Predicting the future is an easy game in which everyone can play – as the only stakes are one’s reputation provided that a critic cares enough to look up your record and beat you over the head with it.
The wild gibberish of Nostradamus still sells well, over 450 years later. One shelf in the Institute library is filled with the dire predictions of environmentalists over the years – one favorite is Lowell Ponte’s 1976 prediction of a pending ice age as industrial pollutants cut down on sunlight. Resting beside it is the 1970 collection of apocalyptic predictions of Paul Ehrlich (Population Resources Environment: Issues in Human Ecology) – now largely discredited. Jonathan Schell is still in the prognostication business although his predictions of an imminent nuclear holocaust in The Fate of the Earth are out the window. Schell still writes profitable books while Ehrlich had a long academic career (but did lose a substantial bet about the prices of commodities that he predicted would have been depleted by 2000).
A more useful hint about the future comes from the recent book Constant Battles by the Harvard archeologist Steven LeBlanc (St. Martin’s Press, New York, 2003). Reaching the conclusions already pointed to by other near-heretical archeologists and anthropologists, LeBlanc points out that the roots of most human conflict are easily explained. Part of the theory is hardly new: Most human societies exploit their environment to the limits that their technology and home range can tolerate, but once their numbers grow to the point where their prosperity is threatened, it is time to see what can be stripped from the neighbours.
What makes LeBlanc new is his very unfashionable perspective; sub-state societies (or non-state actors in contemporary thought) are far more likely to engage in this sort of behavior than states do. Moreover, only states – particularly Western ones – have ways of containing or diverting this drive for exploitation and aggression.
As stability also rests with issues of population growth and the ability to exploit one’s environment, the prosperity of the Western World will be the greatest asset for peace the world has ever seen. Our prosperity tends to limit natural population growth (a behavior that extends to second generation immigrants), and our relentless scientific progress keeps expanding our ability to harness our resources in an efficient manner.
Human population growth is continuing – though not as fast as we once feared, the prosperity engendered by the liberal democracies is spreading elsewhere. So are our abilities to use our resources more wisely. Although environmentalists – who have all cited Ehrlich, Schell, et al, and who firmly believe primitive societies are inherently peaceful and respectful of the environment – cannot admit it, but the environment in Western Europe and North America is improving.
The environmental lobby also believes that genetic engineering will only be the latest catastrophe mankind has wrought on the planet. The environmentalists should try reading Jonathan Rauch’s article “Will Frankenfood Save the Planet” in the October 2003 edition of Atlantic Monthly. Genetic engineering in the agricultural sector leaves a lot of people uneasy, and with no real reason. What is wrong with an agricultural sector that greatly reduces soil erosion (as no plows are necessary), needs far fewer chemical pesticides and fertilizers, and restores topsoil? This is not a pipedream but a description of the impressive successes of the ongoing major pilot programs in Virginia. Increased yields and vastly reduced environmental stress means that another agricultural revolution is underway, and the world will not need to fear hunger.
The doomsayers of the 1970s forecast that the world would soon run out of copper, coal, oil and other vital resources. What they failed to anticipate was the ongoing revolution in material sciences. For example, fiber optic tubes (made of silicon) do a far better job than copper wire. We have become very efficient in our use of fuel and are rapidly producing cars that use a fraction of the fuel that the cars of 1970 did, all while finding more reserves than ever before. The microbiology and emerging nanotechnology revolutions promise even more dramatic efficiencies in our use of natural resources.
In short, the primary incentives for warfare, the depletion of resources and population growth, will not be a concern for the liberal democracies of the Western World. This will not be true elsewhere. China, India, and the Middle East are facing the possibility of severe environmental stress, and while it may become possible to overcome this with the emerging technologies, they might not be able to afford them, or would be unwilling to embrace them.
Moreover, in much of the modern world humans have become removed from immediate fears of famine and acute material want (save only those ruled by the most disorganized and incompetent of governments – such as those in much of Africa). One result is that people have completely redefined their expectations of their societies. Now, in North America, Western Europe, most of Asia and the Middle East, and elsewhere, what we want is related to purpose and meaning. For example, in much of the Middle East, there are tens of millions of restless young men (to say nothing of the women) who are fed, clothed, housed, and provided with a basic education, but who have no idea of what it is that they will do with that education. In China, the necessary means of existence now seem secure for the vast majority of the population (for the first time in their history), so now their minds turn to questions of what is the place of their society in the World.
People will commit violence over issues of collective status, prestige, self-identity and self-expression. There are instances enough of this within living memory in Western civilization; the growing belligerence of China and Islamic Fundamentalism from the Middle East are renewing our acquaintance with the phenomenon. The threats posed by Islamic Fundamentalism and – indirectly for now – by China could easily lead to real conflict, particularly as both the hyper-nationalists among the Chinese and the Muslim World see our society as an obstacle to their own aspirations and our successes as a direct threat to how they think both their own societies and the world should be ordered.
There are also numerous instances in history of how human societies can collapse in both a mass psychological and in a physical sense. In 19th Century Ireland, the population dwindled from a high of over 10 million to around 3 million – the Potato Famine of the 1840s started the process by killing about 1.5 million people, but emigration did the rest of the damage. In a world filled with ‘failed states’, ‘collapsed states’ and ‘terrorist states’, it is clear that the survival of many Nation States is not assured.
The decline of Russia has continued over the last 30 years. The looming failure of the Soviet society was first apparent to some observers in the 1960s (Arthur Koestler even predicted it in the 1950s), and the desperate attempts at reform in the 1980s did nothing to stave it off – nor have Yeltsin or Putin been able to seriously retard the process. Russian life expectancy has shrunk, those young people that can leave are doing so as quickly as they can, and the Russian population inside the former USSR is collapsing. In large parts of Eastern Siberia, the majority population now consists of illegal Chinese immigrants; the Russian government has just closed whole cities in the Far North by ending the subsidies for their inhabitants; and the fertility rate for Russians themselves has plunged.
With each decade, the ability of the Russian government to rule will diminish, and its population will retreat – leaving a vacuum that other peoples will fill. By the middle of this century, if the present trends continue, ‘Russia’ might be little more in size than the state that Ivan the Terrible inherited in the 16th Century.
Sub-Saharan Africa is another area where chaotic conditions and a failing population is already presenting problems. The failure of almost all African governments to govern effectively has been clearly evident for years, but the full severity of the AIDS epidemic there has yet to be realized. In Africa, AIDS is almost out of control, and is rapidly emerging as the leading cause of death. In some communities, almost all of the adults have HIV/AIDS and most of the children are born infected. Elsewhere in Africa, all of the educated/technical classes are also almost entirely infected. Either way, the younger generation is at severe risk from the disease, but is often maturing to adulthood in regions where there none of the institutions of civil or traditional society are functioning. The child militias of Liberia and Sierra Leone will become more common elsewhere, and in other regions population loss is inevitable.
Those countries that lack the ability to match the Western World in providing for material demands while minimizing or reversing the harm that has been done to their environment mays find themselves – like the Germans of the first half of the 20th Century – in a search for lebensraum… In a couple of decades, some of them may be able to find it.
Could China possible resist annexing parts of Siberia? Or could the Central Asian Muslims refrain from expanding into the failing cities of Russia and their empty countryside? In both cases, they already have a substantial foothold in these regions.
In Africa, two of the most AIDS-resistant populations consist of local Muslims (and many Middle Eastern peoples have a history of involvement in Africa) and the descendants of Hindu immigrants. India, whose population may soon surpass that of China, could also seek new opportunities as Africa empties out. India also has its differences with the Muslim World and with China, and could be a natural ally for the United States in coming years; might they expect a free hand in the Indian Ocean as a reward?
Over the next few decades the Western World can largely expect to remain almost untroubled although we face a threat of terrorism with weapons of mass destruction and some stress from immigration in numbers that may almost be too big to comfortably assimilate. In the rest of the World, there will be a tight race between the need to acquire new resources from someone else and the importation of new technologies to keep using their own more efficiently. There will also be the violence attendant in the retreat/depopulation of Russia and Africa, and in the race to fill the vacuum.
Now, how to write these up in indecipherable quatrains like Nostradamus used to do?
