Ronald Wright in his splendid “A Short History of Progress,” makes a very strong argument that human civilization, in all its manifold forms, will collapse. That is, unless something is done to stop the accelerating environmental damage from the juggernaut of opportunistic development. That is his note of hope, somewhat forlorn, after running through a litany of unending mistakes that have brought every other past civilization to ruin, either permanently erasing them, in most all cases, or transforming them completely after severe suffering and dislocation.
The pattern of cause and effect has a dismal sameness to it in every single case. A perfectly balanced society, nicely egalitarian, only small differences in wealth among its members, suddenly surges forward in an explosion of riches and productivity. Hierarchies form, treasure becomes more concentrated, the labour of the masses is progressively devalued and natural resources become unbearably taxed as the civilization enterprise turns into a negative sum game.
The inevitable collapse of such unsustainable systems is sad but historically unimportant when the demise is local. Easter Island, Sumer, the Mayan debacle were all big events for the affected civilizations but of little, if any, consequence for all the other civilizations simultaneously developing around the planet. The fall of Rome was a much bigger event and its fallout, on a quarter of the earth’s population, at the time, lasted for centuries. But it still did not affect developing civilizations in the Americas or consolidating empire in the Far East.
Globalization has not changed the dreary historical patterns which always badly ended the civilizing process. It has, though, changed the potential fallout by orders of magnitude. From affecting perhaps 500 thousand in the collapse of Sumerian civilization to the millions in the Mayan downfall, the numbers today would jump to the billions. James Lovelock has recently estimated that the earth’s population would drop from seven billion to one billion after the climate changes by more than current agricultural technologies could tolerate. Such a decline would effectively end civilization as we know it. Is there anything that can be done to stop our accelerating slide towards the abyss?
Yes and no. To the extent, as Joseph Stiglitz emphasizes in “The Price of Inequality,” that the holders of wealth, the plutocrats, control the political process which arranges market rules in their favour, they would have to be willing to make changes which would inevitably erode their own position of unparalleled prosperity, and its handmaiden, power. Will they do it? A better question may be: Have their kindred ancestors ever willingly done so in the past? The answer seems to be an unequivocal no. It seems that those who willingly and selflessly gave up stuff in the past did not pass on their genes. What can we do?
Our best hope, and I hate to invoke that word as it is like religion, the opiate of the dispossessed, is to use what remains of our democratic institutions and break apart the political power-wealth construction. The consequence would be to bring down the one dollar one vote edifice and restore the more reliable and sustainable one person one vote regime. Is there any chance of this happening? Not anywhere near certainty but there may be reason for some limited optimism. Recent social and civil unrest, such as the Occupy Wall Street movement, has shown that the anyone-can-make-it illusion may finally, and happily, be coming to an end – an illusion that has always been used to cajole and anesthetize people into accepting gross inequality with the never fulfilled promise of forthcoming rewards, whether in this or the next world.
