THE STORY OF MAN

AN INTRODUCTION TO 150,000 YEARS

CARROLL & GRAF                       2007

PART XIII

Chapter 46: A Backward Look

In 1922, the British writer H.G. Wells published his best-selling A Short History of the World. It ended with the following:

As yet we are hardly in the dawn of human greatness. Can we doubt that presently our race will more than realize our boldest imaginations, that it will achieve unity and peace, that it will live in a world made more splendid and lovely than any palace or garden that we know, going on from strength to strength in an ever widening circle of adventure and achievement?

Wells penned those words just four years after the conclusion of a terrible war. The memory of the obscene carnage on the world’s battlefields was still fresh in his readers’ minds. How could he have been so blithely optimistic? He was a highly intelligent and sensitive man, with exceptional powers of imagination. He understood what terrible things human beings were capable of in desperate situations. The trouble was, he was a comfortably-off  citizen of one of the richest countries on earth; a country whose ruling classes had experienced an uninterrupted improvement in their personal comfort and prosperity for more than two centuries.

Fine writer and visionary though he was, Wells was a product of his time. It was only within the previous hundred years or so that scientists had begun to piece together the history of the earth, and the origins of the human race. It was only 60 years since Darwin had published his Origin of Species, and barely 30 since his Descent of Man, the first coherent study of human origins. Darwin had chosen the title with care, so that people might understand that he was concerned only with elucidating the structure of humanity’s family tree, and not promoting any idea of ‘progress’. In the last edition of the Origin of Species that he personally supervised, he had used the word evolution for the first time. But what he meant by evolution was continuous change, not continuous improvement.

• Unfortunately, with Darwin out of the way, it was open house for everyone who had misunderstood him, or who wanted to invoke his name to support their own crackpot theories.
• In no time at all, the industrial countries were awash with theories of ‘social evolution’.
• Unsurprisingly, the highest form to date turned out to be the kind of organization displayed by the society in which social evolutionists occupied comfortable and prestigious positions.
• Wells was born into a society deeply imbued with Christian philosophy, a religion that has been teaching for nearly 2000 years that history has meaning: it is a linear process with a preordained end.
• Belief in the ‘march of civilization’ ought to have been killed off by the horrors of the First World War, but for many people, the effect was quite the opposite.
• To console the grieving for the losses they had suffered, a rationalization was invented: 1914-18 had been ‘the war to end war’.
• We know better now. Whether we are any wiser is a matter of opinion.
• In the face of the evidence of the past 100 years, we should have abandoned fantasies about the onward march of civilization. But this kind of thinking still lingers. Only the language changes.
• Some put their faith in something called the ‘enlightenment project’. In this variation on the ‘march of civilization’, the ways of organizing society developed in western Europe and North America since the 17^th century are seen as inherently superior to any other, and therefore must prevail, provided only that their practitiononers keep their nerve.
• Other cultures, for example the Maya and pre-communist China, have seen history as a ‘cyclical’ process, in which similar sequences of events recur over long periods, and in which there is no ultimate destination.
• The cyclical view of history may avoid the kind of horrors that are perpetrated by people who carry with them the certainty that History, or God, is on their side.
• But it is a belief that easily slips into fatalism: an acceptance that suffering (especially other people’s) is an inescapable fact of life, and that attempts to influence the course of history are doomed to fail.
• There are threats to our civilized existence that we can do nothing about such as the explosion of Mount Toba, in Sumatra, 74,000 years ago. But there are others that are still within our power to counteract. One is the threat of a major  pandemic, like the Black Death of the 14^th century, or, slightly less frightening, the influenza that raced around the world in 1919.

In a world where we are disturbing every corner of our natural environment, where people are travelling and mixing on a scale never before known, and where we are embarking on experiments in genetic manipulation not only of animals and plants, but of viruses and bacteria, the possibility of something new and horrible emerging to devastate populations worldwide is very strong.

•  The AIDS/HIV virus has already caused one of the most deadly pandemics in human history, and its career is still far from over.
• So long as the human species exists, it will suffer pandemics, and every so often we may expect to be visited by a Big One.

Another threat that hangs over us is human-induced climate change. Even a generation ago, the evidence was still so tentative that it was perfectly respectable, even sensible, to question its significance, and to oppose proposals for large-scale changes in the patterns of production and consumption in the industrializd world. It may still be respectable, but it is no longer sensible. If there had not been so much corporate money riding on the outcome of the argument, it would have been treated as an open and shut case years ago.

We have learned two things in recent years that make continued foot-dragging in this matter extraordinarily unwise. First, we now know that some past climate swings have occurred very quickly. Ice ages have sometimes been replaced by interglacials – and vice versa – in a matter of years, rather than centuries. And that was without any push from large-scale human activity. Second, climate change models suggest that the present margin of safety between a gently changing climate and a rapid tip-over into something more frightening is quite small. It really does look as though it would need only a modest reduction in the snow cover in northern latitudes (reducing the proportion of the sun’s heat reflected back into space) and a modest increase in the carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere (preventing the heat from escaping into space) to start a runaway rise in global temperatures. The science does not offer 100% certainty, but the risks are so great that we should surely try to ensure that our margin of safety is a generous one.

Unfortunately, we face two problems when we try to tackle major issues such as global warming, pollution or arms control. One of these is as old as the human race. The other has been around for some time, but has only become serious during the last two centuries.

• The age-old problem is the balancing of immediate personal freedom against long-term communal good.
• But challenges such as climate change are complicated by another problem, one that we have hardly begun to tackle: that of corporate power and motivation.

Tobacco companies spent years, and millions of dollars, rubbishing medical research that suggested a link between smoking and lung cancer. Energy companies in particular, but others as well, have a similar vested interest in denying the reality of human-induced climate change and will fight to prevent the action necessary to contain it. In much the same way, arms companies, and their friends in high places, have a vested interest in nourishing fear, and in manufacturing enemies. In a world without fear, weapons would be very difficult to sell, and arms companies would be in danger of going broke.

• These malign influences do not arise because company directors as a class are more venal, or personally less honest than other people. It is because a socially responsible business – like a flying pig – is a contradiction in terms.
• Pigs are not designed to fly, and privately owned business corporations are not designed to serve the public good.
• Even if a particular board of directors, bizarrely, wished to abandon the maximization of profit and place equal emphasis on increasing public welfare, they could not do so, because the resulting deterioration in short-term profits would lead to a collapse of the company’s share price, and the arrival of other managers with more stock market-friendly attitudes.
• It is only fair to point out the huge potential for harm that uncontrolled profit-seeking carries with it.

Adam Smith, that wise philosopher and father-figure of the science of economics, is revered by economists and businessmen for his explanation of the benefits that accrue to the community – as a by-product, not by intention – from genuine competition between firms operating in the same market. But what Smith emphasized with equal force was the damage to the public good that must result if businesses are allowed to operate without regard for the wider consequences of their pursuit of profit maximization. Appropriate legislation and public bodies with adequate powers are needed to keep this pursuit within reasonable bounds.

• Legislation that forced businesses to take drastic measures to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases, and other forms of pollution, would not offend against the principles of free competition.
• And it might possibly give the human race a chance of making it to the year 2050 in reasonable shape and with not too seriously reduced numbers.
• It is when we have to deal with powerful businesses whose operations spread across continents that the problem becomes really challenging.
• In a global economy, unfettered businesses whose operations are concealed from public scrutiny, are monsters that can only do more harm than good.

Let’s end with a look on the bright side. Human history has delivered any number of triumphs, and – for the lucky ones – huge advances in wealth, in welfare and in control over the environment. And barring the most terrible accident, there must be wonderful surprises still to come. Less than 100,000 years ago, the human race numbered only around 10,000 people, wandering around in small bands on the African savannah. Now there are over 6000 million of us, in just about every corner of the world. In spite of this huge number, the luckier ones – and that’s quite a lot – are decently fed, and enjoy luxuries of housing, health care, food and drink, travel and entertainment that our great-great-grandparents could barely have dreamed of.