My title today features words which have fallen out of favour. Or for more recent generations, are entirely unknown. They have not been required skills in the last 70 years, at least in the western world. I have been to lots of countries in Asia and a few in east Africa, and can assure you there are many people who do not know these English words, but practice the skills every day as they struggle to live, or even survive, on a dollar or two a day. Indeed, a recent Oxfam survey concluded that half the world’s population, about 3.5 billion, have the same assets as the the 62 most wealthy people on the planet. OK, Oxfam had every incentive to exaggerate, and I suspect that 3.5 billion people actually had more chooks in the back garden that didn’t get counted than the 62 plutocrats, but hey!, even so, can’t you see something wrong here? The imbalance of income is hugely destabalising, both within countries, and internationally.
The transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich has been progressing steadily all round the world for many decades and looks set to continue. The inventor of the board game “Monopoly” supposedly invented it in the 1920’s I think, to highlight the fact that the capitalist system has the dice loaded to produce exactly that effect, and nearly a century later, I see little evidence to disabuse me of that idea. In some western countries in the middle of the 20th century there were socialist governments did a fair job of redistributing wealth to create a solid and mostly content middle class. In some countries such as Australia, there are useful remnants of that era such as the state health services and the education system. But with the steady march of all western governments to the right during the last decades of the 20th century, some of that is eroding, such as higher education. World-wide, the middle class is thinning out. The top few professionals joining the rich, and the bulk sliding down the slippery pole to join the poor. This is most evident in the US, UK and Europe, and least evident in the Scandinavian countries and, I’m glad to say Oz and NooZild. Or at least in Oz it isn’t really hurting yet. China and India are still in a growth phase which tends to create a middle class, but I think the imbalance in wealth is already such that they will complete the cycle and largely destroy the middle class in record time. And China, despite being nominally communist, doesn’t look very socialist to me. Political theorists going back to Aristotle have argued that a large and successful middle class is important to peace in any society because it moderates the conflict between rich and poor and tempers political extremism.
Totally irrelevant to my theme, is a picture of a leaf-tailed lizard I discovered today, hiding out in the mop cupboard at Maple Cottage. About 220mm long. Thank you Linda for the photo.
Leaf-tailed lizard by Linda
So why has not the citizens’ power of the vote and democracy halted slide of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer? In most countries, democracy has become a hollowed out facade precariously propped up by those that benefit the most from the present system. Insidious infiltration of the political system has pretty well ensured that only those that fit the mold and conform to the system can get a toehold towards power. Often there is a financial threshold to overcome before even advancing to “GO”.
As an example I give you once again the US, the country most advanced in its political decay. You need a fantastic amount of money to get elected as president. Obama had a very well done on-line fund-raising machine, the Don Trumpet, I’m sorry Donald Trump, only had to reach into his back pocket. I’m sure he will understand the problems and faithfully represent a single mother of two kids living in a car. Now apparently, he thinks he can shoot people and nobody would notice. He reminds me of the more eccentric emperors in the latter stages of the roman empire. Bring it on Don. The world needs a crash and a reboot with an entirely different operating system. It will hurt. A lot.
The new society will be built around those experiments already existing though suppressed by the prevailing system. Perhaps the most important is sustainable agriculture. It is ancient knowledge that needs to be ‘shovel ready’ when the shit hits the fan. In fact, shit and fans may be may be important inputs. To those people out there doing important research to free us from the very high fossil fuel energy requirements of mainstream agriculture, I doffs me hat, I takes a bow, and think your work will be the foundation of a new society. Bumpy ride though.
In the transition stages the words and practice of thrift, parsimony and frugality will make quite a comeback and the world may never again see the profligate consumption of the last 60 years.
Last 60 years? 70? 700? Come on Paul. Who do you think built all the mansions, stately homes, palaces of Europe? The Parthenon, the pyramids, Michu Pichu China’s Great Wall? Yes, you can tell me who commissioned and owned them, who were the architects, maybe even some of the Master Masons (our great granddad was one such, I think.) But who paid for them, who provided the labour and sometimes their lives in building the great monuments preserved today by the National Trust and sibling organisations throughout Europe and elsewhere? The poor and the working class paid for them. Our generation is not unique since the rise of sapiens from all the other competing lines of Homo. Acquisitiveness is built into all of us. Dissatisfaction with what we already have, along with insatiable curiosity, is what has driven us to know more, struggle for more, achieve more. There is indeed great inequality, mostly unjust, but ’twas ever thus. Ask any Pharoah. The greater problem is not the vastly unequal size of the slices of Earth’s cake, but the colossal number of us now clamouring for a slice.
True, the Trumps, Rothschilds and the rest seem to be on a different planet from everybody else. Some of them, like Bill and Melissa Gates, appear to be giving some of it back where it’s most needed. But the fact is that sometimes, great achievements and great endeavours require great concentrations of wealth, whether in the hands of individuals or of governments. I think your own travels and observations would convince you that even a huge number of poor African or Indian villagers are not going to get us to Mars, or dig a road tunnel under the Red Sea. Not that I think Donald Trump is any more likely to do so of course, but in some indirect way, some of his wealth might someday get someone else part of the way there.
I rather arbitrarily chose the last 60 years as the period where the great majority of people in the western countries had the discretionary spending power to become significant consumers of goods and services. It has been described as people buying things they don’t need, with money they don’t have to impress people they don’t like. The pillaging of resources and the pollution of the environment has been largely the result of our generation’s excesses. If it continues, the environment which you and I enjoyed will be horribly degraded or may collapse with horrific consequences. I have some problems with “Acquisitiveness is built into all of us. Dissatisfaction with what we already have, along with insatiable curiosity, is what has driven us to know more, struggle for more, achieve more.” Well yes, we are driven to acquire what we need. Consider the famous ‘Hierarchy of needs’ pyramid. Water, food at the bottom, next maybe sex, then up through social esteem etc to the higher intellectual functions. The concept was first conveyed to me by Pop, who had just been on a management course discussing the human side of management. The concept of pyramid suggested the lower levels were broader and more imperative, the higher levels narrower and more optional. But the theory included the idea that the basics, the lower levels, could be satisfied and we move onto the next level of desire. “Dissatisfaction with what we already have’ is not a permanent human state. It is quite possible to be satisfied. I am satisfied with what I have, except perhaps some fine tuning in the cerebral realm, and I hope you are mostly satisfied. The thought behind my blog, which you so artfully have teased out of me, is that our material needs are over-supplied, and our social, sexual, intellectual, spiritual needs are neglected and we need to get higher on the pyramid. There, I have managed to splurge out what I was really thinking, and it may just save the planet if we simplify our material needs. You and Jeannie are invited to dinner anytime, just drop in.
Well yes, Maslow’s hierarchy has its uses, but is limited. Once we’re all getting enough, as it were, what’s left? What separates us, if anything, from the basic behaviours of Earth’s other organisms? Yes, we could reduce our burden on the environment by living only in regions with climates and ecologies that suit us, thus removing our need for technologies associated with clothing, shelter, farming, fishing and transport. Technology-based entertainment could be removed also if we returned to community-level singing and dancing. We wouldn’t need weapons either, if we accepted our role as slow, weak prey animals and didn’t fight so much between ourselves.
There would, as you’ve pointed out, be a period of terrible readjustment, but those remaining would soon forget the glory days of science, when we discovered what stars are, why we got diseases, what matter is made of. We’ve opened The Box though. As a result there are now way too many of us even to feed with advanced science and farming technology. And we don’t want to change. We’re probably, as you say, in for a bumpy ride to say the least, but we’re stuck with it.
Once we are getting enough, contentment should result. This idyllic result has been sabotaged by the onslaught of advertising which seeks to create permanent dissatisfaction, then wonderfully provide the cure with the latest product. At a cost of course. I am not a Luddite proposing a nation of Morris dancers. I am a pacifist proposing fighting/wars/terrorism as the most destructive force threatening humanity. Heck, I’d have a holiday home on Io by now, with great views, if it wasn’t for all the ruinous wars we have had. You have a point, a very important point, when you mention overpopulation. I don’t have an answer to that.
Nor I. But like you, I fear that an answer will be found for us, and we won’t like it. Maybe we’re already beginning to dislike it.