August 11, 2004
KILLED BY KINDNESS (via Harry Eagar):
Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot, August 10, 2004, The Guardian)
"We live," the cover story of the current Spectator tells us, "in the happiest, healthiest and most peaceful era in human history." And who in the rich world would dare to deny it? The aristocrats, the cardinals, Prince Charles, the National Front, perhaps: those, in other words, whose former social dominance has been usurped by the times. But the rest of us? Step forward the man or woman who would exchange modern medicine for the leech, sewerage for the gutter, the washing machine for the mangle, European Union for European wars, relative democracy for absolute monarchy. Not many takers, then.But the party is over. In 2,000 words, the Spectator provides plenty of evidence to support its first contention: "Now is good." It provides none to support its second: "The future will be better." Ours are the most fortunate generations that have ever lived. They are also the most fortunate generations that ever will.
Let me lay before you three lines of evidence. The first is that we are living off the political capital accumulated by previous generations, and that this capital is almost spent. The massive redistribution which raised the living standards of the working class after the New Deal and the second world war is over. Inequality is rising almost everywhere, and the result is a global resource grab by the rich. The entire land mass of Britain, Europe and the United States is being re-engineered to accommodate the upper middle classes. They are buying second and third homes where others have none. Playing fields are being replaced with health clubs, public transport budgets with subsidies for roads and airports. Inequality of outcome, in other words, leads inexorably to inequality of opportunity.
The second line of evidence is that our economic gains are being offset by social losses. A recent study by the New Economics Foundation suggests that the costs of crime have risen by 13 times in the past 50 years, and the costs of family breakdown fourfold. The money we spend on such disasters is included in the official measure of human happiness: gross domestic product. Extract these costs and you discover, the study says, that our quality of life peaked in 1976.
But neither of these problems compares to the third one: the threat of climate change. In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.
Interesting thing about all those generations that have contemplated catastrophes like global warming, the next Ice Age, the population bomb, the apocalypse of 1666, the apocalypse of 1999, etc. It never comes.
Meanwhile, Mr. Monbiot speaks favorably of the disastrous socialist egalitarianism that has left Europe so far behind the U.S. and led directly to the social breakdown he bemoans.
He's right though that Europe's future is rather dismal.
Posted by Orrin Judd at August 11, 2004 6:02 PMDisasters happen all the time, its just that history is written by people who survived them.
Posted by: Robert Duquette at August 11, 2004 6:18 PMno anticipated one
Posted by: oj at August 11, 2004 6:28 PMIt's possible that Mr. Monbiot is right about the first and second lines of evidence - But not in America.
In the US, home ownership by the lower and middle classes, as well as among minorities, are at the highest levels ever.
Meanwhile, crime, as reported by the FBI, has been falling for around a decade.
Mr. Monbiot suffers from what might be called "Star Trek syndrome": The ability to contemplate the future, without the ability to do more than extrapolate straight-line projections of current trends.
T. R. Malthus saw that problems would arise from a fixed amount of cropland and an expanding population; he failed to imagine chemical pesticides and fertilizers, as well as vastly underestimating how much acreage would be available for tilling, world-wide.
There may indeed be extreme population dislocations due to climate in the future, and hundreds of millions might die from bio-warfare, or even from nuclear warfare, but the surviving peoples will live lives beyond our mainstream fantasies of futurism.
Robot-driven flying cars and castles in the sky will be the least of it.
Wasn't it the redistributionist efforts that Monbiot lauds that were what all of that political capital was spent on? Not to mention being a large part of the crime problem as well.
Posted by: Annoying Old Guy at August 11, 2004 7:44 PMMonbiot's quality of life may have peaked in 1976. That was roughly the peak of liberalism (election of Jimmy Carter, peak of unionism, widest spread of Communism, dominance of old Labour in Britain, etc).
Posted by: Gideon at August 11, 2004 8:14 PMThe empirical evidence is consistent: each subsequent generation enjoys improvements in lifestyle and increased options in how you can direct your life. Exceptions are due to war, despotism, or other forms of increased government power. This trend is consistently seen among the poor and the rich.
So increases in (wealth) inequality definitely do not consist of declining lifestyle among the 'normal' or 'typical' poor. (The atypical poor are the drug-ravaged or the otherwise dysfunctional debilitated subset.) Instead it is that that the improving lifestyle of the poor is LESS FAST than among the more well off.
Look how the well-off('the rich') are blamed for this. Look how the 'solution' depends upon increased government power. Once again, there's a degree of consistency.
Of course it never occurs to Monbiot to notice the correlation between the redistribution he talks about and that increase in crime and family breakdown he notes. Nope, couldn't be related. Not at all.
Of course, that the US has been moving away from his desired model or redistribution while seeing shrinking crime rates and more stability in the younger generation (less teen pregnancy, etc). Another correlation that escapes him.
Posted by: BC Monkey at August 12, 2004 9:46 AM>Interesting thing about all those generations
>that have contemplated catastrophes like global
>warming, the next Ice Age, the population bomb,
>the apocalypse of 1666, the apocalypse of 1999,
>etc. It never comes.
OJ, you've left yourself vulnerable. You can say the same about:
Yom Kippur War Rapture Scare, 1973.
Comet Kohoutek Rapture Scare, 1974.
Rosh Hashanah Rapture Scare, 1975.
Jupiter Effect Rapture Scare, 1981.
LA Olympics Earthquake Scare, 1984.
"88 Reasons" Rapture Scare, 1988.
It's just the expression of the Hal Lindsay Syndrome in another milieu, so don't get smug about "them".
(From a veteran of The Gospel According to Hal Lindsay, aka the Seventies Evangelical incarnation of the Montanist Heresy.)
Ken:
Open to what? Man doesn't get to tell God when to have the Apocalypse. I put 1666 and 1999 didn't I?
Posted by: oj at August 12, 2004 2:19 PMFor the record, I didn't pass that on to Orrin out of admiration, though the friend who sent it to me thought it was great.
Some anticipated catastrophes do come true. Europe, for example, had plenty of warning of the Mongols, but that didn't help.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at August 12, 2004 4:55 PMWhat are the Mongol nations of Europe?
Posted by: oj at August 12, 2004 5:01 PMAnd what are the Christian ones?
Politics, like life, evolves.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at August 13, 2004 2:13 PMAll of them.
Posted by: oj at August 13, 2004 2:19 PMWell, the Rapture has been predicted many times but the truth is that we do not know the when.
We do know that a major global catastrophe called global warming is happening. It will bring higher sea levels, stronger hurricanes, melting icecaps, hotter deserts, etc.
Perhaps we can find new sources of energy that do not increase CO2? Solar maybe?
Posted by: Rapture at September 16, 2004 3:27 PM