Can Nineveh repent again?
Herman Daly reviews One With Nineveh
Paul
and Anne Ehrlich, One
With Nineveh: Politics, Consumption, and the Human Future,
Island Press, Washington, DC, 2004, 447 pages, $27, hardback, ISBN
1-55963-879-6.
The subtitle
is descriptive of the book's contents; the title is evocative of its
forebodings. I will comment on each.
The
thrust of the book is to show that the World Scientists' Warning to
Humanity—that "Human beings and the natural world are on
a collision course"—is correct. The facts indicating the
collision are organized around the useful identity introduced by the
authors some time ago: Impact = Population x Affluence x Technology,
where Affluence is GNP per capita, and Technology is impact per unit
of GNP. Much new and old information is clearly and convincingly presented
in this framework, interspersed with apt personal recollections.
There is no attempt to present the scientific or economic first principles
from which the World Scientists' understanding and consequent warning
follows. Instead a wealth of empirical evidence is presented, along
with common sense arguments, to show that the Warning is correct.
Earlier the Ehrlichs' textbook with John Holdren, Ecoscience,
had taken the more basic conceptual approach and equipped the student
to follow the scientific arguments himself. I mention this not because
I think they should have written a textbook instead, but to publicly
lament the fact that Ecoscience has long been out of print.
Evidently the publishers thought the book had to be "dumbed down"
and the authors disagreed. As one who taught undergraduates from the
book for several years I can testify that they found it accessible,
sometimes with a little help , but then what was I there for? Also,
probably the Ehrlichs felt their time was better spent educating the
general public up to some minimum rather than helping to dumb down
the universities. After all, in a democracy policy cannot rise above
the level of understanding of the average citizen, and the Ehrlichs
deserve a standing ovation for all they have done to raise that average,
as well as for extending the margins of knowledge.
I cannot summarize here what is itself a large summary of facts and
issues underlying population policy, immigration, economic growth
and its limits, inequality, corporate reform, globalization, etc.
I can report that the discussion is fair and judicious, gracefully
written, and without obeisance to the icons of political correctness
or too-easy dispassionate consensus.
Policy recommendations mostly involve getting prices right in the
many senses of that term: parents should bear most of the cost of
having children; growth-inducing subsidies, especially in agriculture,
should be eliminated; consumers should each bear the full social and
environmental cost of their consumption, etc. Support for a consumption
tax is especially welcome, but I would have been happier if, instead
of a mild critique, they had rejected the value added tax in favor
of a tax on throughput—i.e., tax "that to which value is added",
the metabolic flow from source to sink, not the value added to that
flow by labor and capital which is really income. Also welcome were
suggestions for limiting the power of corporations—their size
and their phoney status as persons under the bill of rights. The authors
recognize that more is required than the many good policies they identify—
"Nothing less is needed than a rapid ethical evolution toward
readjusting our relationship with nature so that the preservation
of biodiversity becomes akin to a religious duty" (p.270). "Preservation
of biodiversity" may sound like an innocent technical term, but as
the Ehrlichs show, it really means limiting the scale of the human
occupation of our finite globe. Neoclassical economists have so far
either aggressively ignored this limit or, in effect, treated it as
a religious matter by deifying technology as savior.
The last point leads me to the evocative and enigmatic title. "One
with Nineveh" comes from Rudyard Kipling's 1897 poem "Recessional",
most of which is prominently reprinted at the beginning of book, with
the remaining stanzas supplied in the endnotes. I had not read the
poem since freshman English, and found it even more moving now than
I did then. But why did the authors choose it for their title and
epigraph? Is it just a literary hook to snag English majors, or a
credo foreshadowing the book's message? I think the latter, but it
is not easy to spell out the reasons, which may be why the authors
left it to the reader. Speculation is irresistable.
A "recessional" is the closing hymn sung as the choir exits the sanctuary.
Did Kipling mean that in 1897 Western Civilization's worship service
had already ended, and that in the future the danger would be that
we forget what is worthy of worship—hence the refrain "lest
we forget"? Kipling's poem is a hymn, in fact a prayer, since every
stanza addresses God in an attitude of contrition and supplication.
Far from a celebration of imperialism, something often reasonably
enough attributed to Kipling, this poem is a prayer of repentance
for the national sins of imperialism. Could the connection be that
civilization's imperial conquest of the natural world (as well as
the related US economic imperialism also noted in the book) requires
the same kind of repentance that Kipling called for from Imperial
Great Britain?
Reference to Nineveh also brings to mind (more so in 1897) the biblical
story of the reluctant prophet Jonah. Jonah preaches God's message
to the Ninevites, "repent or be smitten", and is both surprised and
peeved when the Ninevites (temporarily?) repent and are forgiven.
Now many of us, including the Ehrlichs, have, like Jonah, been preaching
to the modern Nineveh in which we live. Our message is similar, "change
your basic outlook and behavior or suffer the consequences, i.e. ,
repent or be smitten". Unlike the ancients, our modern Ninevites retort:
"There is nothing to repent. Guilt is a Judeo-Christian hang-up,
or perhaps just a chemical imbalance. Even if one felt like repenting,
to whom would we offer repentance? Who is going to smite us if we
don't repent? You say the unintended collective consequences of our
own actions will smite us? We are too smart for that old Greek trap
of Judgment by hubris! Look at how our economists have proved by rigorous
mathematics, over and over again, that the free market converts private
greed into public beneficence; look at our technology, look at systems
theory and chaos theory, .... Here, Jonah, have a Prozac and chill
out."
If we liken our scientific arguments and evidence to a lever that
we prophets want to use to move the world, and further argument and
evidence to an extension of the lever, then we still need a fulcrum,
a fixed point of value or right purpose against which to pivot the
lever of science, or else the world will not be moved. Extending the
lever does not create a fulcrum. I suspect that the lure and appeal
of Kipling's poem is that he is praying for such a fixed point on
which to rest the unwieldy scientific lever, the "reeking tube and
iron shard" in which "the heathen heart puts her trust".
Physicist Richard Feynman raised the same question in a 1963 lecture
(The Meaning of It All ):
....the great
accumulation of understanding as to how the physical world behaves
only convinces one that this behavior has a kind of meaninglessness
about it... . ["All
valiant dust that builds on dust", in Kipling's words]... .The
source of inspiration today, the source of strength and comfort
in any religion, is closely knit with the metaphysical aspects.
That is, the inspiration comes from working for God, from obeying
His will,.... So when a belief in God is uncertain, this particular
method of obtaining inspiration fails. I don't know the answer to
the problem, the problem of maintaining the real value of religion
as a source of strength and courage to most men while at the same
time not requiring an absolute faith in the metaphysical system.
I don't know the answer either—how
to conjure inspiration, purpose, and ethical behavior from a materialist
metaphysics ending in meaninglessness. Whether the authors' choice
of epigraph and title was intended to evoke these deep issues, I don't
know, but for me they did. In any case I am grateful to Paul and Anne
Ehrlich for the sanity, clarity, and goodness they continue to bring
to the world. Maybe Nineveh will repent again.