How Many Wrongs?

One reading of de Mandeville’s grumbling hive is that he was criticising hypocrisy. One could make an argument I think that we are at a peak of hypocrisy, though there is no logical or physical reason why it should not climb even higher.

Another possibility is that de Mandeville, for all his Dutch wit and wisdom, was wrong. Frederick Taylor has turned out to be wrong, and the catastrophic results of his efforts are all around us. In a similar, Jeavons Paradox sort of way, Norman Borlaug has turned out to be wrong, even though for a while it looked like the so-called Green Revolution was going to solve the food problem. All it has done is temporarily increase land yield (until the soil and ecosystems are wrecked) and help drive ever more species to extinction – and more widely, as we grab (steal) ever more land from nature, increase the likelihood of a zoonotic pandemic. What a clever species we are. Some virologists and epidemiologists are not convinced that Covid is the big one.

If Borlaug is the flat-earthers’ hero, then Malthus is, as usual, the whipping boy. Yet one day he shall inevitably be proven right as any population biologist can demonstrate. All species which get too populous eventually out-run some of aspect of their support ecosystem, often food. In the case humans, we are also destroying sinks, not just sources, which is one of the reasons why carbon dioxide levels are rising. Even avid climate deniers cannot deny that the level of CO2 is increasing, as it can be easily measured with an NDIR sensor.

On the current pathway we will not use our supposed intelligence to slow down even a bit, though the Covid is showing us one way it could be done. Growth is still the mantra of almost everyone, yet growth for growth’s sake is the modus operandi of cancer.

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