[A-List] The Collapsing Western Way of Life

[Bill Totten]

The greatest threat to the Western Way of Life is the Western Way of
Life itself

by John Kozy

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:

	Brenner's 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
remedies - from government spending and tax cuts to financial
regulation - will not lead to the kind of robust growth and employment
that the United States enjoyed after World War Two and fleetingly in
the late 1990s. These remedies won't succeed because they won't get at
what has caused the slowdown in the real economy: global overcapacity
in tradeable (sic) goods production. Global overcapacity means that the
world's industries are capable of producing far more steel, shoes, cell
phones, computer chips, and automobiles (among other things) than the
world's 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 worse - craft 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, originality
- the best attributes of human beings - are 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
worked - for 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 required - recycling. 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 sixty
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 cleanup - another 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 century's 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 US Army
during the Korean War, he spent twenty years as a university professor
and another twenty 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 on
http://www.jkozy.com/ and he can be emailed from that site's homepage.

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