Something I tell libertarians that a few of us lefties could stand to hear...

[cthulu2016]

Last edited Sat Nov 24, 2012, 08:59 PM - Edit history (7)

20th century capitalism and pesticides and vaccines and modified foods and capitalism (it deserves two mentions) more than doubled the size of the human race, and fed them and cared for them at least as well as they had been fed throughout history.

I like to point this out to libertarians who rail against how our economy doesn't work. Our post gold-standard economy that somehow doesn't work and hinders the economy is precisely what has done things no previous economic structure could. It is amazing, really. Our terrible, terrible fiat money boondoggle economy has created, in a blink of history's eye, half the people who have ever lived, and most of the infrastructure humans ever built, and most of the buildings human's ever erected, and an amazing amount of human produced food. (But hey, people were so much happier in the middle ages...)

And, goose and gander-wise, critiques of modern economy from the left face the same obstacle. Capitalism and franken-science have done amazing things, and if the billions of surplus people alive as a result were polled they would probably say that was a good thing... in that way we all have of thinking our existence is better than the alternative.

For all their ills, were it not for all these marvels of the corrupt modern world, most people wouldn't exist. They would never have been born, or died in infancy, or starved in childhood.

I am a curmudgeon and I tend to agree that it was probably a mistake to use our economic and material technology to allow the world to support billions of more people.

I am not, however, in a hurry to tell several billion people they are an error, and need to be put down (or sterilized)—particularly since there is a good chance that I am one of the "extra" people.

And I don't know a human moral framework that doesn't value persons intrinsically... even if they 'shouldn't' have existed in the first place. So I am stuck. I cannot see my way clear to breaking a few eggs to make an omelet when those eggs are units of a billion persons.

Yes... I will admit it. Part of me is more comfortable with some unknown-to-me person out a billion starving rather than eating the last chimpanzee. I watch a documentary about people supplementing their diet with fantastic animals and I'm irrate... how dare they! But I would do the same if I lived in some exotic locale and had a hut full of my hungry children.

People breed too much. No doubt. But having a family is, to most people, the ultimate satisfaction of human nature. Simply saying, "people shouldn't breed so much" is not easy. And saying that we are overly baby-happy because our nature evolved in a reality where half of infants died in infancy is, despite being true, probably not entirely comforting to would-be parents.

If I was designing the world from scratch it would be more sustainable. It is not easy, however, to find a non-sociopathic moral space from which to easily rectify these ills. We are not going to let the system crash and take down billions through sarvation, disease and war. We, human beings, are not going to just let the system find equilibrium at an immense human cost. And that probably speaks well of us.

I do not think people fixated on stagnant sustainability, and how Greece would do better with a barter economy, and how vaccines are a major health problem are actually in the moral space of a Stalin or Mao. I think they just haven't thought through the unpleasant implications of identifying half the people in the world as surplus.