COMMENTS, ILLUSTRATIONS, ETC. FOR

CH.2: CHANGES, ACTIONS,POWERS...[updated in September 2000]

Abstract of ch.2: A simple, general fact about our world is presented ["In any going system, there are always more ways for a blind change to go wrong than right (because there's less 'room for improvement'); most unplanned side-effects are harmful; it's a 'downhill' world."].

     From this 'Plato/Aristotle'perspective   it is claimed that we can't hope that drastic changes by heedless agents  will 'go right just by luck'. [Ch.1 sketched some of  the ways we can expect many U.S. voters, consumers and leaders to be heedless. It is suggested here that even prudent humans will blunder and misuse

constant waves of superhuman technical advances--let alone a population containing such a high proportion of childish nincompoops.]

   Startling implications are sketched   for re-valuing dramatic action, technology, wealth, cleverness, and certain 'action-virtues' such as bravery, temperance, boldness--as well as [in later chapters] traditional  political values like autonomy, democracy, liberties and rights.

  (The bleak view of human morals and prudence in ch.1 was not intended as a sermon to spur us on to moral improvement; human folly was taken as a given; so now we must ask what are the prospects of childish humans misusing megatechnology and other powers to harm humanity and the biosphere.)

 

 

                                     TECHNOLOGY

This chapter (& these comments) are mainly about hi-tech progress. It is not hoped that confirmed technophiles will be converted here, only that people already dubious about the benefits of constant mega-tech innovations will find here a general explanation of why these innovations turn out so often disappointing or positively harmful.

   In March '99, Merrill Lynch put out in national publications a series of expensive full-page ads praising technology-in-general in a simple-minded way, saying that human users of technology are super-intelligent, saying we should worship inventors! What would be the probable motivation behind such preposterous ads?

1) M-L is convinced (plausibly) that mega-tech progress does increase profits,

at least in the short run(whether it benefits/harms mankind generally in the long run).

2) M-L may be worried that Americans are beginning to doubt the net human benefits of progress-in-general, so they need to have their faith bolstered.[Half of Americans are no better off than before the computer-revolution; they know they are excluded from the elite class by their lack of computer skills. Why should they be fans of technology?]

   There is now a coalition of more-or-less 'luddite' groups which can afford, now and then, full-page ads in NYTIMES questioning the blessings of megatech advances. It's called the TURNING POINT PROJECT, and has a web-site:

www.turnpoint.org

 The Fordham Index of U.S. 'Social Health' showed a drop from 'score 77' in 1973 to 'score 47' in 1997! This in an era of economic boom and fantastic technical progress.] See SOCIAL HEALTH OF THE NATION, by M. Miringoff et al/1999.

Median U.S. workers in 1998 under 45 earned significantly less, in real terms, than similar workers in 1973. Gadgets are cheaper now; but housing, medical care, education, and public transit prices have risen faster than incomes. Why should the average worker be enthusiastic about PROGRESS?

--The main project of my book: to counter bad philosophy in assessing wealth, technology, democracy, et al. (The  book doesn't try to legislate a philosophic utopia, or even to make firm recommendations: these would depend partly on empirical factual claims which the philosopher-author is not qualified to assess.)

IT MAY BE TRUE THAT WE CAN'T STOP (MEGATECH) PROGRESS; STILL, WE DON'T HAVE TO LIKE IT--AND THAT'S LIBERATING.

    SHOULD YOU REJOICE IF YOUR CHILD IS AN INNOVATIVE TECHNICAL GENIUS? His work must be directed toward FUNDED research; this is selected by government, military, and corporation bureaucrats. Moreover, her clever innovations will be used often by irresponsible 'kidults'.  For instance,the developers of SONAR ended up facilitating sonograms for inspecting foetuses. One major use of this innovation is to select female foetuses for abortion..on a huge worldwide scale!

  Walker Percy has a fairly decent innovator praying: "O Lord, may my discovery save the world. Failing that, may it not destroy the world. Failing that, may I get the Nobel Prize before it does."

--Freeman Dyson, a prominent Princeton futurologist, in a speech enthusing about the good that technology could do, said that technical research is heading in the wrong direction, 'making toys for the rich.' What research now needs, says Mr. Dyson, is a 'strong ethical push' to get technologies working in tandem to create

a 'socially just world'.  Mr. Dyson didn't say how to generate this strong ethical push. After all, if we can put a man on the moon, we should be able to generate a strong ethical push when it's needed.

--a letter submitted to NYTIMES, Aug./2000:

Stephen Berizzi deplores "neo-luddite aversion to technical progress. Informed by creative, humanitarian ideals, technology can foster social justice." Yes, and land-mines could also foster social justice--IF designed and controlled by wise saints, ; but they won't be controlled by saints; and real-life technology will not be informed by noble ideals. Even the most optimistic reformer realizes this: for the next few decades, technical research in general will in fact be directed by generals, bureaucrats,  and 'global-business buccaneers'; technical advances will be used by heedless, childish leaders and followers. That's why we neo-luddites expect megatech advances to do more harm than good in the foreseeable future.

SEDUCTIVE TECHNOLOGY: Futurologist John Naisbitt (in HIGH TECH/HIGH TOUCH) says that we are infatuated, intoxicated with technology--not rational users of technology as a too l.

COMPUTERS DOMINATING  HUMANS: Bill Joy, co-founder and chief scientist of Sun Microsystems, published a startling article in WIRED  [April 2000].

Joy expects staggering improvements in computer-power in the next few years; [perhaps 1 million times more powerful by 2030]. he worries that either tiny, self-replicating super-computers will escape altogether from the control of inept humans, or they will be controlled by a few brilliant and tyrannical human operators who will use them to control all other humans. [Acquaintances say 'noone is more phlegmatic than Bill. He is the adult in the room."]

Joy calls for a voluntary restraint on research; he sees his call as analogous to Einstein's warning to FDR of possible atom-bombs. [However, E.'s letter galvanized work toward the bomb; it didn't slow it down!]

  In August 2000, a computer program that 'evolved' more or less on its own actually designed and built simple little robots.  Science-fiction gets real!

--Bad side-effects of sudden changes from primitive technology to 19th-century technology in the 3d world must also be noted: black soot may now be a major climate-warmer. And  the World Health Orgn. says that more children in 3d world die each year of respiratory diseases (from soot & smoke)than all the children dieing in U.S. and Europe from every cause, at every age.

TECHNOLOGY AND  VIOLENCE: Not only have recent 'high-tech' wars killed many millions more than earlier wars; a much higher percentage of the casualties of recent wars are children and civilians.

                             Non-war violence:

  American is undergoing an epidemic of violence on its streets.(There is a lull now, partly because of a temporarily lower percentage of male youths among us; this percentage is due to rise, and with it violence may well  rise again.)

  Crack cocaine and methamphetamine are important causes of brainless violence here. Overall drug-use by the 'over 18s' has increased in 2000. People forget that these drugs constitute significant technical (chemical) innovation: products that people were willing to pay for, converted to a cheap, easily-ingested form.  It's ironic that while our government spends billions in vain attempts to keep cocaine from being imported, (and is slipping into a 2d Vietnam situation in Columbia) small-town people here have learned from the internet how to make methamphetamine in their kitchens! Govt. closed 6 midwestern meth labs in 1992, and 303 in '99! The 'high' from meth lasts longer than the high from cocaine, making paranoia & psychosis more likely. A day's high costs only $25. Better living through Chemistry!

--Cheap handguns are another clever technical innovation. A recent invention is a tiny gun that looks like a key-chain, that can 'get by' inspectors at airports.

--People haven't realized this real possibility: terrorists with portable ground-to-air missiles could shoot down  commercial airliners easily from a small boat off any coast. (Someone has said that such airborne pachyderms would practically 'suck a heat-seeking missile off the assembly-line'!)

   Indeed, a U.S. missile shot down an Iranian airliner; and the unexplained crash of 'TWA 80' could have been caused this way, though experts say it probably wasn't. (In October 1998, a small group of 'retired aviation professionals' took a full-page ad in NEW YORK TIMES to say that evidence of a missile-attack on 'TWA 80' has been ignored.) If this brand of terrorism becomes actual, all our precautions for barring explosives from airliners will become fairly pointless.

--In 1979, I published an article on technology called ARE LUDDITES CONFUSED? (In the journal INQUIRY). I cited there the possibility that  a rich madman could use stratospheric balloons to pump pure chlorine directly into the stratosphere, radically threatening the ozone layer. Then, fearing some rich madman might get that idea, I withdrew that footnote, half-ashamed that I had even imagined it.  Later, I saw a TV movie where a rich madman pulled just this stunt, holding world leaders to ransom.

--Richard Preston's scary novel THE COBRA EVENT describes plausibly how heedless scientists and generals and  corporate executives in various countries  have set things up  so that one intelligent madman--and many such exist--could use a 'kitchen' laboratory available to anyone   to deliberately start a world pandemic designed to 'thin out' human population by 50%. Preston was advised for this book by Bill Patrick, a top U.S. expert on germ warfare. The book alarmed Pres. Clinton so much that he had such scenarios checked out by his intelligence agencies. And indeed, Clinton's new Secretary of the Navy published a NYTIMES op-ed piece warning of a new style of 'non-explosive-warfare'. (We can be sure that the costs of this new war will be ADDED to the costs of irrelevant weapons like the anti-missile missile, not substituted for them.) A Denver paper described plans to use the National Guard to counter this type of threat--plans that might not reassure those familiar with the competence-level of typical National-Guard units.

                         TELEVISION & OTHER MEDIA:

 In the 1930's people looked forward to television as a great technical improvement in education, right in the home.Today TV is seen, with good reason, as a great corrupter of the morals and the brains--and even the bodies--of Americans. (Americans are getting ever more overweight; IN FACT, IF PRESENT TRENDS CONTINUE, ALL AMERICANS WILL BE OBESE IN A FEW YEARS! Apparently,  our metabolism slows down while watching TV even further than when we sit and read or talk.

  Also, the food industry spends $36 billion a year on advertising (mainly on TV); the ads for one Kellogg breakfast cereal cost double the budget for a cancer society's efforts to promote a healthy diet. Obesity costs the U.S. $68 billion a year.

   The Journal of the Am.Med.Assn said in '96 that one's life can be shortened as significantly by TV-watching as by smoking. The more TV children watch, the greater chance they're overweight; but when they watch less, they eat less and are more active.[Conference .of Secy of Agric,Oct.98] Adults watch TV 4-5 hours a day; children watch 3-4 hours; 1 in 3 children watch TV more than 5 hours a day, besides the time they spend on internet and with electronic games and listening to rock music.

  From 1990 to 1998, Type 2 diabetes (caused by obesity and inactivity) increased 76% among Americans in their 30s! It increased 33% among Americans overall. Experts think the rate will continue to snowball, because increases in the rate of diabetes follow after increases in obesity, and overweight rose from 44% to 54% in those 8 years. The risk of diabetes increases by 4% for every pound of excess weight. Medical costs for diabetes are already $98 billion per year. TV & Media and auto-worship pose an almost-irresistible temptation for most Americans to turn 'couch-potato'. [Dr.F.Vinicor at Ctrs for Disease Control/Prevention, August 2000.]

--4 top medical and psychiatric groups have officially endorsed the common-sense idea that children who watch violence are likely to behave more violently.

The awful interplay of hi-tech with human folly is well illustrated by media-technology (TV, internet, and computer games) making senseless mayhem available to all, and U.S. parents by-and-large abdicating from controlling what  their children absorb from the media.

  A new computer toy marketed in summer 2000 is 'Death-row Marv', a nasty $24 doll that comes with his own electric chair. The sales-pitch says, "Feel the burn as the electric buzz fills the room and he starts to shake and convulse..[and so on]." 65,000 of these toys were sold right away; there are waiting-lists across the country.

--At least 200,000 are hooked on 'cyber-sex'; they spend more than 11 hours a week seeking sex-sites, and have more trouble with relationships and jobs than non-addicts. Of 20 million visitors to sex-cites, 1%  are judged to be 'sex-compulsives.' (in  SEXUAL ADDICTION & COMPULSIVITY, Mar.2000.)

   It's important to remember that all these evils came about because of ingenious technical advances: in TV, computers, and computer-games.

--'BOWLING ALONE':One of the traditional virtues of Americans--important for the success of  any democracy--has always been our eagerness to join voluntary groups. But since WWII, we have steadily got less interested in any kind of groups..lately, Americans even bowl alone, instead of in groups as before! Robert Putnam, a Harvard political scientist, says this tendency is mainly due to television.

  People who watch television a lot are less trusting of others, less interested in joining groups.

  The average adult (says one study) spends  15 hours a week or more watching TV and videos. Another study says adults watch 18 hours a week or more.

   There are now gadgets available by which parents could easily control the hours their children spend watching TV; but a study shows that few parents are interested in that; only 2 in 5 parents activate the V-chip for censoring shows for their children; polls show that parents  are far more worried about children giving away family secrets to internet snoops  than they are about their children being exposed to sexual and violent pornography.(They might have to admit their own addiction.)  Parents think 'educational shows' means shows like 'Want To Be a Millionaire?' and 'Oprah'.

   [In fact, another study shows that U.S. parents put less emphasis than before on raising kids to be obedient in general; another study suggests that working women now find home-life so unattractive that they choose to work extra hours.]

   Early proponents of free expression (e.g., J.S. Mill) never dreamed that  whatever shocking material is available to adults would be automatically available also to children! Nor would they dream that, in such a situation, the Supreme Court would say it's better to expose the children to violence-fantasies than to deprive adults of free access to these fantasies!

--Children who watch World Series baseball are exposed to many, many acts of violence during commercials for movies and TV shows.

 --Just when technology is creating a more complex world, needing more mature intelligence to be managed well, the technological invention of TV is sapping  the attention-span and brain-power of our citizens.

   (On the other hand, TV is also weakening the attention-span of bright youths all over the world who might otherwise train themselves to make new technical innovations--so technology might undermine its own development).

  People get jaded with any given degree of degrading spectacle, and demand even more crude spectacles. Violence on mainstream TV rose 23% in one year; the violence on cable TV and VCR tapes is of course much worse. (Entertainment products are America's second largest export; we may be addicting the whole world to degrading spectacle.)

  Hundreds of  studies show that children who watch violent TV, and who play violent 'games', are more prone to violent conduct; it is no coincidence that we are seeing an incredible epidemic of violent behavior among children..who are now, of course, heavily armed. The number of teens arrested for murder more than doubled between 1985 and 1995.  (However, someone has pointed out that Japanese children watch even more violent TV than our children do, with hardly any violent `acting-out'--a puzzle. But lately the violence rate of Japanese has increased sharply(from a very low level).

  During WWII, only 15% of GIs, surprisingly,  would actually fire a weapon( the others would be found dead with the rifle unfired!); but in Vietnam 95% of GIs fired. That's because the army trained the later soldiers not to be queasy about killing. Dave Grossman was involved in such army efforts; now he's written a book warning that similar 'desensitizing' techniques are being used very efficiently on our children, by designers of 'games'. A 14-year-old fired eight shots and hit 8 people; the average policeman hits fewer than 1 in 5 people he aims at. (The policemen perhaps are queasy; the kid was not.) Grossman pointed out that the 2 Columbine killers (self-identified as 'Doom' fanatics) cheered and laughed and mocked as they shot other youths. "Go to any video arcade, watch 2-player games; you see kids laughing and mocking, deriving pleasure from human suffering."

  One computer-game involves a writhing, naked woman begging the player not to kill her. What a feeling of power for a 14-year-old male!

 

  The staggering increase in people--including children--watching professional 'rassling is sobering. One study showed that in 50 episodes of 'WWF RAW',there were 128 cases of simulated sex, 47 cases of Satanic activity, 42 cases of simulated drug-activity, one instance of 'drinking blood' from a 'dead' gladiator;

609 incidents of people struck with items like garbage cans and nightsticks.

   Perhaps even more destructive is the message sent by 'rassling  that all referees are blind, weak and corrupt, that you must cheat because fair rules won't be enforced, so your rivals will certainly cheat. This attitude, which goes far beyond violent contests, might undermine any civilization and require ruthless suppression to keep people from each other's throats.

--Millions of American children have their own separate TV sets (with 'cable'), plus internet-computers, in their bedrooms! Parents who allow this are obviously making no real effort to control what their children see. (A bright seven-year-old in Denver just taught a bright six-year-old  how to access every kind of perversion on the internet.) 58% of teens say they have accessed an objectionable web-site

(music, sex, or violence).

  The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that no child under 2 should watch TV at all; it hampers their development. At the same time the 'teletubbies' are designed to attract one-year-olds.

  In Eire, 1 in 5 children have a TV in their bedroom, in spite of studies that show that children who watch TV in the evening have more sleep-problems.

--Besides the time spent on TV, 90% of children 9 to 13 years old average 1.4 hours per day playing video games. And many teen-agers spend much time surfing the Internet; of all Internet activities,using it for homework ranks seventh.

Children over 8 years old average nearly 7 hours a day, 7 days a week, immersed in entertainment media; that includes 44 minutes a week reading.

  Much TV watching by children is when they're alone: 81% for children under 7, 95% for older children. 60% of children say the TV is on during meals. Associated with high media use are: not getting along with parents, unhappiness at school, getting into trouble,etc. "Devices that might have increased communication have also become means of isolation."

--American adults complain that they  lack free time. But one study, using actual hourly diaries of individuals, found that the average American has 35-40 hours free every week--only in such small blocks of time that he can't really relax. So he spends 15 hours a week watching television.

  The new technical media powers, especially in a society that worships free expression, could destroy civilization.

TECHNOLOGICAL OVER-PRODUCTION AND UNEMPLOYMENT:

In America in 2000,it's rather hard to make the case for fearing unemployment, when the unemployment rate stays around 4%! But the long-run trends toward 'glut' are still in place; we should look for unusual current counter-influences.

  The obvious one is the fantastic rate of U.S. consumer spending. The conventional wisdom was that as money drifted to the well-to-do, consumer spending would sink relatively, because well-to-do people had enough goods already and would put their excess into savings--and the poor couldn't afford the consumption they needed. But now the American upper middle-class have developed an insatiable thirst for expensive toys, SUVs, 2d luxury homes, etc.

  Also, the Pentagon and its suppliers soak up almost a billion dollars a day--and this money is wasted, as the Keynesian theory advocates. It may be that our mad spending is propping up the whole first-world economy!

--While TV is making Americans more prodigal and less productive than they might be in a world Information Economy, other peoples are TOO thrifty, too productive. Indeed, excess productivity is like armament; everyone is worse off  for it, but it pays each nation to increase it. [Of course, corporate propaganda ignores overproduction, using the myth of scarcity to raise prestige/revenue of corporate producers.]/

  Some people are puzzled about why foreign bankers are so eager to finance our ever-growing trade deficit. Why do we get away with steadily consuming more than we produce & sell? Some economists have suggested that the zany American greed for junk is what keeps the whole industrial world from tipping into glut-depression. We are needed to waste dangerous surpluses.

  How could there be 'overproduction' when so many millions are hungry and needy? Because only 'effective' demand counts, demand backed by money. During the Irish potato famine, ships regularly left Irish ports, exporting grain that was 'excess' to local (effective) demand. India today exports much food, while many of its people go hungry.

--The world overcapacity for car-production is such that every U.S. factory could close tomorrow, and there would still be excess capacity.

--A UN report (Nov.'97) shows that unemployed people (30% of the world's labor force) increased by 180 million people from 1994 to 1995. The 820 million underemployed/unemployed represent a world crisis not seen since the Great Depression.

--Abbe Mowshowitz, a specialist in the social implications of computers, foresees a world society of "virtual feudalism" in which global corporations enforce their own laws and comb the world for cheap labor.

--A BUSINESS WEEK editor reviewed approvingly (in NYT BOOK REVIEW,1Nov'98) a book by James Galbraith warning of the danger of excess world productive capacity: Indonesian, Korean, and Thai businessmen built too many offices and factories, 'creating an enormous overcapacity..for the world as a whole.' While mistaken monetary policy contributed to this problem, technological advance made such excessive productivity gains possible.

--When machines, owned by a few rich people, are producing floods of goods, and 3/4ths of the human race is unemployed, who's going to buy all those goods?  As James Galbraith puts it, "Lack of Demand is the problem, stupid!" (Desperate Japanese leaders have issued vouchers  to all citizens, so they'll have to spend the money, not add it to 'already-excessive' Japanese savings.) Already, the ECONOMIST is referring to a very clear world overcapacity for making cars. And we know that a tiny percentage of U.S. farm workers is enough to create huge agricultural  surpluses. (Granted, the elite employed minority will be very well paid; but they will not perhaps be eager to share with the unskilled losers; even now, in America, the bottom tenth are untypically much poorer than the median households.) More and more experts are warning that we could soon be facing a massive worldwide Depression. For instance, an editor of Business Week (in NYT BOOK REVIEW, 1 Nov.98) says the 'Asian Tiger-countries' created an 'enormous overcapacity ..for the world as a whole.' And Robert J. Samuelson of THE WASHINGTON POST says the next pitfall for the world economy is oversupply: global gluts of basic industrial goods ranging from steel to cement.

--The bottom half of American workers have definitely not been enriched by the last 3 decades of fantastic technical progress--except perhaps in the very recent past,[late '99, 2000] during the peak of the present boom--which peak no economist thinks will last.

JOBLESSNESS AND AUTOMATION:

  In 1999, world orders for industrial robots rose 20% over 1998; in U.S. & Canada, 60%.

 A growing number of economic observers fear that the unemployment from automation may not be temporary: previous agricultural inventions put only farmers out of work, while computers and robots are (or will be) replacing an amazing variety of workers, from factory workers to language translators to medical diagnosticians.

   Besides,  the `thinking' power of computers is doubling every 18 months--(Bill Joy says it will shortly jump ahead at a staggering rate);meanwhile, the thinking power of TV-addled humans may be sinking fast.

--Right-wing observers say the solution is for American workers to work cheaper, to get back in the competition. But they'd have to work for almost nothing. Mexican workers, who get about 1/10th of American pay, are also being replaced by machines! Machines don't need costly job training [the 'training' (programming) of one can be effortlessly duplicated millions of times, whereas humans must be trained laboriously, one by one]; robots don't need  cafeterias;they don't quit or strike or work sabotage; they don't get paid vacations.

--Technology has also made it possible to move money all over the world instantly, so worksites can be moved to Asian countries, so American workers face double competition--from really cheap overseas workers, (thanks to incredibly cheap shipping costs, goods can be manufactured on the other side of  the world, and sold cheaply here)--and also from computers/robots which will eventually undercut even the cheapest human workers.

--Also, as noted elsewhere here, less-mobile unskilled workers will be paying  a higher share of taxes! [Technology enables the elite to move their money around the world to minimize taxes.]

--One big danger from pervasive automation is the loss of 'slack': that small amount of spare time or human resources that can buffer against unexpected shocks. The desirability of a bit of slack is especially clear in combat and in expertly operated complex systems like nuclear power plants, where a little time to think..can be of obvious value. However, engineers and managers tend to see slack as wasteful, and automation is..used to wring it out of the system.

 

THE OZONE LAYER:

 The ozone problem is a good example of the general danger of sudden, drastic changes. The problem was well-launched before we even knew that human chemicals were grossly harming the stratospheric ozone layers (though perhaps we should have worried earlier about dumping millions of tons of chlorine-chemicals into the atmosphere). And while we tend to think generally that we can just back up and correct any blunders, those CFC chemicals will stay in the stratosphere for 20-100 years, even if we start now to cut back on them..which is not at all sure.

  The thin, fragile stratospheric layer of unstable ozone protects us from excessive Ultraviolet rays,which destroy living tissue. Every 1% drop in ozone at any given point means a 1.5% increase in UV radiation, which increases chances of skin cancer and cataracts by 2%, and weakens the immune system.

(There are already 35 milion cataracts worldwide; skin-cancer and often-fatal melanoma have proliferated.Melanoma rates (predicted as  1 in 75 over a lifetime) have increased to 18 times the 1930's rate..)

--UV radiation over New Zealand has increased by 12% in the last 20 years.

--90% of salamander embryos exposed to normal Oregon sunlight (with less ozone shielding of UV rays) didn't hatch, or hatched deformed. [Andrew Blaustein]

  The ozone `Hole' over Antarctica is now 2.5 times the size of Europe; (in '99 it covered nearly 4 million square miles.) It's expected to be larger in 2000. The ozone over the Antarctic in July 2000 was only 20-35% of what it was between '64 and '76. The 'hole'  covers the southern tip of Argentina sooner every Spring. There is no ozone at all from 9 miles high to 13 miles high in the winter.

    Over the whole world, ozone has been depleted 1% a year for the last 20 years. Sea creatures around the Antarctic are beginning to show damage from excessive UV rays. (However, the 'hole' was slightly smaller in '98 than in '97; and the chlorine in some regions of the stratosphere is beginning to decline.)

   Radiation has increased over 13% over Europe and America. "We didn't expect such  a huge area of Asia and Europe to show such ozone destruction." (Colorado is very vulnerable to UV damage, because of its altitude and cloudlessness.)   Extra UV harms the plankton which are the basis of the ocean food-chain. There

is a loss of plankton in Antartica, where O2 depletion is greatest.

The plankton off San Diego have lessened by 80%. 50 penguin chicks a day in the Antarctic are starving because the number of `krill', which they feed on, is down..these krill feed on plankton. Sea creatures are thinning out from California to Washington (partly due to the warming of the Pacific Ocean.)/  Ocean fisheries are also being depleted by overfishing; these three problems may aggravate each other. /

   The second-leading New England cod-fishery has completely collapsed. The oceans are under unique environmental stress; new diseases of marine creatures may be showing up. [C.Drew Harvell of Cornell Univ,Dec98]

--Arctic Ozone measured 40% lower than in 1980, and 25% lower than in 1996.

   As noted in the text of chapter two, an ozone HOLE has appeared over Moscow! The ozone over Siberia is down by 35%. Earlier reports that worldwide UV radiation was going down have been contradicted by later studies. Radiation over the U.S. increased slightly during the 1980's.

--There was an agreement [the 'Montreal' protocal] among many industrial countries to cut the use of ozone-destroying chemicals; the rich countries were supposed to pay the costs of the poor countries' substituting safer chemicals; but then the rich countries simply didn't pay what they pledged, Third-world countries like India go on manufacturing CFC's; 20 million pounds of CFC's were smuggled into U.S.in 1996 (also into other first-world countries) to recharge auto air-conditioners. [In 2000, India said it was cutting back on production of CFC's.]

  Sales of air-conditioners for homes and small businesses in Europe have grown 20% in 3 years; air-conditioners using safe gas cost 10% to 20% more.[J. Tagliabue in NYT 8 Aug 98]

  NYCity, in Aug.'00,  paid a huge fine for crushing refrigerators without first disposing of the CFC's they contained.

   --Nevertheless, (good news!) the total set of ozone-depleting chemicals in the lowest part of the atmosphere has started to go down. (The Bromine level is still rising) (From the World Meteorological Orgn) Nevertheless the ozone shield won't thicken to match the 1980 level for 50 years or more. This report says that UV radiation in the Northern hemisphere has increased by 5%, and in the Southern Hemisphere by 8%.

  As the number of cars skyrockets in near-Equatorial regions, the cooling of cars and houses will also increase; and people there may demand and get the old-fashioned, ozone-destroying CFCs. (The number of cars in Sao Paolo,Brazil increases by 1000 a day.)

BOLD EXPERIMENTS: 

 Luddites are ridiculed because 'you would have opposed the invention of fire!'  But after the invention of fire, some families undoubtedly suffocated in caves from the misuse of fires; others learned from their sad example, and fire became safer.

   That's why megatech is different in kind, not just in degree, from older techniques--because we're experimenting with the whole biosphere--if we make any big mistakes here, we might not  be around to learn from them.

   The 'RHIC' experiments begun in April 2000 had a 'tiny probability, but one above zero' of destroying our world and galaxy in one grand gesture. The Brookhaven Lab running these experiments has had several negligence-pollution scandals in recent years(under different management): leaking tritium from an underground tank, plus leaks of strontium, mercury,etc. The pollution was so great that the place was named a superfund site. The (federal) General Accounting Office, in reviewing these Brookhaven leaks, sharply criticized the DOE's muddled chains of command on environmental issued. [Sci.Amer/Feb.98] )

   That experiment did not in fact end the world; but it raises the question of how rational it is to take a very small risk of a quasi-infinite disaster (a disaster that would end all human experimenting!) not for a national necessity but just for a very interesting gain in knowledge.

GLOBAL WARMING:

 Industrial man has dumped millions of tons of carbon dioxide, methane, carbon tetrachloride, 'CFC's' and other gases into the atmosphere. Much of these gases have stayed up there, reflecting extra heat back to earth (in the `greenhouse' effect), gradually raising the temperature. The carbon in Earth's atmosphere has increased 30% since the start of the industrial revolution. "In the last decade",

says Bill McKibben (author of THE END OF NATURE) "human beings crossed a threshhold--we became big enough as a species to affect everything around us."

NYTIMES 28 Oct:

 

 

20th century was at least as warm as any year since 1400, and was warmer than any 90-year stretch since 914./1999, as 'La Nina' year, should have been cooler, but was instead was 5th warmest year on record!./Skeptics about Warming noted that satellite measurements said lower atmosphere was cooler; but in NATURE, Apr.200, these measurements were corrected and tropospere was seen as warming, in line with ground measurements.

  Opponents of controlling the effusion of greenhouse gases now hope that planting more forests, etc., will have same effect (by increasing 'sinks' to absorb the carbon) as would cutting effusion. But the long-run effects of this 'sink' strategy are not really known.       Researchers have dumped iron filings into parts of the Antarctic Ocean, hoping to stimulate the growth of phytoplankton, which would capture excess CO2 and perhaps relieve the global warming problem. (However, the increased UV rays from ozone-thinning tend to harm the plankton.) Meanwhile humans are destroying the rain-forests we have. Brazilian parliament debated in 2000 whether to destroy 1/2 of Brazilian rain-forest, to expand grazing, farming,etc.

  The big moral issue is whether the worriers about global warming have to prove their case before we take action to restrain burning of fossil fuels, or whether growth-advocates have to prove the safety of steady increases in CO2 before uncontrolled growth should be allowed. It seems obvious to me that there is enough plausible evidence supporting the worriers as to shift the burden of proof onto the growth-advocates..but the typical human attitude will favor the presumption of uncontrolled growth until, perhaps, it is too late. [See 'Moving Inertia' in ch2. of the book.]

  An optimistic assessment by a Yale Professor of Forestry, Robt. Mendelsohn,(THE GREENING OF GLOBAL WARMING) says that global warming has so many possible BENEFITS  that many countries will be better off. He cites studies that predict only 1 to 3.5 degree Celsius of warming. Precipitation will increase; the average crop will be 30% more productive (from more CO2). 'There is an unstated myth in ecology that natural conditions must be optimal. That is, we must be at the top of the hill now." [This 'myth' is actually the 'Aristotelian' Principle of the 'downhill world': the presumption that blind change of going systems usually does more harm than good.] Pessimists, says M., tend to discount the potential of societal adaptation, such as that which controlled the malaria that once afflicted travelers along the Ohio River. George Will, reviewing this book, says "Never have birth-rates been so low or per capita food production as high."

--Sorgham, the main crop for millions of 3d-world people, will be harmed by global warming.

 --A 'Cato' Institute environmental expert (P.Michaels) says optimistically (a)  that past summer polar temperatures have been as high as now, and once they were higher.(b) There have been no food shortages resulting from warming up to now (which Michaels agrees may be caused by humans). Pessimistically, he says we can't stop the warming anyway; if all nations obeyed the 'Kyoto Protocal', the warming over the next 50 years would drop by only .13 degrees.

--Hansen, an early 'ozone' expert, now says (in 2000) that black soot (from 3d-world countries) and methane (escaped from pipelines,etc) are major 'global warming' gases. Methane has been hailed as the 'clean' alternative to coal, heating-oil,etc. But it is, unit for unit, much worse than CO2. Luckily,there's not so much of it now in the atmosphere. But there are millions of tons available, and much of what's used will leak out.  Sometimes a remedy for an environmental evil poses new threats.

--A new way to measure how hot the world was before 1850 shows 1.8 degrees warming since 1500. 80% of that increase was after 1800, and more than half of it was since 1900, and .5 degree increase since 1980.(NATURE/feb.2000)

 

Britain's Hadley Center for Climate Change presented to 170 countries (in 1999) some apocalyptic facts and predictions:

--parts of Amazon forest will become desert by 2050.

--1998 was hottest year since record-keeping began;

--land temperatures will rise by 6 degrees Centigrade by 2100.

--in 2050, 100 million people will live in flood-areas; 30 million more will go hungry because of African droughts;

--170 million more will live with extreme water-shortages;

--Malaria will threaten much larger areas, including Europe.

--The Gulf Stream will be 20% weaker;

--U.S. prairies will by hit by drought; wheat, corn yields here will drop 10%.

(Canada's wheat yield will increase 2.5%.)

--The warming will increase after 2050. It was once thought that excess CO2,

by increasing plant yield, would moderate its own increase; but drought will prevent this.

 

In 1999, The American Geophysical union said there is 'a compelling basis for legitimate public concern' about human-induced climate change. The natural change from the depths of the last ice-age till now is 5 to 9 degrees; the average surface temperature of the earth has risen 1 degree in the last century./A UN panel of scientists said that at the present rate of fossil-fuel-burning, the temperature would rise 2 to 6 degrees by 2100. [A critic-group said that , while the observed  rise in temperature appears unusual in the context of the last few centuries, it is not clearly outside the range of (natural) climate variability of the last few thousand years.]

--World climate can change quickly, said Scripps Inst. of Oceanography; there was a 16-degree abrupt warming at the end of the last ice-age, within a couple of decades. In the next 100 years we might trigger one of these abrupt climate changes--which possibility undermines optimistic view that we can wait to cut CO2 admissions till we're SURE about global warming.

--Past fluctuations in CO2 level after the last ice-age correlated with droughts and desertification during Holocene era. [Maybe the desertification caused the CO2 changes; but then perhaps CO2 increase and desertification will work together in an upward spiral.] These ancient fluctuations were smaller than present changes--"We are moving into uncharted waters.". The amount of CO2 in atmosphere is expected to double by 2100.

--Expanding deserts worldwide threaten 250 million people, says UN.

--For 16 months (from May '97 to Sept.'98) each monthly world average temperature broke the previous record. The odds are 20 to 1 that this marked a change to faster global warming. /Jet-airplane exhaust could be a factor in global warming, said Congressional Accounting Office.

--Representatives of more than 80 countries in 1995 agreed in Madrid that global warming is real, and human activities (e.g., burning coal & oil) are partly responsible.Governments are trying for agreements to control emissions; but industry coalitions fight such proposals as threatening `jobs' (and profits).

(In Oct.98, the Energy Information Administration predicted that, as things are going now, carbon emissions from burning fuel will rise 34% by 2010.)

[However--good news!-- it turns out that North America is for now soaking up more carbon than was expected, so the worldwide measured increase in CO2 is less than expected.(Pieter Tans in SCIENCE).]

--A Swiss study says global warming could paradoxically cause a sudden 'Ice Age' in Europe, which depends for warmth on Atlantic currents which could be disrupted by global warming. The longer we wait to control CO2, etc., the greater the risk of this sudden catastrophe.

----The Antarctic ice-sheet has been melting for 7500 years; accelerating this by global warming could be catastrophic, though the ice-sheet reacts slowly to outside changes.

The Arctic ice cap, however,  has thinned by 40% in the past 3 decades (going from 10' thick to 6' thick from '76 to '90s). Its surface area has shrunk by 5% in the last 20 years.Average Arctic temperatures have risen 11 degrees in the last 30 years. If the Arctic Ocean became ice-free in summer months, and fresh water mixed with the ocean's salt-water, the whole circulation of oceans could change suddenly. In August 2000 a sea of unfrozen water ( 3 X 10 miles) showed up in the Arctic Circle, for the first time in 50 million years. (After the first alarm on this issue, some experts said water at the pole was probably not that unusual.  But what was unusual was that the ship encountered an unusual amount of open water all the way up to pole. "In 2 weeks we never had a day of normal ice.")/ Recent arctic temperatures were the highest in 400 years./

  Many independent indicators [e.g., atmosphere circulation, snowfall, snow cover, snow depth, air temperature]point to a unique current warming of the Arctic;  Sections of Alaska and northern Eurasia are 11 degrees Fahr. warmer than 34 years ago. No warming like this has ever been found ever in the record, as measured by tree rings, ice cores and lake cores. [Climatic Change, Aug.2000] All Northern Hemisphere sea ice is melting at 15% per year.

    Ancient viruses have been found surviving for hundreds of years in the ice; if the ice melted and these viruses revived, people would not be immune to them any longer.

--Scientists from 30 nations warned about a likely 2 to 6 degree (Fahrenheit) rise in average temperatures by 2100: this would melt a third of the glaciers and raise sea-levels .5 to 3 feet by 2100./ No matter what we do now, temperatures will rise 1 to 4 degrees. These changes would be the most rapid in the 10,000 years that civilization has been developing.

--Another report, from Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, see temp.increase of 2 to 9 degrees Fahr. by 2100. Since 1860, warming has been .7 and 1.5 degrees. Seas would rise 4" to 3'. CO2 level in 2100 will be 2 or 3 times that of preindustrial world. However, sulfate aerosols from fossil-fuel consumption might make clouds shinier, mitigate warming.

--From 1955 to '95, the oceans warmed an average of .1degree down to about 10,000 feet. [As worldwide average, this is a huge increase.] Surface temps. rose about a degree since 1900.[Sydney Levitus of Natl Oceanic & Atmos.Admin.,relying on recently declassified information from  U.S. & Russian Navies.]

   Siberia is the warmest it's been for 1000 years.(The average wordlwide temperature now is only 5 to 9 degrees warmer than in the last Ice Age--small average differences can cause big changes in the environment!)(1998): The most intense and deadly heat wave in 50 years is baking parts of Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, including the highest temperatures ever recorded in May. (Such high temperatures will increase the need for air-conditioning in the Southern hemisphere, and thus the amount of CFC's leaked into the stratosphere, increasing the threat to the ozone layer.)

There has been disagreement about whether observed temperature rises were actually caused by human activities; a federal scientist says there is now 90% probability that the climate is responding to industrial waste gases. The average rise will be 3 to 8 degrees, but extremes of weather will be more frequent. Some scientists expect an increase in the number of hurricanes and tropical storms.

--Fish & Seabirds have dropped by 80% off San Diego; sea-creatures are disappearing from Washington to California.(Sea-warming has cut phytoplankton, the basis of the sea food-chain, by 80%).

--Vast numbers of warm-water sea creatures are migrating North off California as the ocean warms. The average summer water temperature has gone up 4 degrees.

--In 1997, the EL NINO (a warming of huge areas of the Pacific Ocean which dramatically destabilizes world climates) was noted as the biggest, by far, in recorded history.

--The present tendency is for the emissions of `greenhouse' gases to increase by 30-40% by2010.(report from Internatl.Energy Agency)

--Deadly mosquitoes in India and elsewhere are spreading, due to climate warming. Ferocious 'killer-bees' are spreading further North, no longer being killed by winters.

--Last summer India's temperature reached 124 degrees. Southern Europe saw a unique heat-wave followed by deluge. India's monsoon lasted longer than ever. Hundreds of old people died in a Chicago heat-wave.

The Western Pacific Ocean has been warming for 50 months.

--Global warming will cause an 8% drop in global cereal production by 2060 (just as population has grown to 9 billion) 350 million MORE people could go hungry as a result, unless agricultural practices change sharply. The worst effects will be in the poorest subtropical countries. Some crops would be helped by higher temperatures (for instance, in Canada) , but not the main crops relied on by people in the Southern Hemisphere.

--Sea-levels have been rising for a century; 2/3ds of that rise is due to human activity.

--Sea levels in 1993-4 rose at about twice the rate over the last century..part of this rise seems to be due to global warming. The seas are now rising by .72 inches a decade; a net increase in sea-level of up to 3.3 feet  is predicted over the next century.[The Financial Times/Oct.98/D. Wingham of London U. (Shorelines would move in by 100 feet; estuaries--needed to shelter spawning sea-life--would be contaminated by salt-water by an extra 1000 feet inland.   Whole countries (with dense populations) could be flooded (e.g. Bangladesh, The Netherlands/ the Delta in Egypt/huge areas in China).-- / The Eastern Mediterranean Sea has suddenly warmed up far below the surface, in a `sensational' change.

--Melting glaciers could slow the earth's rotation. Glaciers have been retreating (by 11%) since 1850; in some places the retreat is 50%. The Columbia Glacier in Alaska has retreated 8 miles in 16 years. Alaska, Northern Russia and Canada are melting; temperatures have increased by 5 degrees in 30 years.This process is accelerating.(Glaciers take 50 years to respond to temperature changes.) Some scientists say we may have to rename 'Glacier Park' soon; there may soon be no glaciers there. /Antartica's ancient ice-shelf is beginning to break up, destroying a barrier that protects the whole continental ice-cap from melting. (On the other hand, the actual Antarctic ice-cap itself is not shrinking much yet.)The 4600 square mile Larsen Ice Shelf may crumble quickly. The depths of the ocean off Antarctica are getting warmer. / The Arctic summer ice-pack has shrunk by 6% since 1989. The Arctic Spring came 8 days earlier in 1997 than in 1987./ An iceberg bigger than the state of Delaware just broke off from a polar ice-cap.

--Average air temperatures worldwide have been increasing for a century..

--Interior Secy. Bruce Babbitt, in summer '97, said the world's temperature could rise from 2 to 6 degrees  in the next century. 2000 scientists agree they rose by 1% in our century. Babbitt noted that American corporations are waging an advertising campaign against measures to reduce greenhouse gases.

 --CHINA has just begun to pollute the atmosphere in a major way. By 2050, China will be contributing 40% of the world's CO2.China will not accept any limits on CO2 production; its industrial expansion must be based on coal-power.  China plans to raise its coal-fired electric capacity by 50% by the year 2000. (China actually needs to double its present capacity). A reminder: China's coal-economy is (old-fashioned) technology.

--China will lose much from global warming: the Chinese Academy fears that sea-levels will rise by one meter; during storm tides, an area of China the size of Portugal could get swamped; cities like Shanghai will be flooded; 67 million Chinese will be driven out, not to mention the major loss of food-production just when China will have 1.6 billion people to feed. The Gobi desert is swallowing up almost 1000 square miles of grazing land a year. Nevertheless, nothing can stop the increased Chinese use of coal in inefficient, high-polluting plants. (The optimists hope their coal-consumption will merely double, not triple, in the next 30 years..and that only if Chinese can get enough foreign capital to pay for more efficient generators.)

--The Chinese will not accept American complaints about their aggravating the global warning threat. Even by 2010,  U.S.(with 1/4 China's population) will be emitting more carbon than China is then.

--WORLD FORESTS  `sop up' greenhouse gases to some extent, lessening the tendency to global warming. However, the world's forests are shrinking by 28 million acres a year.80% of the world's original forests have disappeared; over 99% of original U.S. forests have disappeared (due to logging). [However, many forests have been replaced by tree-farms.]

 

--Some scientists say the world is not warming at all; others say any warming is not caused by industrial emissions; some say any warming would be overall beneficial. (Corporations are very happy to publicize any findings that relieve governmental pressures on them to control emissions.  A book The Heat Is On  tells how the fossil fuel industry has used its wealth to create `a relentless drumbeat of doubt in the public's mind about global warming.' However, a senior executive of British Petroleum Corporation shocked his colleagues in '97 by admitting that the scientific consensus supports the reality of global warming problems. (One colleague says, "He's now Out of the Church!")

   A coalition of industrial powers has been opposing implementation of the 'Kyoto' treaty, an agreement to cut emissions, on the ground that the danger from human-caused global warming is not yet clear enough that we should impose economic controls on industries. In 1999 the Ford Motor Co. dropped out of this coalition; its leaders felt there WAS reason for worry and corrective action. In early 2000, the Chrysler-Daimler Corporation dropped out of this coalition for similar reasons.

 

   J. Doeleman [in vol.12 of RESEARCH IN PHILOSOPHY AND TECHNOLOGY, 1992] predicted that mankind would eventually give up on 'saving' Nature from industrial destruction--such a  change would be too costly to powerful interests; instead we'll settle for 'replacing' nature (e.g., replacing ocean fish with 'farmed' fish; enclosing densely-inhabited neighborhoods in huge 'bubbles', to protect inhabitants from air-pollution--or perhaps 'bioengineering people' who can flourish in polluted environments.).

 

WORLD RESOURCES, POLLUTION AND POPULATION INCREASE (FACILITATED BY TECHNOLOGY): 

(June '97): The good news: world population growth-rates (births per woman) are dropping faster than predicted; the bad news: the UN still predicts a world population of up to 10.5 billion before growth levels off, (median prediction: 8.9 million) some time in the 21st century.(This of course assumes no catastrophic die-off).

--Half of earth's wetlands have been lost since 1900; 20% of freshwater fish are gone or endangered;half of forests are gone,including 9% of all tree species;70% of world's fish-stocks are over-fished./2/3 of agric. land has soil degradation since 1950; 1/3 of original forests were converted to agric. [from World Resources Institute report sponsored by UN & World Bank/Apr,2000.]

--Another report: 40% of soil is seriously degraded (75% in Central Am.) But we need to increase cereal production by 40% by 2020, with little new land to convert to agric. But some of this soil-damage is reversible. [Consultative Group on Internatl. Agric.Research (16 research centers)/2000]

   As of December 1998, countries with replacement-level births(or lower) totalled 2.6 billion people, 44% of the world population. But many very poor countries continued to increase at a high rate: for instance, the Liberians were expected to quadruple in numbers before 2050.

--The National Research Council says in '98 that over 110 million tons of fish are being killed by wildly efficient (as wasteful) 'floating fish-factories'  each year, while the possible world 'sustainable-yield'  level is only 100 million tons; in other words, it's not just some species or some fisheries that are in danger;

the entire oceanic supply of fish is threatened.

   For a while it seemed that world food supplies would grow faster than world population. Now experts are worried that our luck is running out. 700 million people are now chronically hungry even during non-famine years; food production per-capita has levelled off or dropped in the regions where population growth is highest. Prices for basic foods have risen sharply; U.S. has smaller surpluses to share abroad. One bad crop-year could cause unparalleled misery. (Food-shortages are especially awful in Africa.)

  An economist, David Seckler, claimed that the sharp increase in Indianfood-production did NOT come from 'miracle grains', but from increases in irrigation;these increases cannot be repeated; but now the population of India is increasing speedily from a much larger base.

  And at the same time, 80 million new people show up to be fed each year. If mankind had perfected and used birth-control before we perfected and used death-control (techniques for keeping people alive long enough to produce children)--we'd live in an amazingly better world. We're paying a heavy price for innovations in death-control  among people not committed to birth-control.

  Officials from 120 countries met in Senegal in Dec.98 to discuss the urgent threat of desertification of productive land, proceeding at a rapid pace and threatening 900 million people.

--WATER-SHORTAGES: As things are going now, 2 out of 3 humans (5.5 billion) will be short of water by 2025, according to the Stockholm Environmental Institute; this estimate is conceded by a UN study: Comprehensive Assessment of Freshwater Resources of the World. Water use now grows at twice the rate of population increase. (Worldwatch Institute says 40% of humans will face water shortages by 2030.) There will be wars over water: 214 rivers flow through 2 or more countries, with no international law to mediate the allocation between them. Until now countries have made up water shortages by importing grain (one ton of grain requires 1000 tons of water). But with population doubling, it's not clear where all the grain that will be needed will come from. (And with the 'middle-class' expanding all over the world, more and more millions will demand red meat, whose production 'wastes' huge amounts of grain.) The cost of water and of grain, and especially of meat will rise.  Undersecretary of State Timothy Wirth says,"The numbers of humanitarian emergencies seems to be increasing."

--ON THE OTHER HAND (MORE GOOD NEWS), a summer '97 report from the UN DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM says that world poverty has fallen faster in the past 50 years than in the previous 500 years.The developing world has covered as much distance in the past 30 years as the industrial world did in a century. More than 3/4 of its population can expect to survive till age 40. Adult illiteracy has been reduced by nearly half. Infant mortality has been cut nearly 3/5ths. [Most of this improvement has happened in East Asia; it is threatened by the new economic crises there.] However, the report concedes that in the former Soviet empire, the poverty rate has jumped from 4% to 32%.And worldwide, 1.3 billion people live on incomes of less than $1 a day."Poverty is no longer inevitable...Lack of political commitment, not financial resources, is the real obstacle to wiping out poverty."(However, this lack of effective commitment  to helping the poor can be expected to continue.)

  The experts don't all agree on our future prospects. But this much seems pretty certain; because of sharp population increases, the minimum welfare of billions of people is at risk.

ANIMAL-TO-HUMAN DISEASES: Years ago, agribusiness around the world decided to feed animal-scraps to meat-animals. Later, many people in Britain came down with 'mad-cow disease', which was thought to come from cows fed sheep-scraps. A study at Yale confirmed that brain-viruses passed from one species to another can mutate in the process.

  Progress is fast in readying pig-to-human organ-transplants. (There is a great shortage of human organs for transplanting.) There are 2 viruses common among many varieties of pigs (the viruses don't make the pigs ill; they would be hard to eliminate by selective breeding); no one knows if these viruses would pass to humans, or cause illness if they did. Once again, humans will be the laboratory animals.

 

INVASIVE ORGANISMS: (facilitated by the technology of cheap shipping and travel):

--The AIDS virus spread to Haiti and America because of cheap modern travel.

(In 3d-world countries it spreads fastest along modern highways.)  Transport by ship has become incredibly cheap; organisms are being mixed all over the world.

--The Asian long-horn beetle, transported in wooden crates from China,  has infested trees in New York and Chicago ; in Oct.98, government experts worried that the ultimate damage could come to $183 billion. All the 'beserk' imported species, including diseases, are expected to cost us a total of $130 billion a year.

--Hydrilla was imported into Florida to use in aquariums; it `got loose' and has now overgrown 40% of the states lakes and rivers,costing hundreds of millions of dollars for herbicides, discouraging tourism,etc. 33 kinds of plants imported to Florida (for erosion control or for ornamental purposes) are `highly invasive'. The Brazilian pepper has monopolized 100,000 acres in the Everglades, killing competition. The Asian tiger mosquito could bring dengue fever to Florida. Huge walking catfish, pythons and boa constrictors are now settled there..the snakes could even eat children.

--The Ebola virus is showing up in various places in the world; in Africa, it kills (horribly) 60-90% of those infected.Some scientists think it is  the human invasion of the rainforests that is threatening to release this plague around the world, just as AIDS got released earlier./See THE HOT ZONE.

--Rabbits were introduced deliberately to Australia, and became a plague. An anti-rabbit virus was introduced; only the immune rabbits survived; they filled up the ecological niche promptly.A new virus was developed on a `remote' island; but before it could be tested properly, it was borne to the mainland (by insects from the island who were blown to the mainland); Australia was covered with dead rabbits.

--A few queens from ferocious African bees were brought to Brazil by an American scientist.Lowly-paid workers let some queens escape; this breed has spread all over Latin America,killing hundreds of people and thousands of livestock. (100 Mexicans have been killed by the bees in the last decade). The bees have spread as far North as Las Vegas, and will go further North with Global

Warming.

--Two world-pandemics (influenza and diptheria)  followed WWI, from the world mixing of populations that happened during the war. (Since then, we've had a huge improvement in anti-biotics; but now microbes are getting drug-resistant.

Such `world pandemics' could happen again.)

--Antarctic penguins are dieing from a runaway chicken virus.

--A microscopic `cell from hell' (pfiesteria piscicida) has exploded recently in numbers in U.S. coastal waters (newly enriched with sewage, animal waste (one area drained has 600 million chickens)  and fertilizers), killing one billion fish. "Human interventions are creating whole new ecosystems." The pfiesteria cell also harms humans. "I don't think it's been proved yet,"said a chicken producer."They're pointing fingers our way, but it's probably a combination of things." Maryland has closed 3 tributaries of Chesapeake Bay because of the problem. 14 million fish died in North Carolina in '95; Virginia fish in '97 had lesion rates of 75%.

 A tropical seaweed (taxifolia) great for decorating aquaria escaped in Monaco and is now infesting the Mediterranean (some say it mutated under the UV light in aquaria). In 1989, there was only a tiny patch in the Mediterranean. I went from 1 square yard to 2.5 acres in 5 years. The French government was alerted, but dithered until it was too late for easy management.

 

  Child-sex tourists (foreigners who go where poor children are available for sexual abuse) have increased markedly, as tourism gets cheaper: in Cambodia,Vietnam,Thailand, Phillipines, Sri Lanka. The abusers now don't just come from Europe and America, but also now from parts of Asia where people have recently got rich.

 

    AUTO POLLUTION: There is now hope that hybrid car engines, using hydrogen as fuel, can drastically reduce the pollution-per-mile.  But we can expect staggering increases around the world in millions of miles driven, so this advantage will be more than negated  Besides that, vehicle tire-treads wear out fast; tons of  particles of latex/rubber go into the air. Many people are allergic to latex. This problem has not been seriously studied yet. (One estimate is that these particles make up only 1% of polluting particles in our air.)But it will get worse even with  vehicles with new clean-running engines.

                              TECHNOLOGY, WAR AND TERRORISM:

--One pound of Semtex can blow a hole in a plane. Terrorists can manufacture such explosives without needing expensive equipment. We spend billions on `star-wars' dreams (for blocking incoming missiles) even though our present enemies are more likely to smuggle in explosives (even n-bombs, shortly!). We could buy equipment to `sniff out' semtex in airports for $2 billion (less than the cost of one Stealth bomber)--but so far we haven't done so; (other countries have). And even if we do, the day will come when terrorists will shoot down airliners with ground-to-air missiles, from small boats off-shore.

--Cheap, effective land-mines are a great technical triumph. 5 to 10 million land-mines are produced each year, worldwide. 26,000 people a year are killed or maimed by land-mines, even between wars. There are 110 million land-mines in place, worldwide; removal would cost $33 billion. (Mines made since 1970 are often more humane; each is designed to deactivate after a few days.) / U.S. generals say they'll need 9 years to revise their system so they won't need land-mines 'to minimize risk to U.S. soldiers.' But army archives show that 64,000 U.S. soldiers have been injured by U.S. land-mines! In Vietnam, 90% of the mines & booby-traps used against U.S. troops were either American-made or remanufactured by the Viet Cong from captured U.S. mines. In the Korean war, more U.S. soldiers were injured by our  land-mines than by enemy mines. The U.S. introduced land-mines into the Korean and Vietnam wars, then lost control of the weapon.

--Biological weapons are `the poor nation's nukes', especially effective in harming a civilian population far from the user. A program for developing biological weapons is easily concealed.(In 1999, Saddam Hussein's regime still had the basic equipment available for waging germ warfare.)

--A terrorist of average intelligence woud need only 2 weeks to learn to make an inexpensive biological which could wipe out a city. "Amateurs could do this," said K. Alibek, former deputy chief at a leading Soviet bio-war lab, and now chief scientist at a U.S. company researching 'biowar defense'. Anyone with access to the internet could learn to make these weapons and find the ingredients.The U.S., he said, has no real defense; our techniques are 25 years out-of-date.

[Of course his new company wants big government grants for such research.]

 

--The U.S. pays millions to Russia to keep its nuclear scientists employed so they won't sell their services to rogue states and groups, but not enough on 10,000 Russian specialists in chemical and bio-war.

 

--India and Pakistan just tested nuclear weapons. If religious nationalists in these countries launch a war of nuclear mass destruction, does anyone doubt that they will also use biological warfare? (In Aug. 2000, U.S. intelligence services saw a real threat of n-war breaking out over Kashmere.)

--The Japanese terrorist-group which released poison gas in the Tokyo subway,

it turns out now, also made serious (though unsuccessful) attempts to spread noxious germs and toxins all throughout Tokyo, including U.S. bases there. We must face the fact that , in this case,  some people mad enough to want to wipe out all humanity were  wealthy enough and almost technically sophisticated enough to control mass-destruction weapons.

  Mr. Bill Patrick, an expert on offensive and defensive bio-warfare says it takes only 18 months to develop a new bio-weapon, but 10 years or more to develop a vaccine against each new germ-weapon.(NYT 3Nov98)

--The Pipe-bombs used so effectively by Algerian terrorists in French subways are examples of cleverly simple technology.

--In 'Operation Ranch-Hand', American planes sprayed 'agent-orange' defoliant over 3.6 million acres of Vietnam; their slogan was "Only you can prevent a forest!" Later, there were reports that many American military personnel had been permanently harmed by contact with the defoliant. The Air Force did a $200 million study: one report was withheld for years (showing high rates of birth defects and infant deaths among children of Vietnam veterans); the other was altered to eliminate a table showing that 'Ranch-Hand' veterans were 'less well' than other veterans, by a ratio of 5 to 1. Ranch Hand veterans had twice as many cancers. The colonel in charge of the study changed a sentence saying that the findings were 'of concern' to say they were 'reassuring'; now he says the changes in the report were 'minor'.[San Diego Union-Tribune, Oct.98]  Few Americans care much about the biological damage to Vietnamese civilians still continuing from this campaign.

  We are now supposed to trust the reports of our military that the alleged illnesses of our Gulf-War veterans are coincidental.

  One charming aspect of U.S. civilians is their naive belief that  the professional warriors they count on to ravage foreigners  will be scrupulously careful about the welfare of Americans. One recalls the medieval Catholic general who gave orders to burn a town dominated by heretics. "But sire," he was told, "there are many Catholics living there also!"/ "Burn them all," replied the brisk general; "On the other side, the Lord will recognize His own!"

NUCLEAR WEAPONS:

--The National Acadamy of Sciences said,in August 2000, that 100 U.S. nuclear- weapon-making sites could never be cleaned up;  unacceptable risks, projected for tens or hundreds of thousands of years,  would remain for the foreseeable future. ' Already some contaminants have leaked out of the sites; and there is no reason to think our government can guard these sites into the future (who thinks that ordinary humans two centuries from now will see as urgent the further safeguarding of ancient nuclear sites?) It's now planned that Rocky Flats, near Denver, will serve as a wild-life refuge. Will we have glowing deer?

--Workers at a federal uranium-processing plant in southern Ohio routinely inhaled uranium dust, arsenic and other poisons for decades.[Energy Dept./May 2000.'

 At every stage of the nuclear escalation: (A-bombs, H-bombs, submarine missiles, 'mirv' missiles) the U.S. led in the technical innovation, and the Soviet Union followed pretty speedily--so any gain in our safety from each innovation was immediately dissipated.

 Documents about the 1950 Cuba-missile-crisis have now been declassified. It turns out that President Kennedy stood against practically all his advisors in refusing to bomb Cuba--a bombing which could well have triggered  Armageddon.

--It's now admitted that there were two urgent `false-alarm situations' during the Cold War when our leaders were notified that the Soviet had launched a missile-armada at us, seemingly warranting an American counter-strike. On one occasion, one minute before the President was called, it was discovered that someone had mistakenly fed military exercise tapes into our computers.) And the Russians had a similar `false-alarm' as recently as 1995.

--Countering objections to our proposed 'missile-defense' shield, Washington said the Russians wouldn't be threatened by this, because they would launch their missiles on the first warning. [It's agreed that the Russian 'early-warning' system is getting more and more defective.] An MIT scientist said that U.S., in exchange for an unworkable antimissile dream, was willing to pay an absurd price: the continued threat of Russian unauthorized, accidental, and erroneous launces.[NYT 1 May 2000].

  Even if we succeed in avoiding nuclear  war, it will always be true that technology put us into a situation where we were really risking the destruction of--almost--the whole human race.

--People think the N-bomb crisis is over: but 8000 Russian missiles remain n-armed and available to fire at U.S.--no longer targeted at us but instantly retargetable--while 8000 [some say 6000] U.S. n-armed missiles remain. (The U.S. has offered to cut its arsenal to 3500, but Russia's parliament has not agreed to such cuts.) Our National Academy of Sciences says all we need are 350 warheads as deterrent.

  Fans of n-war capability often say that  the matching arsenals of the Soviets and Americans prevented any recurrence of conventional world war between the Great Powers for the whole 2d half of the 20^th century.   But that would be like preventing the flu  by measures that increase the probability of cancer and TB.

If people got through that increased risk safely, that would not change the fact of that risk of real disaster, nor would it make such measures count as rational.

  Above all, we should not expect military officers  to be especially careful about disposing of nuclear waste. A Russian naval officer is being prosecuted for treason in October 1998 because he 'blew the whistle',describing how radioactive containers at a Russian nuclear submarine base in the Arctic were simply dumped in a field, while liquid waste was stored in leaky underground containers.[from THE GUARDIAN]

    55,000 fuel assemblies of defunct Russian submarines are awaiting disposal on the Kola peninsula. One train moves 600 of these  assemblies 2000 miles to a reprocessing plant; and 100 other decommissioned submarines float nearby (with, presumably 60,000 more assemblies) ; Russia can't even afford now

to offload their assemblies. Disposing of this stuff will take 20 to 30 years.

--Robt. Alvarez, (Senate Aide overlooking Energy Dept, then Dept. policy advisor '93 to '99) deplores Dept's 'inept and arrogant management culture.' For instance, at Oak Ridge,Tenn.there is enough highly enriched uranium for 9450 Hiroshima bombs; some sits in old wooden buildings vulnerable to fire./At Pantex Plant in Amarillo,TX, 'a time bomb', workers have used wrong procedures to disassemble bombs, and officials have bent rules and censored safety reports.

A senior safety official in Dept. says 'There have been a flock of near-misses."

Altogether, U.S. produced 70,000 nuclear arms over the years.

[BULL.OF ATOMIC SCIENTISTS/ May/June/'00]

                                      NUCLEAR POWER:

--Some researchers say that cancer rates increased within a ten-mile range after the Three-Mile-Island accident; other researchers say there is not enough evidence of this.

--Up to 80 people living near Oak Ridge nuclear lab in Tennessee probably got cancer from iodine releases up to 1960. There is no estimate of how many foetuses got poisoned and brain-damaged from the tons of mercury dumped into a local creek.

 

--Cases of Cancer and radiation-linked Downs Syndrome are still on the rise in Moldova (near Chernobyl). Traces of radiation were found in wild boars in France 11 years after the Chernobyl accident. Pregnant women in Greece, exposed to Chernobyl radiation, produced children twice as likely as normal to have leukemia. (Witty N-power fans are no longer heard to say that "more people have died in Ted Kennedy's car than from n-power.")

--English n-plants have come near to disastrous accidents, which have often been covered up by the plant operators. Some radiation leakages from a Japanese plant also triggered coverups. (Plant workers didn't activate the sprinkling system right away after a fire; they didn't notify local fire departments right away. Some maintenance workers were off playing golf.)

--Less than 1% of 1500 tons of plutonium and highly enriched uranium in Russia and neighboring countries is properly protected from terrorists and rogue nations. Each year 15 tons of plutonium and 45 tons of uranium are released from military control and turned over to insecure civilian authorities in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakstan.

--Decades ago, the U.S. gave a nuclear reactor to the Belgian Congo; then there was the independent Congo, then Zaire, now again the Congo. There sits an unused reactor, with vital parts missing,with no budget for maintenance, but still operable WITH THE FUEL RODS STILL THERE,protected only by a padlock.

--The Japanese scandal of neglect in 1999: Japanese experts decided that a nuclear accident at Tokaimura was impossible, so the plant had no emergency plan. The workers, who were not well-trained,  used containers that increased the chance of a nuclear reaction. [Japan is a sophisticated 1st-world country. What can we expect of n-power plants in more primitive societies?]

 

--Nuclear power is an apt example of human shortsightedness. A new study claims what common-sense has always known: that n-power is prohibitively expensive, compared to alternative energy-sources, WHEN you factor in the huge investments in building 'safe' n-plants  and the staggering costs of decommissioning each radioactive plant 'safely' (estimated at $300 million for one obsolete plant).

This analysis ignores the unmeasurable costs of storing radioactive wastes safely over the centuries. Yet nuclear power still accounts for 20% of U.S. electricity, and plays an even heavier role in Japan, Britain, France, etc.

 

--N-power also illustrates a general point about technical prudence: when a device requires for minimal safety  a level of watchfulness in maintenance  which is higher than can be expected from ordinary humans, that point alone should forbid the development and use of such a device.

                                                          POLLUTION:

Wits sometimes say that cities a century ago were MORE polluted than now, because of horse-manure in the streets,etc. But the Census Bureau says that our air

is now 10 times more polluted than in 1900.

 

--BIOSCIENCE says that 40% of the world's deaths are from pollution! (Oct 98)

--Autos are a  top source of air pollution; the new U.S. fad for Sports Utility Vehicles and light trucks (mainly for hauling family and groceries ) has greatly increased auto-pollution. A mysterious recent increase in athsma among children has baffled researchers. U.S. athsma cases have doubled in two decades, affecting 5% of the population, usually between age 5 and 14. Such a great,sudden change

'must be from environmental changes'.

--In Metro Denver, children near busy streets have 6 times as many cancers as those in quiet neighborhoods.[co-authors Robt. Pearson & Howard Wachtel.]

--Atrazine, the most-used pesticide in America, is banned in many other countries. It's a possible human carnicogen. It shows up in supermarket corn, beef and milk. It's one of the leading contaminants of drinking water. Farmers using atrazine have much a higher chance of cancer.  The federal government does not screen chemicals for safety before going on the market.The manufacturer of Atrazine has spent $25 million battling EPA over the product. (Toxic Deception)

--from TOXICOLOGY AND INDUSTRIAL HEALTH (2000): A common mix of insecticides, herbicides and fertilizer alters the thyroid hormones of young mice, makes their behaviour more aggressive, and suppresses their immune system. /Two groups of comparable Indian children in Mexico were compared: one group exposed to pesticides and one not. The exposed children were inferior in motor skills, memory, and stamina, more aggressive, less sociable and creative in play./ In rural Minnesota, children conceived during the spring growing season had more birth-defects./ "I'm kind of dubious that low-level exposure to chemicals are raising all kinds of havoc with endocrine system, said a spokesman for  pesticide manufacturers."The human system has so many protective systems, and our bodies are bombarded with all kinds of things." Still, he said, the industry is highly concerned about these findings.

--Chemicals were found in 400 pregnant NY women; among the babies born from them, high rates of allergies and respiratory problems. 80% rise in athsma death-rates between 1980 & 1993. [Columbia Center for Children's Environmental Health/2000.]

--At least 10% of pollution on U.S. West Coast is from East Asia!

--At least one chemical spill each hour is reported; many others are not reported.

--Fat women get more breast cancer because their breast-fat stores more chemicals.

--Endocrine-mimicking chemicals are causing deformities in U.S. fish; the worry is that these may account also for decreased human sperm and increased cancer of prostate and testicles./ A study in the journal of Natl. Inst. of Health said definitively that American sperm have dropped 1.5% per year since the 30s; European sperm dropped at twice that rate./On the other hand, one U.S. study showed that the sperm-count of 1400 Los Angeles men was identical to sperm-count measured back in 1950's. [?]

--Three out of four bodies of water studied contain toxic sediment, increasing risks of cancer and birth-defects. Some places are so polluted they are devoid of marine life.

--Dioxin is one of the most toxic chemicals known. For the first time, the EPA

wants to require manufacturers to reveal how much dioxin they release into the air.In one area near Tokyo, the infant death-rate is 50% higher downwind from an incinerator.  Japanese air has about 3 times as much dioxin as in U.S. or Europe. The dioxin finds its way into fish, which Japanese love./ Babies who feed on breast milk with more dioxin have less of certain hormones important for learning. The technology exists to clean up incinerator smoke, but this takes time and money.

 A '99 study showed that boys who lived in high-ozone areas and spent a lot of time outside had lower lung capacity; the effect was even worse on girls.

 An 7000-square-mile area of the Gulf Of Mexico is a 'dead-zone' for each summer because of fertilizer-runoff (1 million tons annually) from the Mississippi River.

This 'dead zone' has doubled in size since 1992.

  Americans use over 1 billion poinds of pesticides each year; it costs almost

$2 billion each year to clean up the ground-water. About half of this pesticide use

is unnecessary (e.g., killing uncosmetic weeds or preventing unsightly bites on fruit and vegetables)./Pesticides tested on young mice altered their thyroid hormones, made them more aggressive, suppressed their immune system.

In Mexico, a study compared children in an area using pesticides heavily with a comparable area not using pesticides. The 'pesticide' children had more trouble drawing stick figures, catching a ball, dropping  raisins into a bottle; they had poorer memory, were more prone to physical aggression, were less sociable and creative in playing. Pesticide was found in the breast milk of the 'pesticide-area' mothers.

--Autism is a terrible curse on children. The number of children reported to the government with autism has risen from 15 million in '92 to 42 million in '97.

In California, the cases nearly tripled in the last decade. Possible causes are vaccinations, pollutants, pesticides.

--Reported cases of athsma rose in U.S. rose 75% from 1980 to 1994. Among children up to age 4, the increase was 160%. Athsma death-rates in Colorado have doubled between 1975 & '95. In one Denver hospital, athsma admissions doubled between 1994 and 1999, and the increase continues.  Colorado doesn't have dust-mites or molds (common culprits elsewhere.) (Smoking among parents hasn't increased that dramatically.)

 

 

CAN WE COUNT ON GOVERNMENT REGULATION  TO PREVENT POLLUTION?

--It's very clear now that death-rates are higher in areas whose air is highly polluted by particles; also, deaths & hospitalizations from heart and respiratory ills rise regularly on days when particle pollution  rises. 64,000 Americans a year die from particle-pollution. 27 prominent scientists wrote to the President advocating stricter regulation; but other scientists, conceding the broad correlation between this pollution and health problems,  want to wait at least 5 years until we learn more. Some studies have shown that very small particles of soot harm people's health.(They remain in lungs more than larger particles do.) Until now these particles have not been controlled. EPA now proposes to measure and control these emissions. U.S. industry is fighting this proposal vigorously, saying we should wait until we know exactly how these particles harm us. (Cigarette companies used to plead similarly for delay until we knew exactly how smoke harms us.) Surely the burden of proof rests on DEFENDERS of problematic polluters.

--For 10 years, a million diesel trucks have used a clever device to outwit air-pollution controls. As a result, in 1997 alone, the trucks poured over 1 million tons of nitrogen oxide into the air, (besides other pollutants) equivalent to the pollution produced by 65 million passenger cars. In 1998 the government finally made them stop this and made the engine manufacturers pay a huge fine.

(Oct.98,THE WASHINGTON POST)

--Diesel fumes could cause 125,000 cancers; excess sulfur in diesel fuel fouls up pollution-control devices.[State & Territorial Air Pollution Program Administrators, plus Assn. of Local Air Poll. Contr. Officials.] But an oil spokesman said dramatic controls would raise cost of diesel fuel by 20 cents a gallon.

 

 

  Pollutants at 3 stations in Los Angeles were hundreds of times higher than federal standards call for. People who breathed this air for their whole life would have about 426 additional cases of cancer per million.

 

--Children exposed before birth to PCB pollution (their mothers ate polluted fish from Lake Michigan) have trouble reading at age 11, and have lower IQ's.

One-third of sediment and fish tested is contaminated with mercury, PCB's,etc.

--The Energy Department has cleaned up 700 polluted sites in 4 years; (only 80 sites were cleaned up in the previous 4 years); between 5000 and 10000 sites remain.

LEAD POISONING: An Australian study showed that infants exposed to lead did not recover their intellects even when the exposure ended at two years old. Dr.C.Williams of London University says that one in ten British children have enough lead-poisoning to cut their IQ's.  90% of the children in some African countries are thus affected, as well as 17% of U.S. children. (Another study says 5% of U.S. children have been exposed to toxic PCB's which also harms mental development.)

[Earlier data):Nearly one million U.S. children still have dangerous blood levels of lead, mainly from old paint (some ingenious chemists had discovered how to improve paint marginally by adding lead.)

In Colorado, 3.2% of children tested were at risk. In older Denver neighborhoods, 16% of preschoolers were at risk. Opposition to a clean-up bill comes from those fearing it woud be costly for homeowners and landlords.

   TECHNOLOGY TODAY said that at the present rate of cleanup, the dangerous lead would not be completely removed for 400 years.

--CAR magazine carried out a 2-year investigation of the history of adding lead to gasolene.  It found that 75 years ago the danger of lead poisoning was known to scientists, and well known to OCTEL, the maker of 90% of the lead-additive, as well as to the oil-companies. Also known was the fact that ethanol would counter 'motor-knocking' as well as the lead; but the lead could be patented and monopolized. The guilty companies controlled research and slanted it to conceal the evils of lead-additive. Documentation showed that General Motors, duPont, and Standard Oil colluded with U.S. surgeon-general to conceal damages from lead. But in 1965, a scientist proved that lead in human bodies had doubled since the introduction of lead in gas.  Since 1976, when lead was banned in U.S., our blood-level of lead has dropped 80%.

   However lead is still added in other countries; in Mexico, 32 tons of lead is pumped into the atmosphere each day. 2 million city-dwellers are still in danger of lead poisoning. 93% of all gas sold in Africa has lead, as does 30% of the gas in Asia. This illustrates what happens when dramatic technical advances are controlled, as they will be in the foreseeable future, by ruthless corporate leaders and compliant government officials. [from GUARDIAN, 20 July 2000]

[On the other hand, one could say that we have undergone a drastic experiment in which American blood-levels went up 100%, after 1920, then down 80% after 1975(?)  Is there any clear evidence that American children got dumber after 1920--or smarter after 1975?]

--An article in NEW SCIENTIST (and a book ENVRONMENTAL TOXICOLOGY) claims that U.S.counties with toxic metals heavily polluting their drinking water  have three times as many  murders, assaults and robberies as do average counties. (The researcher `factored out' poverty as a separate generator of crime.) Lead and manganese affect the `inhibition' agents and interfere with `mood messengers' in the human brain.

CAN WE COUNT ON GOVERNMENT REGULATION TO CONTROL POLLUTION?

It turns out that if companies simply put their hazardous wastes (including lead, cadmium, and arsenic) into agricultural fertilizer, it

then escapes any government regulation!  "When it goes into our silo, it's hazardous waste.When it comes out, it's no longer regulated." And mountains of these toxic fertilizers are actually dumped on cropland in various parts of the country, where they could easily show up in food.     Monsanto Corp.used to sell its cadmium-waste to a fertilizer company, but has stopped this because it fears lawfuits.(From the Seattle Times)

   Farmers have used 'b.t' pesticide for 30 years (containing a microbe that kills insects). Now scientists have figured out how to tinker with crop-genes so the crop-plants will produce this microbe themselves.(Critics worry realistically that this insect-resistance might spread to weeds.) The EPA wants to regulate this new genetic material, but scientists say they can't, since they never regulated the 'b.t.' that was inserted artificially into the soil.

'PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVES';TECHNICAL RADICALS, SOCIAL CONSERVATIVES:

 One real worry is that runaway technical change will exhaust the human tolerance for change, so ordinary people will turn into social reactionaries. That way lies disaster, with drastic technical changes modifying our social environment blindly, and social values frozen to prevent adaptation to the changes in situation.

 

 

               GENERAL DEFENCES OF TECHNOLOGY:

--Some defences of technology are just silly: for instance, ascribing all kinds of benefits to technology, but then refusing to `blame' technology for the harms it 'does' (i.e., for the harms it facilitates).

(This consideration also answers this objection: "Most people think technical progress does more good than harm; their opinions must be largely correct." If it turns out that most people ascribe the 'benefits' of technology to technology, but ascribe its bad effects to 'human misuse', that shows they've never made a serious attempt to balance its good and bad affects.)

 

--TECHNOLOGY AS TEMPTATION:Technophiles say it's generally good to have all these magic new powers available; people can always refuse to use them, where they prove harmful. These thinkers just ignore the inability of most humans to resist strong temptations..Jesus was pretty shrewd when he adjured his followers to pray daily for protection from temptation.

  The automobile, for instance, is so glamorous that once it's anywhere near available, the highway culture takes over. (In Taipei and many other cities, newly rich people sit patiently in their cars in incurable traffic-jams, when they could walk to their destination more speedily; Sao Paulo,Brazil sees 1000 extra cars each day.) 3.4 million Americans were  injured in 1998 by vehicles(Natl. Safety Council); cars carry 3 times the risk of guns; 100,000 pedestrians are injured by vehicles. 1 million brain injuries per year (a fate often worse than death) are caused by vehicle accidents.

  In August 2000 the extra chances of SUV turnover were increased by the chance that the tread on Ford tires often just come off. Also, gasolene prices went way up. Nevertheless, people contined to buy Ford SUVs and to pay the extra fuel price for customary travels. (Americans drive twice as many miles per year now as in 1970.) Such small obstacles don't deter addicts.

 

 

--Cheap guns--and cheap, violent entertainment--tempt people to settle quarrels with lethal violence, or to act on temporary suicidal impulses.

Cheap, easily made explosives and nerve-gas tempt terrorists to destructive feats they never dreamed of before. Cheap beef tempts people to shorten their lives by overeating..and so on.

--Adventurous criminals (willing to test new advances recklessly on innocent by-standers), and suicidally fanatic terrorists will tend to develop and use new technical innovations faster than sluggish governments will develop counters.

NOT-SO-PUNY MAN:

   The upper atmosphere shrank by 8 kilometers in the last 35 years,

a (harmless) result predictable from the 'Man-Caused Global Warming' hypothesis.

--The Great Plains has lost 75% of its wetlands. Just 6% of these might have

sopped up enough spring rain-water to prevent the 1997 floods near Grand Forks.

--Jet contrails actually affect the amount of cloud-cover in the U.S.

--The supersonic Concorde actually affects the ozone layer.

--Humans have doubled the amount of nitrogen that is `fixed' (e.g, usable by humans).Humans have affected the nitrogen cycle as much as Nature has. Nitrous oxide is both a greenhouse gas (implicated in global warming) and a threat to stratospheric ozone; it weakens the ability of plant communities to `sop up' carbon; it contributes to smog and acid rain.

--And of course all this fixed-nitrogen provides material for terrorists' explosives.

TECHNOLOGY AND POLLUTION: Technophiles point out that technology can be used to clean up and prevent pollution; nevertheless, the overall facts are clear: as `low-tech' societies `go hi-tech', pollution of air and water tends to increase dramatically. (In later stages of development, newly prosperous and better-educated populations may insist on `clean-up'.)

 

--Technology's most  sensible general defender is Samuel Florman, who has written several books on this topic (e.g. BLAMING TECHNOLOGY) and dozens of articles for the prestigious MIT journal TECHNOLOGY REVIEW.  Florman admits that technology, all along, has caused many problems; but he says these can be solved only by applying more technology. (Later we'll deal with an analogous empty slogan: "All the problems of democracy must be cured by applying MORE democracy!")

   What's fascinating is that Florman nowhere adverts to the near-certainty that

the technical fixes of technical damage--that these new technical fixes will themselves cause much damage..so there is no certainty at all that they will count as overall beneficial. (Drastic remedies are not made less dangerous just by being necessary.)

--Florman compares technical innovators with Sisyphus, who pluckily keeps pushing that rock up even though it keeps falling back down. But suppose Sisyphus discovered that his efforts resulted in the rock ending up further down than ever after each push; his pluck would then look like madness.

It's possible that this is what will happen with new technical innovations.

  Brian Friel's play MOLLY SWEENEY describes a blind woman who is strong, happy, self-confident until her hyper-activist husband recruits an 'achievement-obsessed' eye-doctor to intervene to restore her sight partially. This disrupts her psyche completely; she ends up half-crazy, immobilized in a mental hospital.

This play might be considered a parable  warning against technical meddling: If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

--Also, taxpayers are asked to advance billions of dollars to finance the technical Sisyphus' quixotic enterprise, when they might not share his enthusiasm for

the enterprise itself, independent of likely benefits.

--Florman says that if we hamper technical progress, we'll be cheating all the poor people whom progress could have helped. But if progress were hampered, the poor might be saved also from its destructive side-effects.(One presumes that pollution-damage falls with extra weight upon the poor.)

               DISENCHANTMENT WITH TECHNOLOGY:

--Florman laments that talented young Americans are lately no longer throwing themselves enthusiastically into exacting careers of technical innovation; (indeed, most of our technical graduate programs would have to close  if we relied just on American recruits!) In spite of the legendary salaries of 'computer-nerds', in spite of a shortage of technicians so severe that Congress is giving emergency consideration in 1998 to laws  doubling the number of foreign technicians immigrating here, only 5% of our own high-school seniors plan to major in computer-science in college! And as noted before, our engineering schools are graduating 15% fewer engineers now than 10 years ago--and many of these are foreigners!)

   Perhaps our talented young people are half-aware of the awful uses that technical innovations are often put to; and they may be disenchanted about  the benevolent wisdom in typical decision-makers. Would you really want your very talented child to devote her  life, with quasi-monastic dedication, to enabling typically heedless humans   to exercise incredible new powers   in initiating dangerous semi-random changes in our world?

  You wouldn't want your child to be agonizing over possible misuses of his new discoveries.    Even less would you desire that your young scientific innovator should shrug off such possible misuses cavalierly. He'd then be like Hitler's rocket scientist (as lampooned in a Tom Lehrer song):

       "I send them up; who cares where they come down?

 

THE NEED FOR TECHNOLOGISTS IN MONITORING ENVIRONMENT:

  It is true, though, that we sorely need competent technical experts to monitor and adjust for inevitable changes in our world today. However, technical experts need expensive equipment to do their work; they must restrict themselves largely  to projects that are heavily funded; and the lay potentates--bureaucrats (in corporations and governments), politicians, and generals--who decide  which projects to fund--[RESCUING PROMETHEUS (by T. Hughes) describes how managers have coordinated and controlled scientists since WWII]--are far more likely to back  glamorous innovations which seem profitable   than to fund cautious monitoring and damage-adjustment programs which don't specially benefit any powerful agents. So the talented fledgling applied scientist  should know that he'll likely end up innovating, not adjusting or monitoring or repairing. (A biological scientist told me that he once proposed a study of agricultural pollution to various agricultural researchers--funded usually by agribusiness firms. Their silent  response was illuminating.)

--Kenneth Boulding, the distinguished economist/poet, was an ardent technophile, invited for years by Technology Review to write a general column on the general evaluation of technology. Boulding divided people into praiseworthy `doers' and deplorable `stoppers'.

  He used to make this point: when you prevent a technical advance, you can never know how much good it might have done. (However, you don't know either how much harm it would do.)

The suggestion in these pages is that, in our `downhill' world, we should presume that drastic actions facilitated by dramatic technical innovations, might well do more harm than good.)

 

TECHNOLOGY HAS REMOVED HUMANITY'S MAIN VIRTUE: ITS WEAKNESS.

"[..vs. a common view that all environmental problems stem from man's recent and hubristic attempt to establish dominion over nature..]:..archaeologists..and anthropologists [say now] that pre-industrial people were just as often capable of  environmental mismanagement..(e.g.): the giant birds of Madagascar and New Zealand were..wiped out by man. In 2000 years the Polynesians converted Easter Island, in the Eastern Pacific, from a lush forest..into a treeless, infertile grassland...the Mayan Empire reduced the Yucatan peninsula to meager scrub..the Anasazi Indians..deforested a vast area.

 

TECHNOLOGICAL OPTIMISM JUSTIFIED? Suppose optimists like Julian Simon are correct: suppose it can be shown that well-being for 'median' humans has improved  in a direct correlation with increases in the free use of  technological powers;  then it would be challenging to explain what beneficent forces have countervailed the dangerous and harmful tendencies noted here from the free use of constant improvements in technology. What are the weak spots  in my general argument about the dangers from broad freedoms and dramatic powers  in a Downhill world? Is there perhaps a general benevolent good-sense prevalent among human decision-makers  strong enough to outweigh  our destructive tempations to heedlessness, contrary to the worries sketched in chapter One?

   Simon thinks that, just by surviving, human groups show they have evolved beneficial customs  guaranteeing that group actions would be in the main beneficial. (He implicitly admits that some such positive beneficial tendencies must be posited  to explain  the tendency toward improvement; he would perhaps    agree with me that unplanned improvements don't just happen.)  Could it be that each emergency triggers innovative countering strategies which not only obviate that emergency, but leave mankind better off than before?   This is possible, but is there real evidence that this tendency is universal? In order to settle whether we're 'better off now',  we need trained historians, not just economist-amateurs like Simon,  to tell us how badly off 'we' were at the start of the technological revolution.

  Suppose a village produces 3 children, with one grossly deformed and handicapped. Then the  doctors predict that if they go ahead with having the 20 they want, they will end up with 5 deformed children and 15 normal ones.

That is, they will end up with 2 more deformed children, but with a lower percentage of deformed children than they have now. I submit they should not go ahead with this project. Analogously, everyone admits that there are more poverty-stricken, diseased, hungry humans on earth now than there were in 1600. True, the proportion of such wretches might be lower today; but the actual number is far higher. If this is the situation, it is not at all obvious that a rational, far-seeing, all-powerful person would have 'chosen' to institute/allow the technological revolution to take place.

   One new problem with the heroic powers available today is that one group can thoughtlessly or maliciously harm another group so easily; the Ukranian generation of electric power, after the Chernobyl disaster, left Scots sheep radioactive for years. American planes  left 30 million bomb-craters in Vietnam. Semi-intuitive customs preventing great harms within a group today might not prevent great harms to outside groups.

   Another new  problem is that cultural changes in the past century have been so widespread and dramatic (and often seemingly anomic) that past happy experience does not demonstrate strongly that our present social groups will survive.

  Also, previous human powers have been modest enough so we could try them out in small regions and modify any harmful uses. For the first time we are experimenting with dramatic modifications of the biosphere as a whole; and there is no guarantee that we will get such timely and clear warnings of impending disaster  as to persuade actual decision-makers    to swerve and adjust in time.

   My distinction from other critics of technology:

1) I don't think technology is necessarily an alien non-human force oppressing us from outside. I think technology is from a 'natural' impulse in humans, the impulse to 'do things well', to succeed at whatever projects we happen to have. My worry is that this part of our human nature has developed 'out of synch' with the rest of our nature: that the selection of projects, the uses of technology, are often determined by our primitive, childish drives, not by our goal-selecting reason.

 

(This was also Plato's worry, in GORGIAS.)

 

2) Are we Part of Nature, or Standing Outside of Nature? We are obviously UNIQUE parts of Nature; so  you can say we are parts of Nature, broadly, or you can say we stand OUTSIDE typical (non-human) Nature. Neither way of speaking affects my concern, which is the heedless way new technical innovations are likely to be used.

--------------------------

Years ago, a serious science-fiction movie was made about a nuclear crisis in which decent, sensible rulers faced an accidental launch of a U.S. nuclear missile at Moscow.  To prove to the Soviets that this was an accident, not the start of a nuclear assault on Russia, the U.S. President must allow the Soviets to destroy New York with immunity, even though his wife is there.     Terry Southern then made a parody of this movie, in which the abstract accident is replaced by a deliberate missile-launch by a loony U.S. general, in a situation where the Soviets had developed a 'doomsday' deterrent response that would wipe out all mankind (neglecting, though, to inform the world in time of this move!). The spirit of chapter two here  is in line with the perspective  of  "Dr. Strangelove': staggering, dangerous  hi-tech powers are in the custody of human decision-makers (including voters) who are often childish clowns.

**********************************************************

CHANGES, ACTIONS,POWERS AS    RELATIONAL    TERMS:

--Objection: "Lyons says there are no such things as POWER or FREEDOM;

only`able-to-do-X-in-Y-situations', `free-from-X-constraints-to-do-Y-in-Z-situations'. But there are no DOGS either, only spaniel-dogs or collie-dogs. That's true of every generic term, relational or not."

Answer: `Power' and `Freedom' are more like `20%' than like `dog'. Generic terms like `dog' refer to some core-set of stable qualities found in every instance in the genus; so it might make sense to say [most] dogs are good or bad. But it would be foolish to say `90% of X is a lot';there is no stable core-quantity referred to

by `90%', until you supply the  X . Similarly `doing' or `able to do' or `free to do' have no core-quality in themselves that could be approved of or disliked. For ANY  value/disvalue to accrue, the evaluator must know WHAT was done, HOW things were changed, what the agent was able/free to do.

--Objection:"At first, Lyons says we can't approve/disapprove generally of changes; but then he presumes that blind,drastic changes are generally harmful!" Answer: That's the (sad) power of the Aristotelian principle; that's why Lyons says we face a `Downhill' world. The situations we value generally involve organization, which is in itself unlikely. [We value order usually, not always: in a can of paint, we want the globules `disorganized'; so we subject the can to vigourous shaking, as random as the machine will allow.But this situation is an `exception that proves the rule'.] And high levels of organization are intrinsically less likely than simpler levels. With highly organized systems (e.g., organisms, polities, ecosystems), there is `little room for improvement' but much room for deprovement.

  So any given random change--or the unplanned side-effects of any planned change--are likely to be for the worse. (China imposed a drastic `one-child' policy, on families strongly preferring male children; a couple of decades later, there are 40 million fewer Chinese women than one would expect--which means that 40 million men perhaps can't find wives. Families have aborted female foetuses, or murdered infant girls--now couples in these villages may have trouble getting grandchildren.)

--Animal and human societies are fragile systems, susceptible to disruption from drastic, heedless changes. Even controlled logging of the tropical forests (only 10% of any given tract are cleared) has terrified troops of monkeys and apes into the territories of other packs, triggering brutal wars.In Gabon, the number of chimps has dropped from 50,000 to 30,000.

--The Aristotelian principle ['side-effects of dramatic actions are usually in the net harmful'], plus the worry that human actions are often rather heedless, producing dramatic unplanned side-effects, explains why our quasi-instinctual admiration for just any CHANGE, ACTION, POWER, FREEDOM is so ill-advised. These `instincts' lead us to admire many harmful things.

 

CATEGORICAL GOODS (GOOD IN EVERY CONTEXT) VS. HYPOTHETICAL GOODS  (GOOD ONLY IN CERTAIN CONTEXTS):

To say that actions are good only when they produce good results is NOT to say that their only value is in these good results, that actions have no intrinsic value.  Whenever an action has good consequences, then it is intrinsically good; [i.e., it's better that good consequences should come about by human agency, expressing human excellence, than, say, by chance.]      However, that doesn't show that action is good-in-every-situation, nor that disastrous or trivial actions are good!

--Unreflective people can accept the idea that some contexts can REDUCE

the value of dramatic actions and powers. But they find it harder to believe that glamorous powers can actually be harmful.

ACTIONS WITH IMMEDIATE/REMOTE BAD CONSEQUENCES:

-- Adam Smith notes that we admire palaces, which are usually wasteful and harmful socially, while we shudder at useful prisons..because the bad effects of palaces and the good effects of prisons are too remote in time to engage the imagination, which readily grasps the immediate pleasantness of palatial life and the immediate grimness of prison life. [p.35/Theory of Moral Sentiments]That's our problem: bold, harmful actions still keep their glamour if the harms they cause are fairly remote.

LOSING BY WINNING: In GORGIAS, Polus insists that the power to destroy your foes is simply splendid. "Not when this results in harming yourself!", says Socrates.  Years before that dialogue was written, Athenian enemies of Alcibiades had won the legal contest to get him legally condemned in absentia; his reaction was to defect to Sparta, carrying important military secrets with him. The winners of that debate ended up losing heavily, together with all Athenians. Perhaps Plato, at this point of GORGIAS, was rubbing the citizens' noses in this remembered fiasco.

EVALUATING ACTION: HOW LONG A RUN? The choice of an evaluating-horizon can make all the difference in evaluating this-action-in-this-situation.

Let's consider, for example, the famous Bridge Over the River Kwai.

A subordinate of the English colonel building the bridge suggested that it should be painted, to preserve it from jungle rot. Scornfully, the colonel reminded his underling that such paint would also make the bridge more visible to 'enemy bombers'! And the reader then remembers that this mad colonel is building this bridge for his enemies, the Japanese--so he should WANT it destroyed by `enemy' bombers, i.e., by his own side! (Now, just to increase the paradox, imagine instead that a half-demented Japanese  colonel was engrossed in building a perfect bridge for the Allies.)

  We can then imagine 4 points of view, increasing in their scope: (A) just thinking of the danger of jungle rot; (B) remembering also the outweighing issue of vulnerability to bombers; (C) remembering also the issue of helping `The Enemy'; (D) remembering also the issue of Who Should Have Won the War (presumably the allies vs. Japan).

   From level A, painting the bridge seems good; from B it seems bad; from C it seems good; from D it seems bad. From level A, the prudent concern to avoid jungle rot seems sensible; from B it seems foolish. From level C, the prudence of level B looks mad!. From perspective D, the prudence of level C seems short-sighted, parochial, perhaps unethical.

    Evaluating actions can be maddeningly complex! That's why people don't like to think of bold, clever actions as splendid- only-hypothetically: one doesn't feel sure ANY unreflective admiration is justified!And people insist on finding heroes they can admire.

EFFECTS: FORESEEN/UNFORESEEN:

 Many side-effects could be foreseen, by properly attentive agents; but many agents simply don't care enough to inquire about effects on strangers, on the world.

   Another point: we can, strangely, foresee that there will be important unforeseen side-effects..we can infer from past surprises, say, that pumping tons of new chemicals into our air or water will have some surprising effects!

UNPLANNED SIDE-EFFECTS:

 Economists refer to these side-effects as 'externalities' (unplanned effects on 3d parties of voluntary transactions. They generally assume that such externalities are increasing regularly in importance; and they assume that the externalities are usually harmful. Economists recommend that producers of harmful externalities be taxed to pay for their repair; but today producers in one country can produce devastating externalities in another country; no legal procedure exists to manage making such producers pay for the damage they do.

"IF SOCIETY AIN'T BROKE, DON'T FIX IT!"

   Aristotle approved of cities which make it dangerous to introduce new laws.

Since brute habit is one main motivation for law-abidingness in the ordinary person, even fairly useful changes in the law, if frequent, can 'break' that vital habit and increase crime. Once again, dramatic changes in going systems are not to be presumed beneficial. (The drastic, sudden changes mandated  for the Roman Catholic Church by the Second Vatican Council had many unexpected side-effects, most seeming harmful, from the perspective of friends of that church. Indeed, the American Catholic Church is hardly recognizable today as the same institution as it was fifty years ago.)

--Adam Smith sees clearly that a benevolent king might be tempted to improve the running of the national economy by various `master plans'. This ruler, says Smith, should reflect that the Economy is already a lively, autonomous, dynamic system with energetic parts interacting on their own--heedless interventions will very likely do more harm than good.

Whence the wisdom of `Laissez-faire': Leave it alone![Wealth of Nations,IIp.213]

   However, Smith doesn't emphasize enough  the harms done to other aspects of society,from the sudden,dramatic, blind changes triggered by a free-market society. (He does note the undermining of respect for military valor, and the stupefying of factory workers..and says that society must `patch up' these rents in the social fabric. [W of N, I,102/II284-9]But he never shows a general awareness of the secular damages done to the human world by `the most continuously revolutionary force ever unleashed'--as capitalism has been described by both friends and foes.

SIDE-EFFECTS OF SUDDEN, DRASTIC SOCIAL REVOLUTION:

An astonishing drop in life expectancy for Russian men in the last decade, combined with one of the lowest birth-rates on earth, has turned Russia into a demographic freak show. The rate of 15 deaths per 1000 people puts Russia down with Afghanistan and Cambodia. The death-rate among working-class Russians today is higher than a century ago. The death-rate for men went up 77% between 1990 and 1995. The Russian population total fell by half a million in one year, the steepest decline since WWII. 3.5 million Russians under 60 died in 5 years, a figure parallelled only in vast famines or prolonged war. And all this chaos is from a non-violent revolution!

 

--SELF-CONFIDENT,HEEDLESS ACTION:  Not every ignorant person is stupid--not if  he is aware of his ignorance, tries to overcome it, and in the meantime acts cautiously. Stupid people are those who don't think they need extra knowledge for life, who think the things they don't know are automatically unimportant. (Many learned experts are stupid.) These people will never learn more, because they don't even try. About such people it has been said,"The wicked can repent; but stupid is forever."

YOUTHFUL CONTEMPT FOR  WISDOM-NOT-IMPLEMENTED: When grey old philosophers reminded activist students in the 60's that not all change counts as improvement,the students would retort, "Things couldn't be worse than they are now!" The gloomy ancients would remark that these youths had a very poor imagination. And so it turned out.

               ORIGINAL SIN EXPLAINED:

 This Aristotelian insight (that,in going systems, there are always far more ways to go wrong than right) goes far to explain the phenomenon of `original sin'  described in detail in Chapter One.

  We can imagine what a perfect human would be like; we hear about a few close-to-perfect humans; but then we become vividly aware that  practically all the characters we know or hear about (including our own!) are gravely flawed in various ways.

  How could this be? Well, any computer programmer knows that, above a certain level of complexity, it's almost certain that `bugs' will show up--and, indeed, that in correcting some bugs  one is very likely to cause others!  It looks as if evolution has produced some organisms (human beings) which are just  too complex to be produced and to undergo ordinary, inevitable changes  without getting deformed in various ways.

   If one reads a book on embryology, one is astounded to discover the huge number of awful things that can go wrong a) in conceiving a child and (b) during the pregnancy. Monstrous embryos and foetuses abound, in sickening variety--but practically all of them are eliminated by miscarriages, so ordinary people don't know about them.

   The relatively few flawed humans who get born   actually constitute a large number of humans; while the surviving flaws are relatively minor (compared to the monstrosities eliminated before birth) they include some pretty severe flaws! These remaining flaws are often NOT eliminated after birth, especially in a humane society that (unlike ancient Greece and many primitive societies) does not practice eugenic infanticide..and in prosperous societies, where weaker humans do not get eliminated by the competition for food. (Even in these harsh societies, many defects of character will not tend to get eliminated; these subtle defects get more and more dangerous  as society gets more complex, and as technology provides staggering new powers to many human agents.)

  Besides `innate' flaws (caused by bad genetics or by random mishaps before birth), many physical and--more important--psychic flaws   are caused by the partly-random ways children are raised. Most families are `dysfunctional' to some degree, in one line or another. (For instance, our families move on the average once every five years, uprooting the children and interfering with any deep friendships among them.)

   Moreover, if `it takes a village to raise a child', most `villages' are partly dysfunctional. (Our own society has not hesitated to inflict wholesale lead-poisoning on our own children, damaging many brains permanently. And our worship of 'free speech', plus the general inability/unwillingness of our parents to control their children, leaves horrifying violence-pornography available to our children. Also, our misinterpretation of the Second Amendment means that our children have easy access to guns..and so on.)

--( Murphy's Law: `Whatever can go wrong will go wrong.' is just nonsense; if it held true, all systems would have disappeared long ago into chaos. But if`things happen' randomly, it will seem as if Murphy's Law holds, just because so many `bad' (deproving) things are available to happen. It is really quite a profound truth that with careless change, Shit JUST Happens, while Chance Improvements Don't.)

  For a perfect human to show up, thousands of partly-random events would have to all go just right, in a very-unlikely coincidence; unsurprisingly, most humans display important defects  (physical and mental) in one line or another.

  All traditional sages agree on observing the wholesale flawing of human characters: the Bible pictures the Lord seeking on earth just one just man--`..and He found not one, not one'. Aristotle lists the various kinds of people one should fear, ending with this warning: "In general you should fear anyone who could harm you; for most people: if they can, they will."[RHETORIC II, 13825-10]

 

TRUSTING IN `THE HIDDEN HAND' OF THE FREE MARKET

(to guarantee good results from heedless actions): Perhaps the doctrine of the beneficial effects of `The Hidden Hand' is so plausible   precisely because

it is little more than a tautology (an uninteresting statement which is true by definition). Granted the empirical claim that many people in the modern world are strongly influenced by the prospect of getting more money--then, INSOFAR AS Society (using political or informal-indoctrination methods) can block people getting money by any means other than fulfilling the wants of their solvent neighbors in the cheapest and most efficient way..then, TO THAT EXTENT, people will strive mightily to provide  the goods and services their solvent neighbors want, at the lowest cost possible. Of course!

   A Market Society tries hard to discourage alternative ways to get money: discouraging monopolies, cartels, robbery, thievery, fraud. When it succeeds to

a considerable extent, then (unsurprisingly) many active, talented people are recruited to fulfill the aggregate effective demand (demand backed by money)

for goods and services in the cheapest possible way.

   If someone thinks up an easy new way to get money WITHOUT serving the present preferences of solvent `consumers', then either Society will have to block that new way, or the Hidden Hand will be exposed as a mere tautology. There are in principle an indefinitely large number of ways imaginable  to evade the control of the Hidden Hand.

   Even when the Market is in control, there's still a large gap between this  and  any claim that the Hidden Hand efficiently promotes true, long-run human welfare: 1) There is little motivation provided  to satisfy the grave needs of the very poor.  2) The intense, present wants of the solvent people (what the're willing now to pay for) may not correspond well with their true long-run interests. (Society tries to block the fulfillment of some obviously harmful wants..for drugs, for prostitutes, etc. But a large number of harmful (or trivial!) wants are not effectively blocked--e.g., for cigarettes, alcohol, gambling.)

3) Externalities abound: unheeded side-effects on third parties of various 2-party transactions. For instance, you want a car and I want to sell you one..neither of us cares much about the accidents, pollution, and other harms to strangers from a `highway society'.

     In theory, government can tax such transactions  so as to make the two parties pay compensation to the 3d-party losers;(both of these parties presumably benefit from the voluntary trade, at least in terms of satisfying their present preferences). In practice, corrupt governments are not very likely to do this readjustment well--notice the uproar over any suggestion for a tax on the use of polluting carbon--or even a realistic gasoline tax in America! And transactions in one country can easily harm people in another; no mechanism exists in such cases for compensation.

4) It's a truism in economics that `psychic income' substitutes somewhat for money income. Other things being equal, a job that's interesting and prestigious will attract more candidates competing for each post, so each worker in a socially beneficial career tends to get paid less (than a worker in a disgraceful job like whoring or cigarette advertising). One source of job-satisfaction (`psychic income') is the belief that you are helping people in an important way. Such beneficial workers will ipso facto tend to get less money-pay than people despised for trivial or harmful functions (which someone with money wants peformed); and this socially harmful tendency is built right into the market system!

5) Defenders of the Free Market always assume that if resources are distributed optimally to heads-of-households (as it's said they are by the Market), then they're distributed optimally WITHIN each household. But Amartya Sen has pointed out that about 100 million women are 'missing' in 3d-world countries because female infants and children are aborted, murdered, or neglected by their parents (and their fathers dominate the families.)

ACTIVE HUMAN NATURE: There is an ancient tradition in the West that man's very nature is to be active--this is why Aristotle said that humans `bloom' in activity. But no one would say that harmful activities fulfill human nature; and harmful activities are the worry here.

  Some admirers of technical innovation (e.g., Samuel Florman) suggest that `engineering' the world is the very essence of being human--are they saying that we should encourage (and finance) such engineering, to maximize the expression of the human `essence', even if these innovations should threaten the very existence of mankind?

ADMIRING WINNERS:  Plato in REPUBLIC IV says that 3 basic loves are found in all people: the love of truth,the love of victory, and the love of 'base' pleasures (& money & survival). Only in 'born soldiers', does the love of victory dominate. But the drive itself is one basic human motivation, for Plato.

--We tend to confuse the general concept of energetic Achievement (facing challenges) with the narrower concept of competitive Winning (facing a rival), or even worse--with the concepts of aggressive Fighting (facing a foe) or predatory Hunting (facing prey).   One suspects that instinctually what counts is winning contests with foes or prey.Hence people refer to `aggressive' salesmen.  One wouldn't be surprised to hear Mother Theresa praised for her `aggressive' pioneering in helping the destitute!

                                                        POWERS:

   Plato in REPUBLIC II describes a watchdog with terrific speed for catching up with a foe,and adds drily that this dog has better also have fighting power to deal with the foe when reached.  Otherwise his speed makes him worse off.

   James T. Farrell seems to have had Plato's dog-example in mind when he wrote the short story "The Fastest Runner on 37th Street" (in the anthology CHICAGO STORIES): this Irish youth was a terrific runner, but not much good at fighting. He teamed up with an ape-like boy who could lick anyone but couldn't catch other boys. The runner would catch up with an opponent, and hold him till the fighter showed up to pound him. Together they ruled the play-yard. The runner got enormously conceited (he was also a bright student with a great career ahead).   Then came a race-riot. The runner's gang was chasing a group of black youths; triumphantly he pulled ahead of his mates, only to encounter the blacks all by himself and get promptly killed. His speed killed him.

  MALE COURAGE AND ENERGY:

  In 2000, easy tesosterone amplification is available: does the world need more thoughtless, aggressive energy?

 

 It's startling how Americans seem to be fascinated by comic-strip pscychopaths: the cats Garfield & Heathcliffe, the awful little boy Calvin, the aggressive, parasitic Andy Capp.One interesting aspect of these anti-heroes is that they are all small. A seven-foot , 300-lb man who thinks like Garfield would not be amusing. This again illustrates how power adds disvalue to malice and folly.

--Raging little boys can be  amusing; but not when they get hold of pistols.  (One drawback of technology is that it puts so much incredible power (e.g., cars and guns) into the hands of youths  that society gets quite intolerant even of normal male mischief, nervous that any conflict could escalate into a slaughter.)

 The latest dilemma is that children can buy laser-pointers easily and use them to threaten people's eyes.

-- Mill in ON LIBERTY (Chapter 3) just assumes that human energy is always good,though he admits it can do harm if not harnessed to prudent good-will. Mill says it's society's fault if the energetic youth is not trained and civilized.   Maybe so, but if we consider the possibility that society IS failing to civilize adequately many youth today--then, given that likely failure, it's perfectly reasonable to deplore their harmful energy!

--The movie DAS BOAT might tempt us (wrongly) to admire the quiet courage of the German submarine sailors, even though they are dedicated to Hitler's triumph. A good antidote would be the movie THE AMERICANIZATION OF EMILY (written by Paddy Chayevsky): here a macho combat-marine becomes disillusioned with all war. When he realizes his younger brother will be enlisting early, in admiring imitation of his older brother, the marine arranges to get himself transferred to a cushy desk-job in London as an admiral's pimp! This ex-hero has realized the danger of misguided admiration.

--Aristotle notes that many a man has been ruined by his courage. He may have been thinking of Sophocles' AJAX who lost his mind (so he thought a herd of sheep was a band of fierce enemies), Ajax fought with great courage and fierceness--but what he was actually doing was slaughtering sheep. When he came to himself, he killed himself from humiliation.

--It's clear that young Americans today are nowhere near as eager to die and kill for their country as were their fathers. Their `selfish cowardice' may count as good, in our actual situation: we're not going to be invaded, and our rulers' temptation to meddle ignorantly, militarily, in the world will be lessened by these leaders' reflection that if they `gave' a war today, almost nobody would come!

TWO KINDS OF `VIRTUES':  There are two quite disparate sets of `admired qualities': those concerned directly with choosing correct GOALS (wisdom, good-will, prudence, justice) and those concerned first of all with proficient IMPLEMENTING of goals (courage, self-discipline, cleverness, persistence,group loyalty,etc.) Unreflective people (and many Western sages--e.g., Adam Smith praising 'self-command') emphasize the second family of `virtues'; these are the qualities that make one count as `splendid, not pathetic'. (They can also count as moral virtues, because one cannot do good and avoid evil effectively without them.) Reflective philosophers (such as Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hutcheson, and Christian thinkers) emphasize instead  the first set of `goal-choosing' virtues.

This emphasis is so strong that they say that `courage' without wisdom and good-will should not count as a real virtue at all; after all, unwise courage can be self-destructive and socially harmful. Even conscientiousness (the determination to do what one thinks is right) can cause great harm if 'what one thinks is right' is actually wrong and destructive.    Whereas the tendency to select correct goals cannot be harmful (though it is useless if not implemented).

MODERN SAGES DISAGREEING WITH SOCRATES:

 Mill seemed to praise energy in all contexts, as noted earlier.John Rawls listed primary goods (basically assets that facilitate many kinds of action) and treated them as always good.

   Adam Smith is the only writer I know who faced Socrates' challenge and tried to show that courage and self-discipline are splendid even in self-destructive villains. Indeed, he held that beneficence is splendid only when (& because) it's linked with self-mastery! (See 'Theory of Moral Sentiments :VI,III: "Of Self-Command"/ see also my article "Adam Smith's Aesthetic of Conduct")

ABSOLUTE MORAL PRINCIPLES? Kantians used to prattle on: "fiat justitia, pereat mundus!" (Let Justice prevail, though the earth perish!) Such splendid moralistic talk is seldom heard now, when the Earth might really perish.

CHRISTIAN VS. `HOMERIC' PAGANS ON POWER: In the Vatican Museum, two grave-statues of roughly the same rtime and style  illustrate vividly the sharp difference between the 'Homeric' admiration for Winners and the Christian admiration for Losers. Both sculptures show a warrior on horseback trampling wretched peasants beneath the hooves. But in the pagan version, the admired hero is the warrior on the horse; on the Christian grave, the admired saint is a pious young woman under the hooves.

--On the other hand, Socratics might think the Christian error is less dangerous than the Homeric one. Instinctively, we tend to overrate POWER; so an ideology that underrates POWER might be beneficial-- we should perhaps lean into the (instinctual) wind, in order to stand straight.

   Also: if an observer feels that most people are NOT likely to act with a great degree of wisdom (a position I tried to defend in Chapter One), then one will think that dramatic powers (which will probably be used unwisely) should be presumed harmful in the net--especially when modern technology makes such preposterously powerful actions  available to ordinary people. So the Christian ideology would usually give rise to correct (negative) evaluations for dramatic powers today.

   J.S. Mill criticized Christianity for emphasizing Innocence more than Nobility (in ON LIBERTY, ch.2); but in today's world a person would do well to put first the norm DO NO HARM, ahead of ACCOMPLISH GREAT DEEDS.  

 

NOBLE INABILITIES:

--Twenty-five centuries ago, Sophocles presented a story (in Philoctetes) about a youth so noble he just couldn't bring himself to behave ignobly, even when he thought he should, to help his nation militarily.

--Shakespeare, in CORIOLANUS, portrays a hero  so noble that he just can't bring himself to flatter the odious slobs who run his society, not even to get in power himself. Coriolanus says he'd rather be ruled by the slobs (keeping his integrity) than to rule them in the way they'd insist on.

--Imagine two men today, in a country suddenly taken over by a tyrant. Both think they should flatter the tyrant, to help and protect their families. Smooth, supple Fred turns out to have a positive flair for such flattery, and his family prospers. But manly Joe, though he tries conscientiously, just can't hide his contempt for the slobby tyrant. His family barely survives.  I think most of us would admire Joe more than Fred.

   In any case, before we admire POWER, and despise WEAKNESS, we have to find out what action (e.g., greasy flattery?) a given person is able to do well, and in what situation.

                                                                                                         

 

REFERENCES TO PLATO AND ARISTOTLE:

--In MENO (87c-d) Socrates notes that all the human qualities usually admired [e.g.,health, strength, good looks, temperance, justice, courage, cleverness, good memory, noble character) can be harmful (apt to be misused) in some situations. If there were any human asset that counted as always beneficial  [ as most Greeks thought of 'arete' abstractly , however they filled out its content], this 'always valuable' asset could only be    the wisdom to use these other resources well. [Only in this sense does this passage say that 'virtue is wisdom', a platitude often ascribed to Socrates.] (Since Socrates denies--in APOLOGY-- that he himself has such wisdom(21b) , such wisdom is not found among humans(23a)-he'd probably conclude that NO actual human quality is always beneficial, admirable in every situation.     The kind of always-helpful, always admirable-and-enviable 'arete'  which the other Greeks were seeking  doesn't exist.)

[Why were  Athenians then, and people now, so eager to find one human quality

that is clearly and universally enviable and admirable (the 'Right Stuff' in Wolfe's phrase)? Perhaps because we need someone (easily identifiable) to admire as much as someone to despise; as primates we need to feel secure, even in our 'middle' position, in a status-hierarchy.]

 

--In REPUBLIC (452e) Socrates says that only folly and wrongdoing should be seen as ridiculous, (and only beneficial institutions should be seen as splendid.

--In PROTAGORAS, the sophist by that name shows, in his version of the 'Prometheus' story, that technical skills alone won't save a community, not without justice [321c-324d]. However, Protagoras assumes that Zeus distributed  the aptitude to acquire justice and political wisdom  widely, among most humans

(if they are trained properly). If this were not so, he says, no city would survive; the citizens would tear each other apart. Protagoras must be assuming a definition of justice that does not require a high degree of wisdom (e.g., the later definition: "A constant WILL to give to each his own.."  Such a definition assumes it is easy to learn what is 'his own' to 'each'. )

  Socrates might have replied (a) that many cities do self-destruct (as indeed Athens was doing right then) from the childish selfishness of the citizens, and (b) that the will to give each his own, accompanied by folly in deciding what share is appropriate to each, results in people regularly getting more or less than their proper share of goods--which could hardly count as just. Socrates assumes that a high degree of political wisdom is necessary  for a city to prosper and survive durably, and that this degree of wise justice is NOT widely distributed among any populace--even if most people were  innately capable of learning high wisdom under wise training--which Socrates doubts--they are unlikely to get that wise training (for reasons he demonstrates in the REPUBLIC).

   Given that most communities lack wise/just leadership, advances in definite techniques are likely to be misused and harmful; they are unlikely to work out well just by chance (in a 'downhill' world where there are always far more ways to go wrong than right). Socrates was especially concerned with the likely abuse of   debating skills taught by the sophists and rhetoricians--but his principles apply to all definite skills and techniques and powers.

  In GORGIAS (at 448e)Socrates reproaches Polus for praising Gorgias' art

(the skill he claims to have and teach) before defining it. Then (at 451e) he says that the greatest art would be that which produces the greatest blessing (e.g. health, beauty, wealth, or the 'freedom and power' that rhetoric is said to procure.) So before we can rank the arts, we must rank the benefits they promise. At 504e-511a: Socrates notes  that rich foods and drinks are harmful for sick bodies. While freedom to eat what you want is good for the healthy man, the sick man is better off if the physician makes him restrain his appetites. Analogously, freedom to indulge appetite is harmful for the sick soul. /Callicles thought he showed Socrates as self-evidently, contemptibly weak, because he could not (using clever rhetoric) prevent himself from being perhaps boxed on the ears; but  Socrates holds that

the truly ridiculous man is he who can't ward off the WORST evils (so, to rank such inabilities  as truly warranting more or less humiliation, we must first rank the evils to be warded off). Now suppose a quality that made you able to ward a small evil  automatically made you UNable to ward off a greater evil: paradoxically, this 'power' should count as a humiliating weakness, not as a splendid kind of strength.

   The Gorgias is not just about rhetoric; throughout Gorgias, Socrates analyzes separately over twenty  distinct 'splendid-seeming' powers (e.g., 'able to kill people at will', 'able to save lives' or 'able to implement social policies you think good,', or 'able to shape the People's character'.) He shows  that each of these  powers may not really benefit its possessor or others in the long run,  and therefore, in some situations, should not count as  splendid.

     In Charmides, Socrates shows that various qualities sometimes counted categorically as goods (such as quickness or quietness, modesty, 'doing your own business',etc.) are beneficial only in some circumstances. In EUTHYDEMUS, (281a-e) 'able to do much' (vs. less) is sometimes bad. At 282b, there is no disgrace in being a slave to anyone, if this servitude increases wisdom. In REPUBLIC X, at 591c, strength, health and beauty are to be sought only to the extent that they bring with them soberness of spirit.

  In PROTAGORAS (313-4) different kinds of learning are just as likely to be harmful  as are different wares sold in a food store. [Later (352-357) Socrates holds that the intemperate person has always made a 'measuring' mistake (exaggerating the true worth of present vs. future goods), a mistake similar to the optical illusion that makes nearby items seem larger.]

  Even the golden nature of the born philosopher can lead one to evil when it is mistrained.The 'excellence of thought'..a divine quality..which never loses its potency, can become harmful.(518e) That this tragedy is the typical fate of 'innately philosophical' youths is brought out in REPBLIC,Bk. VI at 490e-495b.  All the alleged goods (beauty, wealth, strength, 'noble' family) tend to corrupt. More surprisingly, each of the true gifts of nature that are found in rare 'born philosophers' (e.g., courage, grandeur of soul, aptness to learn, memory) tend to corrupt  the soul which is trained in the usual way--(as Alcibiades was). It's a general biological law that the more innately vigorous an organism is, the more deformed it gets if it is  badly nurtured. So the best-endowed souls (like Alcibiades) become the worst criminals when they are badly, i.e., typically, raised by their corrupt families. Only a few 'golden souls' (e.g., Socrates) escape this corruption, perhaps by divine intervention(492e)   In REPUBLIC VIII, at 560-1, Socrates describes 'slob' standards of honor: insolence is called 'good breeding', license is 'liberty', prodigality is 'magnificence' and shamelessness is 'manly spirit'.At 551a, it is said that what men admire (e.g.,  wealth-gathering), that they will practice.In many other places, Plato has Socrates saying similar things; for a more complete analysis,see my unpublished piece "Plato's Great Project: Harnessing Shame to the Standards of Justice".

   Sometimes, in REPUBLIC,  Socrates sounds at first like an arrogant philosophical dogmatist.In Bk.VI, philosophers (i.e., those who can apprehend the 'eternal and unchanging') should direct the City.(484a-d) The philosophers are like navigators, trained to steer the 'ship of State' by the unchanging stars.(488a-e). In Bk.VII, in the extended metaphor of the Cave, only the man who's been up out of the cave of ordinary (deceptive)appearances, and has seen True Reality--only such a person is qualified to understand the true nature of  the shifting shadows of ordinary life, and  thus to direct the society of cave-dwellers.

  On the other hand, it was a truism in Greece that a competent ship's pilot must have elaborate 'here-and-now' knowledge also, besides general knowledge (and indeed Socrates says the competent ship's pilot must also understand the time of the year, the seasons, the sky, and the winds--all the changing phenomena relevant to steering the ship(488d). And in the Cave metaphor, he admits that when the philosopher first redirects his attention to ordinary life he is temporarily 'blinded' by the darkness, (and so is unqualified to lead until he can match his knowledge of the Good   with the detailed, here-and-now knowledge of the public world [516-7] )  [Needless to say, in following Socrates's skepticism about the categorical goodness of natural gifts, I am not endorsing his trust in 'true metaphysics' as underlying political wisdom.]    When I refer to 'Socrates' here, I am always referring to Plato's version of Socrates, which is the 'Socrates' which has affected intellectual history. However, we do have in  Xenophon's MEMORABILIA independent testimony about Socrates' emphasis on conventional 'goods' being 'good-only-if..'