complacency and incompetence has now become a liability. The rich and powerful need increasing masses of dumbed-down ‘consumers’ (brilliantly defined by Jerry Michalski as “gullets who live only to gulp products and crap cash”) to buy their junk and keep their ROI growth up to shareholders’ expectations. But since those consumers are (mostly) no longer needed in the industrial economy and since (even in times of low interest rates) creditors will only subsidize mindless consumption so far beyond the consumers’ earnings, the corporatists have had to turn — for new production and new consumption — to globalization. This lets them externalize (leave taxpaying citizens to pay for) the social and environmental costs that enable them to buy cheaper from struggling nations and to sell to new consumers in those same nations.
The works in affluent nations, deliberately cowed and dumbed down by the education system, have become increasingly useless, worthless, expendable.
What’s to be done with them? With us?
The answer, I believe, is entrepreneurship — relearning how to make a living for ourselves.
My book, and entrepreneurial programs and networks (like BALLE) can get us started. Those who have the innate critical and creative thinking skills, sufficient self-confidence, the time to find appropriate business partners, and to make mistakes, and to understand themselves well (their Gifts, their Passions, their Purpose) will be equipped to succeed at this, on their own terms.
They will become models of working naturally and Natural Enterprise that others can follow. But will this be enough to transform our dysfunctional and unsustainable economy? I’m not sure it will, unless we also work to replace our education ‘system’ with something that works in post-industrial society.
What might this replacement look like? How do we learn, naturally, or as Illich says, convivially?
Illich would tell us that this replacement would not contain experts, or institutions, or processes that commodify learning. Gatto would tell us it would not have teachers, or classrooms, or curricula. Esteva, sounding a bit like Bucky Fuller, would tell us it is hopeless to try to fix, re-form the existing system — we need to create an entirely new learning process, and let the old system crumble.
I suspect this new learning process would have these attributes:
But this describes a process that is local and community-based. What about cities and other places that have no real community? Such places lack what Esteva calls the ‘conditions for apprenticeship’ and the cohesion that allows collective learning (rather than 1-to-n teaching).
Perhaps the reason that the most successful experiments in rediscovering this kind of learning process have been in small, relatively ‘uncivilized’ places in struggling nations is that these are places where true community still exists. For those of us in anonymous cities, and in ‘modern’ places where we think community has something to do with shared goals or interests, it may be frightening to discover that deep community is a precondition for true learning, and that, without such learning, an entrepreneurial, natural economy may be unachievable.
Lots to think about.
Category: The Education System
|
July 15, 2007
Sunday Open Thread — July 15, 2007
 Long-term exposure photo by the Hubble telescope of a tiny fragment of the sky, showing about 1500 galaxies. Wow! What I’m thinking about, and planning on writing (and podcasting) about soon: Learning in Community by Apprenticeship: More on Ivan Illich’s friend Gustavo Esteva’s article about how institutional education is hopelessly dysfunctional and how self-managed, community-based, learn-by-doing apprenticeship is the most effective way to learn to make a living. I’m thinking about this in the context of working naturally and Natural Enterprise. Vignettes: Coming up soon, vignette #5. Blog-Hosted Conversations: Plan is for 30-minute conversations, once a week, on the subject of identifying and acquiring the essential skills and relationships we need to be models of a better way to live, and what those models might look like. Still not ready for this: just recording a reading of blog articles is lame, and conversations need a lot of work. Open Thread Question: |
July 14, 2007
Saturday Links for the Week – July 14, 2007
 Leelee Sobieski photo from imdb. The local cable movie channel has been showing Drew Barrymore chick flicks all weekend, and I’m a total sucker for them. Leelee was in the one I just watched, Never Been Kissed. What’s Important This Week The Impeachable Dick Cheney: Henrik Hertzberg in this week’s New Yorker describes WaPo’s recent revelations about Cheney’s execrable record and explains why the US can afford to wait no longer to get him out of office (before he attacks Iran). The Power of Prediction Markets: Wisdom of Crowds guru James Surowiecki, also in the New Yorker: “The collective intelligence of consumers isn’Äôt perfect’Äîit’Äôs just better than other forecasting tools. The catch is that to get good answers from consumers you need to ask the right kinds of questions.” When will business start tapping this wisdom? The Lost Cause of Afghanistan: Still in the New Yorker, the US has taken the War on Drugs to the country that has defied all attempted reformers and occupiers for centuries — Afghanistan. And Jon Lee Anderson explains that this war within a war is another unwinnable disaster. The Delusion of Ethanol…: Tad Patzek in the Energy Tribune explains the political and economic insanity of ethanol as a solution to global warming and the end of oil, showing cellulose is no better than corn. Thanks to Charles Hall for the link. …and the Bankruptcy of Nuclear Energy: Meanwhile, Rebecca Solnit in Orion Magazine explains why nuclear energy as a ‘solution’ to global warming and the end of oil is also insane. The End of Oil as the End of Health Care: Friend and HtStW reader Daniel Bednarz, also in Orion, explains how the End of Oil threatens our health care systems, and how, if we abolish two-tier systems and refocus on prevention instead of treatment, we could make everyone healthier and moreresilient to oil’s decline. |
July 12, 2007
If You Were the President
 A colleague asked me the other day, what I would do if I were, magically, the Prime Minister of Canada, with a supportive legislature. I thought it was an interesting question, since I keep saying I’ve given up on the political process as a means of achieving meaningful change. My answer (after having some time to think about it):
This is a great priority-setting question for a Friday, so I’m going to ask you, dear readers, the same question:
If you were suddenly elected the President or Prime Minister of your country, and had a supportive legislature for your reforms, what are the ten most important changes you would make?
Conditions: They have to be revenue neutral (you can’t finance more programs with less money, and you can’t just say you’re going to eliminate government ‘inefficiency’). You cannot presume that governments in any other country will support you, or align their programs and laws with yours. And your proposals need to be specific, not just principles or broad objectives. What would you do?
Category: The Political Process
|
The Coming Pandemic: What the Experts Say
 This week I had the opportunity to attend a global conference on disaster management, one ‘track’ of which was focused on health emergencies. There is certainly no unanimity about what we should be doing to prepare for and cope with a future pandemic (a pandemic is an infectious disease outbreak that is both virulent — i.e. deadly — and highly transmissable human to human), but over the course of the conference a consensus became apparent. I think this consensus reflects a growing sense of maturity and awareness of the lessons of history and our limited ability to anticipate or predict events in complex environments.
Here are what I think were the twelve most important areas of expert consensus about the next pandemic:
Are you ready for this? What do you think most people will do — panic and overload the phone lines and help lines, or stay calm andrise to the occasion? Category: Science and Health |
July 11, 2007
Vignette #4: Overheard on the Subway
 These days I’m on the TTC, the Toronto subway system, fairly often. In accordance with my resolution to practice paying attention, I often eavesdrop on conversations in the subway, which, since patrons go to such pains to act as if they’re the only people in the subway car (even when they’re pressed up against a dozen other passengers at rush hour), are often surprisingly candid. Here are some of the more memorable excerpts of conversations I have overheard, with the imponderable, banal and cryptic content edited out. For some reason, which I will leave up to others to speculate on, women seem to converse more on the subway than men, and their conversations are generally more interesting. A woman, probably late twenties, talking to an older woman: “God, I’m glad I’m not a man. It’s waaay too complicated.” Two very well-dressed women, probably early thirties, laughing: “He’s OK, but serious self-esteem issues. (Pause, almost whispering) He doesn’t show well.”
Man, probably in his thirties, talking to an obviously unhappy, considerably older man: “I think [Canadian conservative Prime Minister] Harper is an asshole, and I swore I’d never vote Conservative, but of the three party leaders he’s the only one I know well enough to know exactly how little he can be trusted.”
Two teenage girls with shopping bags from trendy stores: “Her Dad is, like, Psycho Dad, he doesn’t let her do anything. She’s like a complete prisoner in her house. One day she’s just going to blow.”
Two guys in suits, probably fathers in their late thirties: “It seems as if young girls are supposed to dress to show off everything but still act like angels, while young guys act like studs but dress like monks — layers of clothes that reveal nothing. What’s that about?” Two older women, clucking: “She bought herself flowers afterwards. How pathetic is that?” Reply, after long pause: “I buy myself clothes. They last longer.”
Young lovers; she’s drinking milk from a carton and has her other arm around his waist, and he’s avoiding her attempt to kiss him: She (laughing): “Why won’t you kiss me?” He (very low voice): “I don’t want to show off. It’ll make everyone else crazy.”
Two women, probably thirty-something, conversing quietly in French (my translation): “How come all the guys (gars, people?) who take the subway are ugly?” Reply: “The good-looking ones are still ( toujours, always?) in bed.”
Two guys, probably fortyish, short sleeves and ties: “He earns twice what I do, but I wouldn’t trade places with him for anything. Not just the hours. Your self-respect has to be worth something.”
Two young black women: “I love you ‘KD’ but I don’t know why you do that. You and Trish are always saying these (nasty?) things about each other, behind each other’s back. That’s just messed up. And I’m caught in the middle.”
Man, thirty-something, to younger woman, perhaps a date: “I became a vegetarian last year. Now I only eat chicken… and sometimes fish and chips.”
Two young women, with Goth clothing, piercings and tattoos: “Well, yeah, he’s promiscuous, but he doesn’t start it. Girls are always coming on to him. You can’t really blame him.”
Man, indeterminate age, to similar-looking man (brother?): “She’s so demanding. I don’t want to be needed that much. It’s great to be appreciated, but I’ve already got a full-time job — I don’t want another one when I go home.”
Woman, probably twenties, watching a young guy leaving the subway car, shaking her head, to another woman of about the same age: “Guys shouldn’t be allowed to dress themselves.” “Except gay guys.” “Even some of them.”
Woman, probably early forties, to younger very slim woman who has been raving about meditation: “I don’t want to know my inner self that well. I’m afraid of what I might discover.” . . . . . After one of my subway trips I’m waiting in a second floor boardroom of an office tower for the rest of the invitees to show up. I’m looking out the window. There’s a daycare centre with a big picture window on the main floor of the building directly opposite, and I’m watching the little kids playing. One little boy is crawling around pushing an enormous red plastic dump truck full of yellow plastic ‘bricks’. The truck is half as big as he is. Suddenly, a little girl holding a doll, who has been watching, seats the doll in a high chair at a nearby table, wrenches the truck away from the boy, dumps out the yellow plastic ‘bricks’, and walks away. The boy sits for a moment, staring at the yellow ‘bricks’. Then, unperturbed, he retrieves the doll, lies her on her back, and uses her arms like cranes to lift the yellow ‘bricks’ one by one onto her stomach. When they’re all ‘aboard’, he raises the doll’s arms and legs up to hold the ‘bricks’ from falling off, and ‘drives’ the doll, with her full payload, along the paddedfloor to her unloading destination. Category: Short Stories
|
July 10, 2007
Stewing in Our Own Sewage
 Big Pharma, and the misinformed media, would have us all believe that medicine can cure every disease, and that as a result, we might one day achieve immortality. Hardly a week goes by without reports of some genetic ‘marker’ for some cancer or chronic disease, with the implication that this genetic ‘imperfection’ might be remedied by the miracles of modern medicine, and the disease eradicated forever. Or that a virus or bacteria ‘suspected’ to be involved in some infectious disease has been discovered, with the implication that, by eradicating the microbe, we can be free forever from the disease. We have, to be fair, made significant headway in the fight against infectious diseases. That is, we have recently (in the last century and a half) identified that most infectious diseases are caused by viruses or bacteria, learned how these microbes spread, and discovered or invented vaccines, antibiotics and antivirals to kill many of them. That doesn’t mean we are winning the war against infectious diseases, however, or that this war is even winnable. Viruses and bacteria can evolve much faster than we can ever hope to invent vaccines and antimicrobials to keep up with them. That’s the reason heath experts are so worried about pandemic influenza — antivirals like tamiflu may not be effective against it (and the regimen for using it is involved, expensive and carries risks of complication), and vaccines need to be tailored to the specific form of the virus, which can take months. In addition, the endemic use of antibiotics and antivirals in modern society is encouraging the more rapid mutation of viruses and bacteria which are resistant to most or all antibiotics and antivirals. And some infectious diseases (like Mad Cow) are spread by prions, which are not treatable with antimicrobials of any kind. So infectious diseases will continue to threaten us, and, as we run out of effective antimicrobials, they could easily become once again as great a scourge as they have been throughout most of the centuries since civilization began. Nothing suits bacteria and viruses better than creatures crowded into close quarters who travel quickly and extensively across communities. Diseases that are not infectious are called environmental or chronic diseases. These are the illnesses (physical and mental) that are growing at epidemic rates, especially in affluent nations. It is simply not true that the staggering increase in these diseases is largely due to better detection, better reporting, or an aging population. We have our suspicions about the reason for the increases, but we cannot prove it. What we do know is that such diseases only seem to emerge when three prerequisites are present:
Our natural stress-responses are fight-or-flight adrenal responses, and as suited as they were to gatherer-hunter culture, they are maladapted to modern forms of (mostly psychological) stress, and to the chronic, relentless stresses that most of us face. I believe that all three of these prerequisites are becoming increasingly prevalent. In recent centuries (and still today in many struggling nations) a larger proportion of the population has each had a large number of children. Since then, our temporary victory over many infectious diseases has slashed infant and child mortality rates. In Darwinian terms, many people who would not have been born, or would not have survived, have entered the gene pool, to the point that genetic weaknesses have inevitably increased in the population at large. We have more toxins and untested chemicals in our food, water, air and soil than we have ever had before, and we live longer than we have since civilization began, so over a lifetime we surely ingest more poisons than previous generations. Even if we wanted to change this, through the precautionary principle applied retroactively, we could not — our economy depends utterly on the ‘efficiencies’ that poisonous production makes possible. We could not sustain even a fraction of today’s human population with healthy, careful, expensive production methods. And we unquestionably face more chronic stresses than previous generations. We can talk about methods to mitigate our stress reactions, but many of these are visceral, subconscious, not in our power to control. So, in short, there is nothing we can do to stem the current surge in chronic diseases. At a personal level, if we can afford it, we can try to eat and drink healthier, and try to find places not afflicted by poisoned air, water and soil. And, if we have the luxury of time, opportunity, awareness and self-knowledge, we can try to self-manage to minimize our stress reactions. But at a societal level, we are literally stewing in our own sewage, and in a weakened condition to start with. Of course, the big polluters, their political and media handmaidens, a big chunk of the medical fraternity, many religious groups, and the Big Pharma oligopoly would have you see it differently. They’d have you believe it’s your fault: not taking care of yourself, having bad genes, suffering for your sins, being too lazy and hence too poor to afford good food anddecent medicine. And guess what all that guilt and self-blame does to those who believe it?
Category: Science and Health
|
