geography for beginners #4

It’s sometimes dry
in Mumbai
when it’s wet
in Phuket,
but there’s no rain
in Bahrain,
only a downpour
in Lahore.

It’s often windy
in Rawalpindi,
although it’s windier
in India,
and the monsoon
in Rangoon
makes it wetter
than Quetta.

the failure of capitalism

A week ago, I read a report on the BBC news website about how coal is powering much of China’s economic expansion, which is bad enough given its likely effect on global warming and climate change, but the part that really struck me was the following:

Jeff and Ada Qian both work as IT specialists for international firms in Shanghai. At home in their flat they and their 10-month-old son Tim enjoy many of the comforts of modern life. They have air conditioning, a car, a fridge, a washing machine and two televisions.

“I feel so far our life is good,” said Jeff. “But I think people always have ambitions, you always want to have more. If I have more money I want to have a better car, a bigger apartment.”

Today perhaps one-third of China’s 1.4 billion people live like this, and many of the rest aspire to.

“I think many of China’s people would like a lifestyle like us," said Ada.

This extract succinctly sums up what’s wrong with the modern capitalist system, which encourages wasteful, needless consumption by focusing on the individual and the satisfaction of personal desires over the collective needs of the world as a whole. Unfortunately, consumption is integral to the capitalist system and is seen as virtuous, even mandatory. During the early part of the Industrial Revolution, capitalism was clearly the optimum form of social organization; indeed, it drove much of the social progress of the nineteenth century. However, resources were plentiful then, and few cared much about tomorrow. Resources are no longer so abundant, yet the present system encourages aspirations that can only deplete those dwindling resources at an ever-increasing pace rather than conserve them to be channelled into useful applications.

In the quoted extract we have, by any standards, an obviously prosperous couple who still want more, while hundreds of millions of their fellow Chinese remain in poverty. It is a scenario that is repeated around the world, both by citizens of the developed nations with respect to those in the developing world, and by elites in developing countries with respect to their compatriots. Yet by satisfying such demand we merely accelerate the inevitable. When are we going to develop a social and political system that encourages people to use less, not consume more? Answer: only when the various crises that are likely to kick in over the next couple of decades really hurt, when people are affected personally.

The recent financial meltdown should have been a wake-up call, but already we’re almost back to business as usual, particularly for the bankers, brokers and others at the top of the greasy pole of acquisition and accumulation who created that problem in the first place. Wealth creation? The global financial system is merely a clever wheeze for channelling money from poor countries into the already bulging pockets of the rich. We’re poorly placed to withstand the next crisis when it comes along. What will that be? Well, my bet is that degradation of the global environment (destruction of forests, rapacious extraction of minerals and other raw materials, etc.), which has been a problem for a long time, mainly because we don’t place a cash value on that environment, and which has accelerated rapidly in recent years, is going to start to have a massive effect on people’s lives fairly soon. You can’t expect finite resources to last for ever, but we behave as if we do. And the environmental crunch, when it does come, will make the recent credit crunch seem like a genteel tea party by comparison.

And what about the population crunch, when that comes? It is an iron law of ecology that the population of a species cannot exceed the carrying capacity of the environment it finds itself in. We as a species are clever enough to be able to postpone the inevitability of an ultimate population crash, but not clever enough to see that we cannot do so indefinitely. Drastic action is needed now on all fronts. The human race is in deep shit, and those of us at the top of the tree need to dramatically downsize our lifestyles, not encourage others to climb to our level. Unfortunately, I don’t expect anyone to follow this advice until we can actually see the precipice ahead, by which time it will be much too late to find out that the brakes don’t work.

who's fooling who?

You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all of the time.

Abraham Lincoln, in a speech delivered in Clinton, Missouri, in February 1858.

Some people can be induced to believe almost anything with remarkably little effort. It’s a thought that has been expressed many times, although seldom as succinctly as by President Lincoln. I was reminded of it one day in 2003 by my neighbour, a self-righteous lady who makes snap judgements about everyone and everything, and who continually makes outrageous statements based as much on prejudice as on any dispassionate assessment of the evidence.

“What d’you think about that thing in Hong Kong?” she enquired when I met her in the street one morning.

“Not much!” I replied casually.

There is little mileage in getting excited about something that you are utterly powerless to influence or affect.

“Don’t you know what’s happening there?” she asked scornfully, in the process jumping to yet another of her misplaced conclusions.

Of course I did. Like anyone who’d just spent four months in Hong Kong, I’d been aware of SARS since well before Christmas, but it seemed at the time—and still does—to have been nothing more than the latest viral nasty from East Asia, a little nastier perhaps, a little more virulent than usual, but certainly not a cause for undue concern. From a distance of eight thousand miles, it was hard to feel a sense of the panic that was apparently gripping Hong Kong.

“It was al-Qaeda!” announced my neighbour self-importantly.

Well at least she made a better stab at the proper pronunciation than did President Bush or any of his lieutenants. But there really is no way to argue with this kind of statement. I merely disagreed politely and continued down the street. My neighbour probably wouldn’t have accepted an outright denial delivered in person by Osama bin Laden himself.

In fact, we can confidently turf this hypothesis out of the window, as too the notion that it was all down to unhygienic farming practices in China, keeping pigs and chickens too close to humans, or something like that, allowing the easy transference of infective agents across species. This idea was mooted a few days after the encounter with my neighbour by a correspondent writing in the letters page of the Daily Mail, a leading refuge for members of the loony Right in the United Kingdom. The suggestion, made very forcefully, was that China be subjected to an immediate and total quarantine until it had cleaned up both its act and its pig sties. The risk was of the decimation of the world’s population by a pandemic on the scale of the one that followed the First World War, which killed many tens of millions of people. You could detect a strong whiff of xenophobia in the letter, another characteristic that my neighbour has in abundance.

Anyway, the reason for this diversion into recent history is to emphasize my point that reality is not a requirement when such people rush to judgement. However, two other aspects of the 2003 SARS epidemic in southern China are also relevant to the discussion. The first is the idea that boiling vinegar might be efficacious in fighting the infection. As in the old wives’ tales that once dominated popular thinking in the West, there may be a kernel of truth in the notion, but it does seem equally likely that you might ward off bubonic plague armed only with a pocketful of posies. And then there was the claim made by some of the scientists investigating the outbreak in Amoy Gardens, a housing estate in east Kowloon, that the infection was being spread by cockroaches. Never can straws have been clutched at so resolutely.

It turns out that scientists are no less gullible than the rest of the population, easy prey for anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of the weaknesses in the so-called scientific method and a bent for trickery. There have been plenty of instances: scientists are either easily hoodwinked or so dogmatically determined not to be fooled that they are unable to see the screamingly obvious. The cold fusion controversy of the 1990s is a case in point. Was it a hoax? The protagonists, Martin Fleishmann and Stanley Pons, remain convinced that cold fusion works and claim that they were against releasing details at the time because they felt that the idea needed more work. However, their employers, the University of Utah, wanted to ensure that it would be first with the announcement in order to be able to bask in the kudos of being the host for such ground-breaking work, so it rushed out the lamentably incomplete information it had with all the fanfare and razzamatazz of a major press conference. Once the initial excitement had died down, it was inevitable, given the insufficiency of detail, that no one would be able to replicate the experiment, so it was soon dismissed as nonsense. However, whether it was a hoax or merely incompetent science, you will note, in passing, that the main opponents of the idea were those with the most to lose in terms of public reputation if cold fusion really were possible.

We are on much firmer ground when we discuss Piltdown Man. At least we are on ground that is firmer than that from which this purported missing link in the evolution of Homo sapiens was unearthed in 1933. It was in fact a crude forgery, pieces of an unusually thick human skull with the jawbone of an orang utan that had been filed down to make its true identity less obvious. This find confirmed the dominant theories of the time, that our fossil ancestors, when found, would carry a noble human braincase atop a simian frame, so the skull was not finally denounced as a hoax until 1951, partly because so many leading scientists staked their less than solid reputations on its being genuine. The identity of the hoaxer has never been discovered.

A similar but less well-remembered hoax took place at Glozel, a hamlet in the foothills of the Auvergne just outside Vichy in southern France, in 1924, which again targeted the archæological community. In an overgrown field soon to become internationally famous as le champ des morts (‘the field of the dead’), a cow stumbled into a hole in the ground. To cut a very long story down to manageable proportions, this event led to the discovery of vast quantities of artifacts, mainly pottery, frequently intact, on a site that should not have been able to produce even a fraction of these quantities, and certainly not undamaged. The soil was shallow, and the field was on a slope, so the degree of water throughflow would have ensured that no archæological sequence could have developed. And to cap it all, some of the pottery was so badly fired that it actually dissolved in water. It took an international commission, but the Glozel ‘finds’ were finally found wanting.

However, there is a telling postscript to this story. Many years later, a new technique for dating ancient pottery was developed: by measuring the thermoluminescence of a pot, the approximate date when it had last been fired could be determined. The pioneers of this technique tried it on some pots from Glozel, and they came up with, not a modern date for their firing as the archæologists had expected, but a date around two thousand years ago. The physicists could see nothing wrong with their methods, or any flaws in the underlying science, while the archæologists were equally insistent that the Glozel site was not just implausible. It was impossible. Even when faced with damning evidence that they must, somehow, be mistaken, the physicists had faith in science, as all its practitioners are required to do. This misplaced faith is now enshrined in the pages of Wikipedia, which confidently proclaims the Glozel site to be genuine, solely on the basis of the thermoluminescence data.

It is sometimes said that we live in an age of science, but that is not true. We live in an age of faith. Faith in science. The mediæval connotations of the phrase ‘an age of faith’ are not out of place, because there is an unquestioning orthodoxy about some key areas of science today, typified by the single voice with which scientists proclaim the origin of the universe in the Big Bang. The original theory has had to be modified more than once. For example, once it had become possible to calculate the mass of the universe, it also became apparent that we couldn’t see four-fifths of it. Hence the invention of ‘dark matter’, ‘invention’ being a mere courtesy title. On encountering such intellectual legerdemain, one is bound to ask: “How can you tell if what you can’t see isn’t there?”

And once the physicists had calculated the age of the universe, it became apparent that the structure seen in the present universe, at the current rate of expansion, couldn’t have been produced in the time available. Hence ‘inflation’. Expansion of the universe had been faster at some unspecified time in the past. Despite this blatant fudging, challenge is heresy; the penalty is excommunication. Naturally, no one likes to be thought a fool, so the silence is self-enforcing. Alternative and equally rigorous theories are not even discussed, or are dismissed outright as crackpottery, a term that would be more appropriate to describe the artifacts from Glozel.

However, it should be noted that there are many fields of science that are comprehensively beyond reproach. Anyone with a basic science education can follow the vast accumulation of evidence in favour of the theory of evolution, for example. Only someone who believes in the literal truth of the Bible would think it plausible to argue against such a well-attested theory, and on the terminally fatuous grounds that evolution contradicts their treasured source of knowledge. But this kind of idiot tends to dismiss all of science as a conspiracy, which of course it is not.

The problem lies with esoteric fields of science such as cosmology and theoretical physics. The vast majority of the general public are unable to follow the assertions of the ‘experts’ in these fields, because the mathematics involved is far too difficult, so they are reduced to accepting such assertions on faith. Ours may be a more sophisticated age, but at root there is little difference between this situation and that of credulous peasants toiling in the fields of ancient Sumer being told of the latest pronouncements by the city’s priests. These latter may have been able to predict eclipses and other astronomical phenomena, but they also advocated human sacrifice as a means of appeasing the capricious gods whom they alleged caused these events. In this matter only have we advanced in the intervening six thousand years.

did you know that...

a noise annoys an oyster?