The Collapsing Western Way of Life The greatest threat to the Western
Way of Life is the Western Way of Life itself.
By John Kozy
URL of this article:www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=19782
Global Research, June 18, 2010
The Age of Enlightenment was born sometime around the beginning of
the eighteenth century. A mere three-quarters of a century later,
industrialization ushered in the Age of Endarkenment, and human
life has grown more and more perilous ever since. The Golden Age
of capitalism cannot be recreated merely by applying the right
mixture of spending, subsidies, re-regulation, and international
agreements. Because the economic advantages of industrialization
rely on overproduction and profit, balanced trade is impossible if
the advantage is to be preserved; it entails no economic profit.
Industrialism is a Hegelian synthesis which embodies the forces for
its own destruction. The greatest threat to the Western Way of Life
is the Western Way of Life itself.
That human beings seem unable to solve their most pressing problems
is too obvious and well known to deserve much mention; that most
of the problems that human beings seem unable to solve are caused
by human beings themselves deserves mention but rarely is.
Human beings act as though having to deal with problems whose causes
are beyond human control is not enough. Cyclones, earthquakes,
volcanic eruptions, droughts, floods are apparently not serious
enough to command human attention.
These problems, apparently, have to be supplemented by self-made
catastrophes to keep our minds engaged. But most manmade problems
could be avoided by careful and complete analysis of the ideas that,
when implemented, have dire results.
Time-tested and effective ways of analyzing problems have been known
for centuries. Rene Descartes published his Rules for the Direction
of the Mind around 1627 and the Discourse on Method in 1637. John
Stuart Mill published his Methods in his System of Logic in 1843.
The mathematical method known as reductio ad absurdum has been
employed throughout the history of mathematics and philosophy from
classical antiquity onwards, as has the method known as counterexample.
And root cause analysis is a highly developed method often used in
information science and other places. Oddly enough, however, even
most well educated Americans seem to be unaware of any of these
analytical techniques, and when attempts are made to analyze ideas,
these attempts are rarely carried out logically or all the way to
their ultimate ends. Americans rarely "follow the argument wherever
it leads;" even those good at analysis often stop when they come
across something that looks appealing.
John B. Judis recently published a piece in the New Republic in
which he summarized some claims made by Robert Brenner, a UCLA
economic historian.
Judis writes:
"Brenners analysis of the current downturn can be boiled down to a
fairly simple point: that the underlying cause of the current
downturn lies in the real economy of private goods and service
production rather than in the financial sector, and that the current
remediesfrom government spending and tax cuts to financial
regulationwill not lead to the kind of robust growth and employment
that the United States enjoyed after World War II and fleetingly
in the late 1990s. These remedies wont succeed because they wont
get at what has caused the slowdown in the real economy: global
overcapacity in tradeable (sic) goods production. Global overcapacity
means that the worlds industries are capable of producing far more
steel, shoes, cell phones, computer chips, and automobiles (among
other things) than the worlds consumers are able and willing to
consume."
Why this is worth mentioning is difficult to fathom. Overproduction
has always been associated with economic busts, and such busts have
happened with such regularity that economists have even incorporated
them into theory by euphemistically calling booms and busts the
"business cycle." The question that must be asked is, "What causes
overproduction?" And the answer is industrialization.
The Industrial Revolution began in England around 1780. It transformed
England from a manual labour and draft-animal economy into a
machine-based one. But this change in the primary mode of economic
activity was not merely economic;
it changed the entire culture, not clearly for the better. Almost
every aspect of life was changed in some way.
Many cite increased per capita GDP as evidence of the revolution's
benefits, but GDP is a poor measure of benefits. It merely measures
the sum total of economic transactions in terms of the culture's
money, neglecting the effects of economic activity on the quality
of human life.
The Industrial Revolution is largely responsible for the rise of
modern cities, as large numbers of people migrated to them in search
of jobs. These people were mainly housed in slums where diseases,
especially cholera, typhoid, tuberculosis, and smallpox, were spread
by contaminated water and other means. Respiratory diseases contracted
by miners became common.
Accidents in factories were regular. In 1788, two-thirds of the
workers in cotton mills were children; they were also employed in
coal mines. Henry Phelps Brown and Sheila V. Hopkins argue that the
bulk of the population suffered severe reductions in their living
standards. Although life in pre-industrial England was not easy,
for many it was better than laboring in factories and coal mines.
Other consequences of the revolution are worsecraft workers lost
their jobs.
The Industrial Revolution concentrated labour into mills, factories,
and mines, but industrial workers could never experience the sense
of satisfaction and pride that craftsmen derived from their creations.
Working a craft is a mentally stimulating and creative activity;
operating a machine is not. The best craftsmen were renowned as
artists. Some are still renowned today: Thomas Chippendale and
George Hepplewhite, for example. The integral strength of Windsor
chairs has never been duplicated in a factory. Handmade textiles,
Persian rugs, even handcrafted toys are renowned for their artistry.
Today that pride and satisfaction accrues only to hobbyists, such
as quilters, but never to industrial workers. The Industrial
Revolution degraded human life to the status of coal. People became
fuel for machines. Bought cheap, people are used until unneeded and
then discarded like slag. Individuality, talent, imagination,
originalitythe best attributes of human beingsare suppressed to the
point of extinction. The Industrial Revolution sucked the humanity
out of the human race; people became things.
But the revolution gave England a temporary economic advantage as
that is measured by economists. Excess production, that is, production
not consumed domestically, could be exported, and England's wealth
could be increased by buying (importing) cheap and selling (exporting)
dear. This workedfor a while, but never smoothly.
The Industrial Revolution quickly spread to Belgium, France, the
United States, Japan, the Alpine countries, Italy, and other places.
As it spread, the amount of excess products that needed to be
exported grew and grew, and the number prospective foreign consumers
shrank and shrank. Because there is little economic advantage (as
economists measure it) in trading exports for imports of equal
value, the international economy necessarily divides into net
exporting nations who are enriched and net importing countries who
are impoverished and less and less able to afford imports. The
system has to be patched or the machines would grind to a halt.
Most of the work of economists since the middle of the nineteenth
century consists of developing patches for this collapsing system.
Comparative advantage, creative destruction, free trade, Keynesian
stimuli, and even social programs (which would be unnecessary if
the economy provided for the needs of people) are merely attempts
to patch the system, to keep the machines running.
Industrialists soon realized that if they reduced the quality of
their products, their life cycles would be shortened which would
require people to replace them more often thereby increasing
consumption. Manufacturers have been steadily reducing the quality
of products ever since. An essential part in a device is made of
an inferior material so the device fails far before its time and
becomes junk, batteries in devices are soldered to their circuit
boards so that when the batteries die, the products becomes junk,
one fewer olive in every jar means more jars are sold, and the jars
become junk.
Economists like to claim that the system produces the best products
at the lowest cost, but in reality it produces the exact opposite.
As more and more products must be discarded and replaced, the
discarded junk is hauled to landfills or dumped in oceans. But as
landfills grow larger and larger, another patch is requiredrecycling.
But it too is ineffective. Batteries soldered to circuit boards
cannot be recycled, every half-filled can of paint cannot be taken
to a recycling center, separating useful elements from the useless
ones is often a hazardous task. The system produces junk! Humans
originated about 200,000 years ago. The Soviet Union launched the
first Sputnik into space in 1957. In less than 60 years, less than
a mere three tenths of one percent of the time people have inhabited
the Earth, the industrial nations have put so much junk into near
outer space that the junk now endangers the functionality of
operational satellites. Abandoned industrial sites are often highly
toxic which often require cleanupanother patch. Often complete
cleanup is impossible. Toxic residues are a species of junk. Keeping
the machines running necessitates the production of it.
Global industrial capitalism will continue on the gradual downward
descent to collapse. The Golden Age of industrial capitalism that
lasted from 1945 to 1970 cannot be recreated merely by applying the
right mixture of spending, subsidies, re-regulation, and international
agreements. Because the economic advantages of industrialization
rely on the two ingredients mentioned above, overproduction and
profit, balanced trade is impossible if the advantage is to be
preserved; it entails no economic profit. Ultimately too many nations
will be too poor to be importers, and the machines in the exporting
countries will cease to function. Industrialism is a Hegelian
synthesis which embodies the forces for its own destruction. The
greatest threat to the Western Way of Life is the Western Way of
Life itself. Patches may prolong it, but they cannot remove its
contradictions.
Chandran Nair writes,
The 20th centurys triumph of consumption-based capitalism has created
the crisis of the 21st century: looming catastrophic climate change,
massive environmental damage and significant depletion of natural
resources. . . . The western economic model, which defines success
as consumption-driven growth, must be challenged. . . . Advocates
of the western model tend to play down its dramatic effects on
natural resources and the environment. They refuse to acknowledge
that their advice runs counter to scientific consensus about limits
and the need for stringent rules on resource management. Instead,
they argue that human ingenuity aided by innovations in the markets
will find solutions. This is rooted in an irrational belief that
we can have everything:
ever-growing material wealth and a healthy natural environment. The
stark evidence . . . should be proof enough that this is not possible.
No, it's not possible, but the impossibility lies in the system's
logic, not in its effects. To use the preferred diction of economists,
the system is unsustainable. Since the collapse of the industrial
system is inevitable, a fundamental rethinking of the way the economy
works is the only alternative.
It has always been the only alternative. But even that leaves
humanity soaking in the pickle. When the economic advantages of
industrialization have dissipated, humanity will still be stuck in
a world filled with bioundegradable junk, hazardous sites, raped
environments, the unending consequences of the often accidental
importation of alien species, polluted air and water, and numerous
other consequences, the costs of which economists have never taken
into consideration. And the progeny of both the rich and the poor
alike will have to live with them. The pockets full of money that
the rich have won't prevent their children and grandchildren from
breathing bad air or drinking bad water or dealing with environmental
degradation. These children and grandchildren may someday curse the
days their fathers and grandfathers were born. Capitalism, as we
know it, is reaching its endgame.
The meek who inherit the earth will find it to be worthless.
The human brain has enabled mankind to discover and create wondrous
things; it has also been used to inflict horrendous suffering and
destruction. In fact, it would be difficult to design an economic
system more destructive, wasteful, and dehumanizing than the
industrial, and much of the destruction it has wrought may be
irreparable. Industrialization does not efficiently allocate
resources; it squanders them.
So, is mankind smart? Of course, but that is not the question. The
ultimate question is, Is mankind smart enough to keep from outsmarting
itself? The answer appears to be no!
The Age of Enlightenment was born sometime around the beginning of
the eighteenth century. A mere three-quarters of a century later,
industrialization ushered in the Age of Endarkenment, and human
life has grown more and more perilous ever since. Natural disasters
can be catastrophic, but their destructiveness is usually limited,
and the really horrendous ones are rare. Manmade disasters are
ubiquitous, very extensive, and difficult, perhaps impossible, to
repair. Had mankind been wise rather than merely smart, most manmade
calamities could have been avoided. Que Sera Sera! Whatever will
be will be will be. The future is plain to see, and it's not pretty.
John Kozy is a retired professor of philosophy and logic who blogs
on social, political, and economic issues. After serving in the
U.S. Army during the Korean War, he spent 20 years as a university
professor and another 20 years working as a writer. He has published
a textbook in formal logic commercially, in academic journals and
a small number of commercial magazines, and has written a number
of guest editorials for newspapers. His on-line pieces can be found
onhttp://www.jkozy.com/and he can be emailed from that site's
homepage.
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