The Human Titanic: steering a safe passage for civilisation part 1

The Human Titanic is the name of the book I have been dreaming of since at least 2000. It builds on my doctoral thesis but is aimed at a much larger audience. It is an analogy for the vessel, our planet that we live on, in one of four decks, each occupied by a different global "claste", who rarely interact except within their own level, other than by rule-giving (or taking) or by ritualised hand-touching or foot kissing.

Four decks

High up are the Mary Antoinette suites, though they could be also be named after deceased members of this fabulously wealthy and powerful class: Mobuto, Markos, Mengistu or for that matter still-living icons like Gina Rinehart. There are cabins, decks and on-board casinos inhabited by people who are fabulously wealthy and act as though the fate of civilisation that the ship hosts (and on which you and I also live) does not matter to them.

I live on the second claste deck, and so does virtually everyone I have ever met, and who will ever read this, though some of us live on more or less privileged parts of this layer. But some of us from this deck work on the upper floors, trained to be discreet and servile, such as by Institutes of Butling and Household Management, producing butlers, as they used to be called (I don't think I am related). Robert Frank has a long description of the production process for these butlers to the elite in his book Richistan.

Below us live the Precariat and below them, in steerage, are people who are unimagineably poor, at least to most of us on the higher decks. They may number as many as a billion. I have encountered a few of them, for example in a village in Meghalaya, India, near the Bangladeshi border. Few birds live in the remnants of forest on the steep hillside, near the wet desert of Cherrapunjee. Most of the people I met there are less than 1.5 metres (5 feet) tall, due to lifelong undernutrition. Many are chronically infected with parasites. They could become become radicalised, as Arundhati Roy describes but are more likely to live a short life in poverty.  I also once met a precariat member - he was from somewhere in South Asia and was flying back from Nigeria, maybe to Singapore. He'd been in Nigeria for about 24 hours, some mistake had occurred, over which he had very little control. Life in economy class at 35,000 feet beyond about 60 hours a week surely classifies as a hell realm, but at least he was well-fed, literate, and skilled. 

You could argue my temporary companion on that flight really belonged on the second deck, but, like a lot of things in life, the boundaries of these claste decks are not absolutely precise. And some people can definitely move between decks, in either direction. President Mobutu Sesu Seko, of Zaire, wasn't born to wealth or power, but for a while he achieved sufficient of both to be a genuine first-claste member. In fact, according to this article by the BBC, it was Mobuto's rule that first popularised the term "kleptocracy" - rule by thieves.

The roots of this book

The title of this book (The Human Titanic) was suggested to me by Robert Chambers, who I worked with in 2002, and who had been involved with writing Voices of the Poor, for the World Bank. We met for three days in San Francisco, finalising the titular chapter of the conceptual framework on human well-being and ecosystem services for the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. Robert was a famous academic, but unlike the rest of us he looked like a backpacker, travelled with a back pack, and didn't seem at home in five star hotels. But Robert also wasn't perfectly at home when interviewing the extremely poor, one of whom had asked him his salary. Robert couldn't bring himself to tell him.

In 1997 I had hoped to undertake a PhD on tropical medicine, preferably on malaria. But I changed my mind during the conference to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Ronald Ross's discovery that malaria was transmitted by mosquitoes, in Secunderabad, India. One of the keynote speakers, before several hundred delegates, mainly Indian, spoke frankly of the futility of lobbying for further research funds, and suggested instead that malaria researchers would need to learn to better use their limited funds.

My immediate reaction was that though brutally honest, this was only true because those who suffer from malaria are overwhelmingly poor. It then occurred to me, with an intensity previously sensed comparatively faintly, that the way the population of the First World views and treats that of the Third World parallels the way some upper caste Hindus treat the dalits.

The claste system

These thoughts led to coining of the word “claste” and a substantially econometric analysis of the global claste system that my thesis comprised. But it soon also occurred to me that global economic discrimination also provided a previously under-recognised causal explanation for the process that I called “environmental brinkmanship”, akin to nuclear brinkmanship.

During my thesis I published two long articles in journals, each in 2000. One was called Inequality, global change and the sustainability of civilisation. In it, I wrote: "The powerful exhibit contempt - for the poor, for nature, and for the future - of breathtaking scale. In this paper, humanity is compared to the travellers on the Titanic. Most live in steerage, unable to sense the iceberg’s proximity or to escape. Above deck, the privileged enjoy entrancing conversation and entertainment. If, as in 1912, the unthinkable should happen, they know they have disproportionate access to the lifeboats.

Those who escaped the Titanic reached the safety of New York. But if human demands on natural capital exceed the “environmental Plimsoll Line” then we risk not only the failure of civilisation, but its collapse. Even New York may be an inadequate haven for those sufficiently privileged to access the lifeboats; the hegemony of the currently wealthy may not guarantee future security."

I see that to read that paper, which was once open access, now costs $45. Good thing I have a copy. I will have to post a copy on my website (at least the text).
 
I have been trying to write this book, as I mentioned, for over a decade. I keep getting obstructed - there is always something more urgent, usually that is doing something that I'll get paid for, or meeting an obligation that I rashly promised I'd do. But, now I feel, getting these ideas to a wider audience is perhaps the most important thing I can do. At least I can write these installments.

I did write part 2.

Are we due for a revolution in global consciousness?

In 1788, in France, the court must have tried to control public opinion but the behaviour of the French court was so outrageous (and inept) that in the following year the Revolution started. The global situation today is not incredibly different; we have a high elite (Koch Bros, Rupert Murdoch, the late Marc Rich, Gina Rinehart etc) so far above us that the contempt they exhibit for the fate of ordinary people seems not that different to Marie Antoinette etc. In turn they reward and fund groups like Pelerin, and an army of bloggers like Andrew Bolt .. and the Australian public are left to choose between extremists like Abbott and (let's face it) their opponents in the ALP who were only slightly more environmentally aware and a self-destructive parody.

I reckon the establishment must really fear (or at least be irritated by) social media - not just in China * but even here .. eg if we relied even on the ABC how far would we be in the dark? Social media and the internet are kind of accidental tools for democracy. I know the internet had a lot of idealistic founders and contributors and that Mark Zuckerberg thinks Facebook (FB) can help democracy. Others claim the chatter on FB and twitter etc is largely of groups talking to themselves, rather than truly influencing the opinions of others. But, for me, social media and the internet are the most powerful tools reformers have. Even so, there is a great distance to go.

Australia is still one of the richest and free-est places on the planet. Suffering is intrinsic to life, we can't have paradise here and probably not in heaven. But I believe we in Australia (and some other places with free speech) have a valuable opportunity to contribute to the struggle; there are many ways to do this. The dark fate of civilization that former Czech President Vaclav Havel fears is not yet inevitable. We have to contribute to the struggle to rescue ourselves from ourselves; it is hard of course, but I find many people to be sympathetic to this.

When I was much younger I used to think that the big struggles in history (at least in the West) were over; we had achieved abundance, a life expectancy of over 75 .. the task was to extend that abundance and health globally. I now think that we are passing though the end of a "sweet spot", that the global development project (if ever sincere) has been a shell for at least 35 years - and even worse - we are eroding our own environmental foundation. We may well collapse as a civilization but it could be decades away .. though the decay has already started. In any case I think we have to develop our awareness, contribute how we can. I met former Australian leader of the Opposition, Malcolm Turnbull, in about 2010, for 30 minutes and discussed some of this with him - he genuinely seemed to understand, especially about the "tertiary" effects of climate change, which already include higher food prices and conflict. It is not quite hopeless.

We need a revolution of consciousness, and people like the Pelerin Group and climate sceptics like David Murray and Maurice Newman who have influential role in Australian society need to be marginalised. That requires better information, more democracy, and the decline of the Telegraph, the Australian etc. Even the Australian public radio (ABC) is too intimidated to fairly report on the erosion public environmental goods; they instead underestimate the risks that civilization faces. Carry on!

*The Chinese government is trying to fight this site; it is often down or overloaded. A backup service is at https://www.vpnmentor.com/test-the-great-china-firewall/ 

Peering into the Fog: Ecologic Change, Human Affairs, and the Future

This paper was published in 2005; but it's hard to find for free. Here is a shortened, slightly updated version.

For millennia, humans from diverse cultures have used oracles and omens to try to read the future. Science and mathematics have long contributed to this effort, originally through astronomy but now by supercomputers allied to theories and datasets. For a while, the universe was likened to an enormous mechanical clock, and a conceit arose that with sufficient data, theory, and computational power, science might one day refine predicting human affairs to a high accuracy. More recent discoveries of relativity, quantum mechanics, and chaos theory show the fallacy of this thinking, even challenging precise astronomic forecasts.

Postmodernism has questioned other fundamentals, so that definitive statements about even the present can seem audacious. However, the quest for the perfect should not obstruct the search of the helpful. The failure to develop a widely accepted science of history does not negate the existence of useful and durable historical principles; the fact that the future can never be known with certainty does not mean that little of value can be said about it.

The futurist and systems thinker Hartmut Bossel has usefully likened the range of future possibilities as constrained within ‘‘riverbeds’’ of likelihood. Many properties of human and natural systems compose these riverbanks. As well as the laws and principles of physics, genetics, biology, evolution etc, perhaps the most fundamental determinant of the future is that it must evolve from the present. This means not only that future human society will be strongly influenced by current and recent economic and social trends and theories, but also that past alliances, injustices, resentments, and enmity cannot be wished away. Historical facts, transmitted in the culture and contained within the psychology and memory of billions of people, will inevitably influence the future. There are a myriad of such facts and memories, and together they act to significantly restrict the range of possible futures.

Similarly, existing institutions—social conventions, interpersonal networks, rules, agencies of government, markets, laws, and norms—are embedded in the memory, customs, and behavior of the 7.2 billion souls currently alive. Institutions change, but their rate of change is slowed by the complex conceptual, legal, and psychological elements through which change must be filtered. Other identifiable riverbed components include demographic and infrastructural inertia and the plausible rate of technologic evolution. For example, barring calamity, such as nuclear war or an asteroid impact, the human population in 2020 will inevitably be larger than 7.5 billion. Similarly, there are maximal rates of technologic transition, such as the development and diffusion of a solar- and hydrogen-fueled energy system that cannot be plausibly exceeded. Though daunting, the generation of plausible futures is not impossible, and many spheres of science—especially physical, ecologic, and social—have made and will continue to make important contributions to this developing field. Perhaps one day scientific disciplines of both the future and history will be mature and respected.

Scenarios

All humans build scenarios and create mental models of the future. We all know that the sun will rise tomorrow, and we project many other elements of the present into the short-term future, such our plans for a holiday or even retirement. But as the length of focus and the variety of possible outcomes increase, confidence we can have in our projections diminishes rapidly.

Some futurists imagine a world of extremely rapid technological innovation and transformation. It is possible to conceive of a future full of energy- and greenhouse gas emission–sparing devices, of new crops that reduce cultivation pressure on marginal land, of techniques that harness biology to large-scale industrial processes, and of new forms of communication that enable the rapid diffusion of information, literacy, and education. Such visions can then be used to forecast optimistic rates of hunger alleviation, of slowed greenhouse gas accumulation, of adequate water quantity and quality, and so on.

Lay scenarios and social thresholds

Planning, whether for the next hunt, crop or corporate takeover, is an ancient human characteristic and has often formed the basis for attempts to enlist celestial help. In well-governed societies, sophisticated economic and social planning is routine. As large as the formal scenario literature is, an even larger mass of lay scenarios exists within people's imagination. The collective imagination of the near-term future by large numbers of people can sometimes mobilize society in ways that significantly influence that future, such as by large-scale protests and revolution.

In some cases, social thresholds are passed that are beneficial to society, freedom, and population health. For example, the peace movements in Western countries in the 1980s arose in part because millions of ordinary people became sufficiently concerned about a potential nuclear Armageddon (a lay scenario) to vehemently protest. In turn, this reduced the risk of global nuclear war. Shortly after, mass social movements in Eastern Europe led to the peaceful fall of several governments.

In other cases, such as the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest in Beijing, collective imagination proved, premature. The Rwandan genocide of 1994, when one-sixth of the country’s population was rapidly slaughtered, illustrates the passing of a social threshold that was immensely damaging to population health. Although this event may seem an inexplicable example of barbarity, other workers have suggested that the genocide was in fact a foreseeable and understandable consequence of resentment and resource scarcity leavened by the rapid growth in the number of largely unemployed, landless, manipulable, and desperate young men.

Problems with existing scenarios

Large-scale thresholds, whether social or environmental, are problems for scenario maker. These thresholds that lead to the quantitatively and qualitatively altered post-threshold states are hard to predict. Though their nature is uncertain and contested, their occurrence is well understood, not only by scenario workers, but also by the lay public. Evidence for this exists in the plethora of sayings in many languages and cultures, such as ‘‘a chain is only as strong as its weakest link’’ and ‘‘it is the last straw that breaks the camel’s back.’’

Most scenario builders work in groups, and reaching a consensus about the scale and timing of thresholds introduces another difficulty. This may be complicated by a wish to not appear too negative, because of the risk of marginalization of more pessimistic forecasts, such as the Limits to Growth or those from Lester Brown.

The precise prediction of most thresholds (other than their general existence) will almost always be wrong, and this may thus be seen as reducing the credibility of scenario theory. Thus there may be a tendency for most scenarios, especially those developed by groups, to understate their frequency and severity. Thresholds are also problematic for quantitative modelers, who can still rarely factor thresholds into their models. Imagine, for example, the political difficulty of introducing an equation that specifies a population-reducing calamity such as a civil war once population density, poverty, and inequality exceed thresholds.

But, excluding such factors can produce implausibly optimistic scenarios. For example, the United Nations Population Division has long provided forecasts of the global population based only on demographic factors such as birthrates and average life expectancy. The possibility of large-scale war is entirely absent from consideration, and has led to absurdly high projections of maximum global population. Although more recent UN population projections have been lowered in response to the scale of the HIV epidemic, their projections continue to assume, implausibly, an absence of other adverse threshold events.

In other cases, the inability to factor in positive social thresholds may lead to excessively pessimistic scenarios. One such pessimistic scenario posits the almost complete loss of civil society, especially in developing countries, thus leading to ‘‘barbarisation’’. Countering forces are likely to sequester such outbreaks, though with local spread, for example to Syria and Iraq, Congo and South Sudan... but not yet to Hawaii and Edinburgh.

Conclusion

Most scenario framers claim their visions are equally plausible, actually they are equally implausible. Exaggerating existing tendencies to reveal clearly distinct futures is makes such futures unlikely; a blend of various scenarios is far more likely, but more messy and harder to sell. Most scenarios are caricatures that will not occur on a global scale. Most scenarios are biased toward optimism and the privileging of Western values, and understate the risk of adverse social and environmental thresholds. Despite their limitations, scenarios can still be of value. The imagination of alternative futures can provide insight into policy formulation. The visualisation of adverse consequences may influence preventive policies. Desirable scenarios may inspire decision makers to work constructively.

Governments, corporations, and defense organizations will continue to explore diverse scenarios. Adding social, environmental, climatic, ecologic, and health aspects to the scenario literature can only help. More place is warranted for desirable scenarios. Scenario workers could then work backward from this imagined future to the present to see how it might be achieved. The wide involvement of civil society in the process of imagining such a future (though not one that is utopian) could be useful.

Global social affairs are enormous juggernaut, beyond control and operating in a competitive global market on a planet with limited resources and a human population that may be beginning to realize its collective footprint and, perhaps, its collective responsibility. Although ideally we will look before we leap, ‘‘he who hesitates is lost’’ may reflect the competitive pressure that most people work with. These competitive forces constrain the power of decision makers to influence the future.

The global environmental system has tremendous inertial and self-organizational properties. Although humans have long influenced the global environment, it is hubristic to think geo-engineering or other strategies will radically and beneficially alter this environment within a few generations. At best, our influence will probably be painfully limited, although a small contribution could still prove very valuable, given that we do not yet know the full biosocial capacity of the planet.

Workers in health, ecology, and other fields related to sustainability can collectively make a crucial contribution. This is to challenge the view that limits are neither real nor close. The excessively optimistic counterview, found especially in some economic and demographic literature, has been characterized as one that ‘‘lays stress on new ideas as a source of progress, supposing that the growth of ideas is capable of circumventing any constraint the natural-resource base may impose on the ability of economies to grow indefinitely’’ (Dasgupta, 2000).

This counterview is powerful in the worldview of many currently influential people. Taken to extremes, it is a kind of magical thinking. Alan Greenspan proclaimed faith in the capacity of the market to generate solutions to the current high cost of oil. I too have some faith in the capacity of society to solve its problems, as does Dasgupta. However, left to the market alone, such solutions are likely to be at a high social cost.

Technology is not the only crucial element for the future, including for health. The quality of our institutions, culture, aspirations, rules, norms, and resource distribution is of at least equal importance. Science needs to contribute to both. Peering into the fog, it is still possible to discern a future better than the present, but it will take much hard work, the change of some fundamental values, and, probably, a good measure of luck.

Dasgupta P (2000) Population and resources: an exploration of reproductive and environmental externalities.