Human Society
Comment on Sex and Fertility in the Post-Petroleum Age
Blog comment in response to Sex and Fertility in the Post-Petroleum Age by Jan Lundberg,
27 July 2010
Look at Historical Evidence
Developed societies like ours, with sanitation, medical care, artificial contraception, and optional bottle feeding of infants, are a recent exception in the history of humanity. The prevailing patterns over the history of our species have involved females becoming fertile at a somewhat later age (16-18 years old), due to less adequate food supply; prolonged breast feeding of infants, which suppresses fertility and ensures a longer inter-pregnancy interval; higher infant and maternal mortality; less investment of effort and calories in infants that have a poor chance of survival or less social utility (e.g., the Greeks abandoning deformed infants at birth); a certain amount of infanticide, usually by men, who kill a woman's children by a former male partner; etc, etc.
We’ve Got to Rebuild America’s Crumbling Infrastructure
Early this summer most of America saw images of houses washing down the swollen Mississippi, logjammed against a bridge. In the following weeks we heard about the humans, libraries and even pets left homeless, but outside Iowa, few people heard about the problem of those houses, or indeed about that bridge itself. Iowans alone were left to contemplate their opportunities: When insurance failed, would FEMA provide? Would charity?
Preparing for Inevitable Shocks
Naomi Klein's new book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, promises to become a major tool in the fight against rampant privatization and conservative decimation of the public sphere--but only if enough people read it and talk about its ideas. Those interested in progressive social change should also consider the possibility that naturally-occurring shocks or social disruptions can provide opportunities to rectify system dysfunctions and inequities, and move communities in directions that may be more positive for their well-being in the long term.
In an excerpt of the book published in The Guardian, Klein reveals the neoliberal strategy, promoted by the late Milton Friedman, of taking advantage of disasters and socially disorienting events in order to impose radical economic changes:
Ghosts of Mount Misery
Once upon a time, in a small Maryland town on the Chesapeake Bay called St. Michaels, a teenaged slave named Frederick Douglass beat up a white farmer named Edward Covey who had been hired to "break" the difficult boy. That fight was a turning point in Douglass’s life, liberating him from fear and instilling self-respect, and it set him on a path that would lead him out of slavery and into a career as the preeminent African American spokesman of the nineteenth century.
The Uses of History
Americans have a love-hate relationship with history. On the one hand, history is often seen as something dry and dusty, composed of dates and events and people that hover on the borders of consciousness and relevance and make the eyes glaze over, like the Wilmot Proviso. Compared to other Western democracies, we are shamefully uneducated in history, even our own, and yet little sense of embarrassment seems to attend this deficiency. That's because Americans pride themselves on not being constrained or determined by the past, but on always surging forward confidently into the future, reinventing ourselves, our nation, and perhaps the world along the way. History? Leave it to the antiquarians and the Europeans.
Eyes in the Skies II
In the last issue of the Uncommon Denominator, a number of questions were posed about the advent of consumer-friendly surveillance technology, particularly such software as Google Earth and Microsoft's Virtual Earth: How will widely available satellite and photographic imagery change our understanding of public space? Can our new image technologies reinvigorate the ancient ideal of the agora, or will they pervert it? Who wins and who loses? To what degree will these technologies help to distribute power more broadly, and to what degree will they concentrate power in fewer hands?
Eyes in the Skies I
The world - and it is a small world indeed - is at your fingertips. Let them do the satellite tracking.
The Age of Surveillance is in full swing, and it is we who are swinging. In contrast to the dystopic visions of yesterday's sci-fi writers, in which the people endure constant surveillance by governments or corporations, today's technologies of surveillance are increasingly decentralized and increasingly publicly available. Mark Crispin Miller's elegant revision of George Orwell -- "Big Brother is you, watching" -- seems strangely apt in a world where it's becoming easier and easier for us to see what our fellow human beings are doing.
The occasion for such ruminating is the advent of Google Earth, a software program that allows the user to view any spot on the globe, from various "altitudes," through the eyes of orbiting satellites. The "streaming" images that Google Earth provides are not quite real-time, but they are three-dimensional, and they include both terrain features and man-made environments. Want to see the Eiffel Tower? Zoom in. Tierra del Fuego or the Sahara? Zoom in.
Gone Forth and Multiplied
It didn't take the Biblical injunction to "Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it" (Genesis 1:28), for humankind to go about the task of filling and subduing the earth. It did take a few centuries, however, before some people began wondering about the implications of doing so.
In his 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population, the British political economist Thomas Malthus argued that the future rate of human population growth would increase exponentially while the rate of agricultural food production could only increase geometrically. The result, he predicted, would be an inexorable divergence between population and resources, entailing an inevitable train of grim consequences: poverty, famine, war, misery. The theory underlying this depressing scenario has been frequently challenged over the years, but its haunting power and intuitive plausibility suggest that Malthus was not completely off the mark.
Redefining Personal Responsibility
The phrase "personal responsibility" or "individual responsibility" has often been taken by the Left as code for conservative policies that reinforce the divide between the haves and the have-nots. That's not surprising: the Right routinely invokes the phrase to imply that government should not do much to help ordinary people, who should rather just help themselves.
This is not the kind of "individual responsibility" I am interested in here. But nor am I talking about the apparent alternative: abdicating personal responsibility by trusting a cadre of elites to promote our best interests through a variety of social programs and policies. Instead, I'm advocating an understanding of individual responsibility that goes beyond such traditional formulations, which tend to be more politically divisive than they are constructive.
