“In every age,” writes
Bronowski in
The Ascent of Man (1973), “there is a turning point, a new way of
seeing and asserting the coherence of the world.” Similarly, Abraham Lincoln
(1862) said, “As our case is new, we must think and act anew. We must
disenthrall ourselves….”
It seems clear that the great forward leaps of human progress have
been made by people who “disenthrall” themselves and develop “a new way of
seeing and asserting the coherence of the world.” We see this in Galileo and
Copernicus, who had the audacity to claim the Earth was not the center of the
universe. We see this in Charles Darwin, who took on the religious
establishment with the heretical idea that man was a product of evolution. We
see it in political systems where Locke and Jefferson had the revolutionary
ideas that humankind could govern themselves. We see it in Freud with his
upsetting idea that man was not always a rational animal. All of these people challenged the current
ordained wisdom of the time, and all of them proved correct.
These people were labeled heretics. Their ideas aired amidst great
controversy. Huxley once observed that, “All great truths begin as heresy.” Humankind
falls into a routine way of viewing the world and then, breaking the
continuity, someone observes that the current orthodoxy is at variance with
reality. A great debate ensues. New ideas are upsetting. Attempts are made to
shout down new opinion. If the idea is grounded in reality, the heretical idea
eventually prevails and becomes accepted wisdom. One generation’s heresy is
frequently the next generation’s orthodoxy, which thus sets the stage for the
next new heresy. New ideas replace old ideas, but often only after a struggle.
This is as it should be. The poet of old observed: “New occasions teach new
duties. Time makes ancient good uncouth” (Lowell, 1844).
The great Earth-shaking controversies of our history, between
science and religion, between church and state, between Christianity and modern
culture and, recently, within science itself, all have been characterized by a
heretic or heretics who challenge the straightjacket of orthodoxy.
New ideas come hard in public policy. Public policy is reactive,
and new problems are addressed as long as possible with old solutions. It has a
hard time adjusting itself to new ideas. As Barbara Tuchman observed:
Policy is formed by
perceptions and by long implanted biases. When information is relayed to policy
makers, they respond in terms of what is already inside their heads and
consequently make policy less to fit the facts then to fit the baggage that has
accumulated since childhood (1981, p. 289).
In the same spirit John
Stuart Mill wrote:
When society requires to be
rebuilt, there is no use in attempting to rebuild on the old plan…. no great
improvements in the lot of mankind are possible, until a great change takes
place in the fundamental constitution of their modes of thought (cited in
Commager, 1982, p. 13).
II
Who are the modern prophets whose heresies will turn into
tomorrow’s truths? We know they are there, but we differ strenuously on who
they are Some would say Mother Teresa and others Paul Ehrlich. Every person
would have his or her own list. “We see the world not as it is, but as we are”
goes an old aphorism. We choose our prophets because they lead us where we
already think we are going. Like beauty, contemporary prophets are mainly in
the eye of the beholder. It is only the future that vindicates our choices.
Current assessment of new ideas is so notoriously flawed that we all tell each
other that “prophets are without honor in their own country.”
I have been convinced for over twenty years that Garrett Hardin is
one of the prophets of our time. He has had the courage, intellect, and
audacity to take on many of the orthodox assumptions of our age. We will look
back from the future and recognize the growing importance of his message.
III
Time and geometry are on Hardin’s side. I suggest there is massive
and mounting evidence that we live on the upper slopes of some awesome
logarithmic curves. The “new way of seeing and asserting the coherence of the world”
in our time is to show that infinite growth cannot take place in a finite
world. I choose not to repeat all the depressing statistics. Let me instead use
a metaphor. John McPhee has written:
Compare the six days of
Genesis as a figure of speech for what has in fact been four billion years
geologic time. On this scale, a day equals something like 666 million years and
thus:
All day Monday until
Tuesday noon, and the beautiful organic wholeness of it developed over the next
four days. At 4:00 pm Saturday, the big reptiles came. Five hours later, when
the redwoods appeared, there were no more big reptiles. At three minutes before
midnight Christ arrived. At one-fortieth of a second before midnight, the
Industrial Revolution began.
We are surrounded by people
who think that what we have been doing for one-fortieth of a second can go on
indefinitely. They are considered normal, but they are stark raving mad
(McPhee, 1971, p. 79).
I believe when the history of these times is written it will show
that our prophets were those confronting the finiteness of our world. Each year
our population grows, the deserts creep, pollution seeps and forests shrink,
the globe warms, our topsoil erodes; habitats degrade and more and more species
disappear. We are in the hinge of history, where ethnocentrically we thought
the Earth belonged to us, but ecologically we are finding out, to our great
astonishment, that we belong to the Earth. We are finding that human genius can
push the limits of nature, but that, ultimately, man cannot conquer nature but
is subject to its timeless, inexorable laws.
Despite the massive and growing evidence that we are causing
unprecedented harm to our ecosystem, a vast number of people choose to ignore
it. No one today can “prove” global warming will inevitably act in a harmful
way, and there will always be an optimist somewhere who will relate that the
event will ultimately be good for humankind. There are always Simple Simons
telling us against all evidence that a negative is actually a positive. It is
this type of conflict that too often paralyzes public policy. We cannot know
for sure, so we do nothing. Ken Boulding (1984) has observed that the essential
human dilemma is that all of our experience is in the past and yet all our
decisions relate to the future. That makes dramatic change hard to accomplish.
In absence of proof of the negative, we are forever hopeful:
Our images of the future
themselves are affected by our evaluations of them. We tend to put too high a
probability on those that we dislike (Boulding, 1984).
IV
I know and am sobered by the fact that there has been a myriad of
Cassandras predicting doom that has
not taken place. We know from the thoughtful study
of history that most utopians and most doomsayers have been wrong. Will and
Ariel Durant (1968), after a lifetime of studying history, observed that 99 out
of every 100 new ideas that come at a society are bad ideas. It has been very
stabilizing to societies and nations to give a heavy burden of proof to those
arguing for dramatic change. History shows, as a group, they are usually wrong.
Most prophets, alas, have been false prophets.
V
That said, I suggest the next major revolution in human thought
will be where humankind confronts the finite. It will be the revolution in
science, public policy, and human consciousness. It will assert that infinite
growth cannot take place in a finite world: that our atavistic thoughts on
population and the way our economy is currently structured will be found
obsolete and dangerous to the survival of humans on Earth. It will bring about
a new way of seeing and asserting the coherence of the world.
One anthropologist commenting on the worldwide crisis that
humanity confronts said:
The extreme novelty of
humans as the dominant force on this planet is as surprising as is our current
rate of destruction of our own habitat and that of the Earth’s other life
forms. This disregard is all the more striking since, in geological terms, our
species has only recently departed from its “place in nature.” The full
implications of our derivation by the random processes of biological evolution
in a mere 5 million to 7 million years from an animal much like a chimpanzee
have yet to be incorporated in any manner into the fundamental beliefs or
institutions of our own, or in fact, any society. In its very success, our
species has raised grave problems that demand new kinds of solutions. Will we,
by better understanding the processes that made us what we are, grow in
capacity to solve the frightening problems of the future arising from our very
selves? (Potter, 1989)
VI
This revolution in thought will be more contentious than any that
has gone before. There is in the western world a deep-seated cultural belief in
abundance, and that a world of plenty is the natural state of affairs. The
developed world enjoys its lifestyles and the underdeveloped world seeks to
emulate these lifestyles. But increasingly we are finding that resources are
not unlimited; topsoil is too often ephemeral. We are schizophrenic about our
technologies — we marvel at them but we realize that they are not always benign
and often comes close to being a Faustian bargain. We are finding that economic
growth increasingly has byproducts, which may cause more harm than the good
incorporated by the product.
VII
These concerns will be a new chapter in “seeing
and asserting the coherence of the world.” Where past genius was recognized for
pushing back these limits, future genius will be recognized on how to adapt to
the very rapidly approaching limits inherent in living in a limited ecosphere.
More accurately, we must both push back these limits
and learn to live within the
clear overall limits.
When I was 19 a wise person
told me, “maturity is a recognition of one’s limitations.” It was hard
for me to accept — I had a typical 19-year-old desire to read every book,
travel to every country, hold every job, live every experience. But, truth won
out and maturity was a recognition of my limitations.
So also, I suggest, with the world. We know that no trees grow to
the sky; that no species of animal can grow without restraint; and that the
harbingers of ecological destruction warn daily of a new set of limits.
VIII
Al Bartlett writes:
If an enormous source of
low-cost energy is discovered, it is easy to predict what the immediate
consequence would be. Our political and economic leaders would collectively
breathe a great sigh of relief and would then discard all notions of energy
limits. They would rejoice over the advent of a period of uninhibited growth in
global rates of energy consumption.
In order to estimate the
consequences of likely rates of growth of global energy consumption, we must remember
that essentially all of the energy released by human activity winds up
ultimately as heat in the environment. First we need some data. The solar power
incident on the Earth can be calculated by multiplying the solar constant (1.35
x 103 W/m2) by the projected area of the Earth (pRe2).
This gives 1.7 x 1017 watts, of which 34 percent is reflected back
into space, leaving 1.1 x 1017 watts of solar power entering the
Earth’s atmosphere. Romer shows that the rate of energy use by humans is 8 x 1012
watts. A simple quotient shows that human activities put into the Earth’s
atmosphere about 10-4 of the power the sun puts into the Earth’s
atmosphere. The simple arithmetic of growth shows that one would gain a factor
of 104 in 14 doubling times would take only about 300 years. The
arithmetic would suggest that at this modest growth rate, in 300 years human
activities would put about as much thermal power into the Earth’s atmosphere as
the sun puts in! The absurdity of this situation is obvious. Independent of the
greenhouse effect, global warming from this direct heating would likely render
the Earth uninhabitable long before the passage of 14 doubling times (Bartlett,
1989, p. 10).
IX
….Garrett Hardin has been one of the main voices of sanity
directing our attention to the new realities in which we live. He has had a
profound impact on my thinking and I am honored by his friendship. Time will be
kind to Garrett Hardin. The future will look back on him as a prophet. His
science and his metaphors help us in so many indispensable ways to understand
these new realities within which we must live.
The Navajo have an old saying: “The storytellers rule the world.”
For good reason. It is not enough to see and understand the new realities; one
must also articulate them in understandable ways.
Gleick, in his book
Chaos, states, “The world awaits the right
metaphor” (1987, p. 22). He points out that, no matter how smart we are, we
often cannot see something without the correct metaphor. It is thus for his
science, his humanity, his heretical ideas, and his ability to show us truth
through metaphor that we honor Garrett Hardin. ■
References
1. Bronowski, J. (1973).
The ascent of man. Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Co.
2. Lincoln, A. (1862, Dec.
1). Second annual message to Congress. Quoted in
Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations (1980). Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Co.
3. Lowell, James Russell
(1844). The present crisis. In
Bartlett’s
Familiar Quotations (1968). Boston, MA:
Little, Brown and Co.
4. Tuchman, Barbara.
(1981).
Practicing history. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. P. 289.
5. Commager, H. S. (1982,
March). Outmoded assumptions.
The
Atlantic. P. 13.
6. McPhee, John A. (1971).
Encounters with the Archdruid. New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux.
7. Boulding, K. (1984). The
fallacy of trends.
National Forum. LXIV, (3), 19-20.
8. Durant, W. J. &
Durant, A. (1968).
The lessons of history. New York: Simon and Schuster.
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(1989). Quoting E. Simons. Personal communication. University of Wisconsin,
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10. Bartlett, A. A. (1989,
July). Fusion and the future.
Physics
and Society, 18 (3), 9-15.
11. Gleick, J. (1987).
Chaos. New York: Viking.
Source:
Population and Environment: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, Volume 12, Number 3, Spring 1991: 213-219.
