The John Gray who writes on the big questions drew a pretty full house on Sunday. Chairing the session was Tim Hazledine, Economics Professor at the University of Auckland. He got it off to a good start by saying he was going to have a different format for questions at the end. To sort out blusterers, fools, irrelevance and Scotsmen (don’t know why they got a mention but lucky for him that Joyce wasn’t at the session to give him what for), he had a new system whereby any questions would be put on cards and then enveloped and delivered by the two pages so that only sensible coherent questions were asked. Given some of the questions we had heard from the floor at most sessions, this was a good idea.
Is progress an illusion? Gray feels that in some areas – e.g. science and technology – progress is a fact but in areas like ethics, politics and art it’s a myth. he used as an example, what he called “the rehabilitation of torture” whereby it had moved from an absolute and a huge prohibition to the recent use of torture by the world’s largest democracy (waterboarding as a tool by the U.S.) As another example, slavery may have been abolished in the 19th C. but it essentially returned in the 20th under Stalin and Mao.
The ruling myth, according to Gray, is that human history is an upwards staircase. He went on to discuss Francis Fukuyama’s famous idea of the end of history. Fukuyama still believes that democracy of the American variety is till the aspirational model for all despite all evidence to the contrary (see Donna’s post on Loretta Napoleoni and her view that basically America is down the tubes as any kind of economic power).
Sustainability and global resources: are we on the right track? Gray believes that the deepening global resource war is the depressing future for us. Will we get global action to solve it? Unfortunately “we should get global action but we won’t get it because many countries have fossil power as the basis of their economy.”
His view on the future for our children is pretty bleak. We baby boomers are “the blessed generation” and we didn’t have to go to a major war. Are we the last lucky generation? Possibly as many of the benefits we have had are coming to an end. We may have escaped war but we are now faced with the unconventional and often unpredictable war of terrorism.
A lot of this should not surprise us and is written and talked about everywhere. It was his take on population pressure that struck me as most interesting since I had just read in a humanist publication a good article on how overpopulation as an idea had been swept under the carpet. Gray feels that fashionable opinion (interestingly in the first world speaking for the third world; in the third world he visits they have the reverse opinion) has abandoned this and see redistribution of resources as the answer. How can we sustain a reasonable standard of living in our nations while we worry over the likes of China and India increasing their lifestyle to approach ours and consequently putting even more pressure on our planet? After all, fulminate all we like, why shouldn’t they have what we have? The emissions and destruction of the biosphere won’t support this! Any discussion on pressure of population, however, is seen as deeply misanthropic/racist/inhuman/you name it. Could global redistribution happen? He thinks, given how entrenched lifestyles are, it is highly unlikely. And what happens if we get rid of the biosphere? The earth would then becomes like a dialysis patient!
All this was pretty strong and depressing stuff and he took no prisoners: taking out the green bin and limiting your plastic bags wasn’t going to help without more radical changing of the way we live.
He didn’t have a lot of time to get on to the other focus of his talk which was American foreign policy. Tim Hazledine mentioned a clever New York cartoon where some Americans were saying “How did our oil get under their sand?” Given our experiences at the pump, he got a lot of “yeah right” reaction from Iraq and American hopes that getting rid of Saddam and privatising oil would make it cheaper for all of us. Diversification into all the other forms of fuel wasn’t the answer since all of them have either a heavy carbon footprint or they cause hardship for many.
Ironically a session about the world running out of time ran out of time itself and there was hardly any time for questions. He did emphasise that he wasn’t just giving us a dose of scaremongering. Our planet can’t save itself and the planet ’simply reacts to what humans do.” A powerful session which inspired a lot of discussion.
Philip
17 February 2009 at 2:42 pm
[...] needed to get a move on. At the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival, English polemical writer John Gray didn’t offer much comfort and felt it was too late. At the same festival, Loretta Napoleoni, promoting her book Rogue economics, said that the new [...]