What do Environmentalists, JRR Tolkein, Luddites, and Progressives all have in common?

The answer is both easy and complicated all at once. The core of it is fear, but the roots lie deeply embedded in the human psyche, all the way back to a time when something out of the ordinary in the environment surrounding a lone hunter/gatherer human had to be read as a danger sign – a red flag, a siren screaming danger, danger! things have changed and that means you could be at risk.

We see this in our own lives and in modern self-awareness: humans hate change. If the office changes how the cubicles are laid out, even if there were complaints before about the layout, now there are a torrent of laments about how horrible the new set-up is. If the 911 emergency system says that your town can’t have 4 ‘Post Roads’ in varied locations and they must rename three of them, petitions circulate and the next Town Hall is packed. Now, let’s expand that to the last few hundred years. Any historian will show you that the arc of progress, of changing and improving technology, has been accelerating upward in a nearly breakneck curve of such steepness it’s difficult to predict what comes next. Which means that humans are still suffering from a collective breakdown over the Industrial Revolution.

Yesterday I wrote about the myths surrounding chemicals, cancer, and foods, and how it has come to a crescendo in the recent decades. A near hysteria surrounds the idea that synthetic, or man-made, substances are somehow responsible for the rise in cancers in the modern era. Firstly, as the paper by Dr. Bruce Ames I was drawing inspiration from points out, cancer is not actually on the rise. What is on the rise is the human lifespan, and cancer is, in some ways, the result of living long enough. I won’t delve into that, other than to say – the fear is based on a misconception, and the specificity of the fear is based on human nature: a fear of change.

Paradoxically, humans individually seek change. Exploration, modern medicine, science itself, our yearning for the stars and the mystery of the Final Frontier… we are constantly looking for ways to change, to become better, bigger, and healthier. The two halves come into conflict in many ways, but the rubbing point here is: fear of technology leads to a determination of correlation that it causes disease. Nevermind that correlation does not equal causation. The narrative is firm and clear: modern technology, and especially industry, is bad, unhealthy, and will lead to our collective doom.

JRR Tolkein wrote a compelling, epic metaphor for the development of the modern world in his saga of The Lord of the Rings. The Shire is a paragon of bucolic country life, an idyllic existence threatened by the looming towers and black sooty smoke of Mordor – which is, of course, the factories that were springing up all over his beloved England. He was neither the first, nor the last, to lament the rise of industry and the fall of the lifestyle that came before it. Even at the end of his tale, the Shire is rebuilt, but it is changed, and those who sought to destroy Mordor are forever changed and cannot return to the former bliss.

The reality of the life before the Industrial Revolution was not all peaches and cream, but the narrative spun in fiction, song, and heavily biased histories is of a simpler, quieter time. One that we should strive to return to. Oh, I’m not glorifying the early days of industry. There were many dangers inherent in the change. Birth is a messy, dangerous business. But with the discovery of pathogens as causative of disease, the development in those factories of sterilizing agents which were then produced cheaply and plentifully, birth was suddenly a joyful bringing forth of a new life, and infant mortality – along with maternal mortality – plunged back into the darkness that came before.

The irony is that the very revolution which was so hated and feared by groups by the Luddites, and is so worked on to destroy by present-day Progressives (can we call them Anti-Progressives? Their moniker is terribly misleading) makes the current concern over what might possibly cause cancer possible. Longer lives, safer lives, healthier lives, are the result of the technological advancements we’ve seen in the last two hundred years. That leaves us able to drill down and focus on the tiny problems, the parts-per-billion doses of toxins, rather than the dull heavy resignation to the coming plague that would sweep over Europe and decimate the population… again. We have progressed to a point where we can cry out and reject a single death. I look back and see mothers who bore nineteen children… and three lived to adulthood.

Perhaps it is cold to look at the statistics and say ‘one death is less than a thousand deaths.’ That’s what I’m always tempted to do when the anti-vaccination movement comes up. I refrain, because I know that all I’ll do is make them bristle and reflexively angry. That, and it’s not true. The evidence for vaccinations causing deaths and disabilities is… well, it’s not. Frankly, coldly, vaccination is a product of the revolution, and without it we would see the specter of Pestilence riding over the land once again.

The fear turns on itself like a small rabid animal, gnawing and attacking the hands that want only to help. Humans have come to fear themselves and to want to destroy their own species. We talk about preventing extinction, while advocating for the extinction of the human race. The feeling is so pervasive that I once had a conversation with an otherwise lovely, normal, caring woman, who happened to be my epidemiology professor, in which she advocated for the death and retardation of development in millions of people. Because if they lived, and were able to achieve their full, healthy potential, she truly believed that they would eat enough to lead to the fall of the Earth via resource depletion. The insidious evil behind this sort of belief is that the people advocating blindly for the mass deaths of humans they have never met is that they believe they personally should live. But not those other people – they should die, because we humans are killing the earth.

But don’t take my word for it. After all, I could be making this up, or indulging in hyperbole.

“…which means the only realistic solution is to reduce the number of humans on the planet.” (Jody McCutcheon, Eluxe Magazine)

“We are a plague on the Earth […] Either we limit our population growth, of the natural world will do it for us, and the natural world is doing it for us right now.” (David Attenborough, 2013)

“The human race is in a suicidal run to self-destruction.” (Paul Farrell, MarketWatch 2014)

“The truth is that the contribution of the individual cannot be reduced to zero. Only the lack of the individual can bring it down to nothing.” (Chris Rapley, 2006)

“There are already too many people on the planet…” (Holly Moeller, 2014)

The fear of change, of progress, of the human race itself, mingles into a toxic mess that advocates for the suppression of the poor who, the elites fear, will overpopulate the earth and destroy it. From a position of great privilege, advocates lobby for the suppression of vaccines which spare millions from the threat of pestilence. They lobby for the elimination of pesticides that eliminate vermin destroying food crops, or parasites that directly affect humans. They decry the technology-driven development of genetically enhanced foods like golden rice, or Bt eggplant that can feed and nourish the poor in undeveloped countries. They spread the fear in mass media and suppress the development of industries that could alleviate some of the very problems they most fear.

So I find myself standing in the shadow of Mordor, wondering when this will change, when science can be free to question ‘settled’ doctrine, and when we can work on practical solutions that do not involve having the blood of innocents on our hands. Blind eyes do not want to see what technology has done for them, and what more it can do in the future. Blind eyes turn to the past and mourn something that never existed. Agricultural life, pastoral vistas, the Shire… it was no lost paradise. It was a short, hard life full of disease and ended sooner than it needed to. Human nature might be immutable, but the future is infinitely mutable if we set our minds to it.


Comments

18 responses to “Retrogression”

  1. I call them “regressives”. They hate any actual progress that doesn’t lead to greater power and status for them and their “our kind, dear”.

    1. Well, that’s why I named the post what I did – a retreating backward into a past that never existed.

  2. Jeff Gauch Avatar
    Jeff Gauch

    “can we call them Anti-Progressives? Their moniker is terribly misleading”

    That is rather the point, isn’t it? If they called themselves neo-feudalists hardly anyone would actually listen to them, much less give them the power they so desperately crave.

    1. So very true. Which is also the point of the emotional manipulation surrounding the whole ‘we’re killing the earth!’ that boils down to ‘those nasty poor people are in danger of realizing they outnumber us.’

  3. Wolfie Avatar
    Wolfie

    *shrug* you know how I feel. I hate them. In many cases they’re moronic hypocritical incompetents with delusions of grandeur. In others they know EXACTLY what they’re doing and are just cynically using the morons to gain more power. I’d love to be able to strip them of their delusions, hell of everything they own…and feed them to [in the case of those who cry we’re killing the planet] the very eco system they say they’re trying to protect. because most assuredly that eco system if you drop them in some of the more ‘beautiful’ parts of it..will kill them, not necessarily quickly and go on about it’s business.

    1. As I pointed out yesterday, nature is hardly benign.

      1. Wolfie Avatar
        Wolfie

        no it’s not but you can’t tell them idiots that. they get all indignant and start calling you all sorts of entertaining names and say you’re part of the problem. hence my wanting to do that to them. Hell drop a big group into the middle of it…statistically one of them at least is gonna survive and probably come out a completely changed individual and tell his former eco comprades “are you fucking NUTS! I’m the only survivor out of *pick a number* dropped into a green hell and the planet killed us off one by one. Disease, plants, animals I once thought harmless killed all. but. me.” Not that I expect the ones who didn’t get dropped with out all their technological goodies that we all depend on to change their minds, mind you but…

        *shrug* I have a dream.

        1. Tom Clancy did a great bit of wish-fulfillment on just that theme in one of his books – I don’t recall which one any longer.

          1. That was Rainbow Six.

  4. Uncle Lar Avatar
    Uncle Lar

    Malthus was an idiot. He failed to realize that population increases exponentially while technology increases logarithmically. And even that is worst case as credible evidence continues to present itself that as a population increases in general wealth the birth rate falls off. In fact in many first world countries that rate has fallen below steady state, thus mandating increased immigration simply to maintain population levels.

    1. It’s amazing to me how many outlets I looked at while researching this article that presented Malthus’ theories as still valid – I found one that called him discredited, but they were still warning of overpopulation. And yes, many of these articles mention the falling birthrate in higher-education families – and they offset that by saying ‘oh, but if you’re better off, you consume more, so therefore it doesn’t help.’

      1. Paul (Drak Bibliophile) Howard Avatar
        Paul (Drak Bibliophile) Howard

        I’ve heard that Malthus actually talked about how “what he fore-saw” could be prevented. Including developments that actually prevented his “dire prediction”.

        In other words, he’s somebody who is quoted in support of agendas that he wouldn’t agree are necessary.

  5. paladin3001 Avatar
    paladin3001

    Progressives, enviromentalists (emphasis on the mental), you name it. I lump them all under the label of neo-luddites. The whole “humanity needs to be winnowed” goes back to at least the 70’s with Paul Ehrlich and his tome of doom and gloom “The Population Bomb”.

    1. And he got it from Malthus.

  6. But there ARE too many people on the planet. We need to send more of them to Space. And anyone who says to me “You first” will get my enthusiastic agreement. 🙂

    1. Yes, ok, this is a very good point. But it’s me first!

  7. […] wrote last week about the environmentalists, who would have us return the Earth to some idyllic ‘unspoiled’ state. I have debated in the […]

  8. […] all that is done is to look at the past, and lament it’s lost glory – whether the retrogressive longs for the days before the Industrial Revolution, or the newly-underemployed bemoans the job […]