Mark E. Clark

The Economics of Spaceship Earth

There is a delightful cartoon showing two ETs in a spaceship. As they approach Earth, one says to the other: ‘You’ll like this place — it has atmosphere!’ Indeed, Earth is one of the few heavenly bodies with an atmosphere, and no other is like ours. Earth is also unique in having liquid water, lots of it, and dry land covered with a thin, but highly fertile layer of soil. How true is the statement: ‘Below that thin layer comprising the delicate organism known as the soil is a planet as lifeless as the moon’.1

The Cultural Spectrum

Culture! Westerners often use this word to mean a taste for the fine arts, music and other aesthetic matters. But it has a much broader meaning, namely, the shared values, language and traditions that define a particular group of people, be they Australian aborigines, black Americans, or the ancient Greeks. Culture is learned as a child, and as children we each learned from those around us a particular set of rules, beliefs, priorities and expectations that moulded our world into a meaningful whole. That is our culture. It tells us what is correct, expected, normal and right. It explains the world for us. It gives meaning and purpose to our lives. Culture is the socially determined mental framework in which we live. It is our Weltanschauung, our worldview, our abstract conception of reality.

The Cult of Efficiency

Efficiency! It pervades our thinking. How can we get the most output of goods and services for the least input of energy, labour and materials? What is the most ‘efficient’, the most ‘economical’ way of doing things? When ‘wealth’ is the supreme goal, the more efficiently wealth is produced, the better. For the sake of efficiency, we subordinate human values that in other times, in other societies, in other worldviews, had far higher priority. The origin, development and logical consequences of our modern devotion to wealth and efficiency are the subjects of this chapter.

Politics: Worldviews in Action

We now come to the crux of our problem: how do people successfully organise themselves into stable societies? Today, most societies are far from stable. In many Third World countries, growing economic inequality, exacerbated by exploding populations, means rising instability. The Second World — the USSR and communist East Europe — has remained ‘stable’ over four decades only through imposing oppressive coercion. Even the industrial democracies, which still seem stable on the surface, face powerful internal tensions in the face of material shortages and an end to economic expansion. Understanding today’s world means understanding the factors that determine social stability and instability, including aspects of human nature (gleaned in Part II), and of the Western world-view (from Part III), which now dominates so much of the global economic and political power structure.

Nuclear ‘Defence’ — or Conflict Resolution

This was not an episode from ‘Star Trek’ or an update of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds. It was a real alert. Bombers were about to take off; men in silos were ready to turn the keys that would fire off nuclear-loaded rockets. All because of a malfunctioning ‘electronic chip, about the size of a dime, which costs forty-six cents’. On such potential failures hangs the fate of the Earth.

Energy and Exponentials

The vague presumption that modern technology is overcoming our dependence on the physical universe is sufficiently widespread to cause alarm, for it signals a general ignorance of the laws of matter and energy. This chapter, which relates the principles of energy to modern life, should dispel any such misconceptions.

The Future: A Search for Values

THE FUTURE: It’s our life, and our children’s and our grandchildren’s. What will it be like? Can all of us look forward to lives more or less like people lead today? Or are there going to be some drastic changes? If major changes are indeed inevitable, can widespread pain and chaos be avoided? Is it true, as M. Giscard d’Estaing, the former President of France, said: ‘All modern day curves lead to disaster’1. What curves was he talking about? What disasters?

The Emergence of Human Nature

Such was Thomas Hobbes’s seventeenth century view of the life of our primeval ancestors. Before the advent of civilisation and the rule of written law, men and women, driven by their inner natures, were condemned to unending violence. For Hobbes, the evils of humankind were inherent, a view still held by those who have never studied the human past. It implies a fundamental nastiness in human nature which only civilisation could possibly overcome. When asked about solving the problems of war, greed and selfishness, people simply shrug their shoulders and say: ‘Well, you can’t change human nature, can you?’. This image has been reinforced by such popular authors as Robert Ardrey (African Genesis and The Territorial Imperative) and to a lesser extent by Desmond Morris (The Naked Ape) and Konrad Lorenz (On Aggression).2 But what do we really know about the kind of beings our ancestors were? What is this raw material — this human nature — out of which we are shaped?

Religions and Worldviews

Philosopher William Hazlitt once observed that ‘Without the aid of prejudice and custom I should not be able to find my way across the room’. 1 That simple phrase in fact says something quite profound about the human mind, and hence about human behaviour. Walking across a room was his metaphor for living through the events of everyday life. He was talking about the inner mental map each of us constructs out of our familiar surroundings and in which we live: the synthetic worldview which is a biased, shorthand reconstruction of ‘out there’. What exactly this worldview is and how each individual acquires it is the subject of Chapter 8. Here it is sufficient to reflect on Hazlitt’s words, ‘prejudice’ and ‘custom’.

Alienation: the Loss of the Sacred

Ours is an age of scientifically based technology. Most Westerners consume 20, 30 or even 40 times more energy and resources than any earlier human society. We live in luxury once reserved for kings. We live long lives, mostly free from physical pain. Most of us are never hungry except when on a self-inflicted diet. We are seldom too cold or too hot; we do not have to do much hard physical work. We have amusement at the touch of our finger-tips. We are, quite literally, immersed in the wonders of technology — yet we are increasingly less satisfied.