My
parents raised my brother and me in the 1950s and early 1960s. My wife
and I raised our two kids in the mid 1970s to late 1980s. They in turn
are raising their families in the early 2000s. This weekend I got to
thinking about how much, and how little, the world at the micro,
social, community level has changed for most of us in the past half
century. And I concluded that, at that level, for most people there
were really only two significant changes in that momentous 50-year
period:
- The introduction of safe, reliable birth control, and
- The necessity of the two-income family.
When
I spend time with our two granddaughters I perceive the only important differences
between their young lives and mine resulted from these two phenomena,
one technological and the other economic.
(For those who haven't read The Two-Income Trap,
the two-income family was a direct result of more and more families,
starting in the 1960s and 1970s, chasing after scarce amenities like
homes near good schools and quality health care. To compete for these
amenities required two family incomes, which in a vicious spiral
created high demand for other amenities like a second family car and
quality child care. That high demand drove up prices to the point that
today's two-income families are really no further ahead than the
one-income families of fifty years ago.)
I can hear some of you
saying that the PC and the Internet belong up there with these two
changes, and some day they might, but I would assert that for most
people neither the PC nor the Internet has fundamentally changed
people's lives to anywhere near the extent that reliable birth control
and the necessity of two incomes have. I look around our house and,
aside from the fact everything is bigger, there is more of everything,
and everything is more complicated and has more 'features', there is an
astonishing similarity between the house I grew up in and the house our
granddaughters are growing up in. I am no more informed and no better
connected than my father, although we have used different technologies
to achieve knowledge and connection. Our children spend money less
thoughtlessly than I did when I was their age, and complain about their
children's preoccupation with material things just as the previous two
generations did.
As my readers know, I am not convinced that
people change, and they adapt to external exigencies (like the
availability of reliable birth control and the need for two family
incomes) slowly, and as little as necessary. The more I learn about
human nature the more convinced I am that nature trumps nurture, and
that not only are we reluctant to change, we are largely incapable of
it. And we beget offspring that resemble us in more ways than just
physically. While they can adapt to new exigencies quickly in their
youth, that doesn't make them fundamentally different in their makeup,
aspirations and personalities from us, or from previous generations.
Anyone who says, of something awful or wonderful that happened in the
past, "that could never happen today" is deluding themselves. We
foolishly ignore the lessons of history at our peril.
If
Kunstler is right (see yesterday's post) and we will shortly embark on
what will appear to us a march backwards through history, back through
world wars and great depressions and rampant disease, back to the point
where most energy is generated by our own muscles and by farm animals,
where electric light is a luxury and night becomes once again a time
for sleeping, where raising a family and maintaining a home is once
again a respected, affordable, necessary full-time job, where we do
things for ourselves instead of paying others to do them for us, where
we conserve because we cannot afford to do otherwise, where we spend
most of our lives in one place and walk or ride horseback when we
travel at all, it seems to me that our grandchildren's descendants will
not find this so terrible (once war and disease have reduced our
numbers to sustainable levels again, anyway). It is completely
conceivable to me that they may consider this move towards small
numbers, smaller personal footprint on the planet, living within their
means, and reintegration with nature to be true "progress" and their
history books may brand the 20th and early 21st centuries an era of
massive psychosis and self-destruction. They may not even blame us for
the horrific 'adjustment' they will have to go through to emerge in a
world where humanity's role and impact on the planet is steadily
declining towards insignificance, and perhaps even extinction.
My
reason for this grim optimism is that I have a fundamentally positive
view of human nature. I believe the vast majority of people are by
nature generous, care genuinely for others, and want to do what's best
for the world and not just for themselves. And, following the logic
that began this wandering essay, I believe we have always been so and
will always be so. When I picture massive struggle and hardship, I
picture my grandparents during the great depression giving everything
they possibly could to the beggars that came to their door. I don't
picture Mad Max, or the tear-gassing of protesting workers, or the
tortures and murders of Pinochet or Abu Ghraib or the Russian Stalags
or the Nazi deathcamps or Mao's atrocities. To me these are anomalies,
perversions of human nature, behaviour against the grain of humanity.
But
I have often been accused of being naive, and perhaps I have been lucky
in the humans I have met and conversed with and worked with and read
about. Perhaps true human nature is different from that of the people I
know (or think I know). So, dear readers, here is your chance to set me
straight. In the comments below this post, please tell me your answers
to the following three questions, and add whatever explanatory notes
you consider appropriate. But please try not to compound my error by
reflecting only the views of those you know of like minds -- think too
of the people you know who do not vote, who do not read, who are rather
too caught up in themselves, or who beneath a quiet exterior seethe
with rage and loathing. Here we go:
- If, because of
cataclysmic war, disease, act of terrifying violence, economic
collapse, or natural disaster a large part of the planet, including the
part where you live now, were to suffer a massive, gradual, and sustained collapse of infrastructure, law and order, what percentage of the population do you think would do each of the following:
- Generously sell off luxuries and give what they could to others, and even take others into their homes,
- Hole themselves up and protect their property with guns if necessary, and
- Exploit the situation by stealing other people's property, by force if necessary.
- If,
in the above circumstances, many of the enabling processes of
civilization were to collapse -- big corporations simply closed up
shop, governments went bankrupt and completely stopped functioning, and
food, energy and clean water suddenly became extremely scarce, what
kind of political and economic regime do you think would be most likely
to fill the vacuum:
- Argentinian
style self-management, where communities would pull together and share,
start up new local businesses, barter, and look after each other,
- Russian
style gangsterism, where people would steal and hoard resources and
extort outrageous prices, sexual favours, and 'protection' money from
others,
- Afghani-style oppression, where local religious
fundamentalist warlords would brutally impose and enforce order on
local residents, including dictating who owns what, who wears what, who
does what and what behaviour is allowed and prohibited, on pain of
summary execution, or
- Total anarchy, where no one would have
enough power to impose order, and where the lack of sense of community
would prevent people coalescing around any system, so virtually every family would fend for itself and do what it felt it had to do to survive.
- Fifty years after such a collapse, how do you think we would be living:
- Peacefully,
responsibly, better connected to community, and more modestly than we
do today, and very locally, but ultimately quite "well off",
- Striving
with mixed results to restore the institutions of civilization -- a
market economy, national and international trade under well-managed
corporations, a lean government to help those most in need with
essential services, defence and security forces and the 'rule of law',
- Under feudal or other totalitarian rule,
- Still in a state of anarchy with roving hordes disrupting every attempt to create a functional society,
- Under the rule of a 'higher power', or
- Virtually annihilated.
My answers will appear in the comments, after I've heard from you.
Painting, Human Nature, from the Arcosanti Intentional Community, artist unknown. |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
