Counterpoint by Mark Nicol – Make room for the future

The key to mankind commanding sustainable expression will depend upon solving the critical geoecological and geopolitical problems of this age. It should be clear to rational analysts, disaffected by denialist and alarmist arguments concerning anthropogenic biosphere damage, that we face an extreme geoecological challenge.

Given that human sustenance is totally dependant upon terrestrial biosphere health, and given intelligent acknowledgement of severe damage caused by man, the only intelligent and caring existential option is to remedy devastating human actions.

Ruefully, the focus of dominant debate, action re our geoecological crisis has been reduced to a myopic address concerning carbon footprints, etc. Any hard analysis would recognize excessive human population as the fundamental driving factor of anthropogenic biosphere damage.

Any penetrating and expansive analysis would recognize that the scope of anthropogenic damage extends far beyond alteration of CO2 content in the air and oceans. So the whole contemporary address of our ecological problem is ruinously stunted by a consensual, myopic and disfigured focus. Why is this stunted reckoning the dismal intellectual, moral, and political status quo?

The general consensual refusal to recognize excessive human population as the first driving factor of anthropogenic biosphere damage, it is generated as an unwitting collusion of simple and complex factors, all of them anthropocentric in derivation.

Firstly, the Common Man does not want to be told not to breed like a dumb rabbit. Secondly, Ancient World and Primitive World cultures simply cannot address any conception of non-anthropocentric thinking, even that which would rationally procure human sustenance. Interestingly, neither can the Modern Western culture.

If Modern Western culture prides itself upon sustaining rational intellectual credibility, profound moral empathies, why is this ‘pedigreed’ intellectual and moral society so resistant to the environmentalist logic calling for drastic population reduction?

Of course, in logistical terms, demographic overload is the first factor also impelling human cultures towards warfare. Thus, it is massive demographic overload, firstly, and then crude imperialistic mentalities, which drive the impetus towards a very possible, imminent WWIII.

Preserving the status quo, the current functional system, is a scripted equilibrium standard to all functional systems. Atomic, molecular, chemical, biological, solar and galactic systems all sustain functionality, for various predictable lengths of tenure, because some inscribed functional equilibrium sustains the ‘status quo’. But the functional operation of a volitional system, of an intellected existential culture, might rise beyond this conforming sustenance of the operational status quo.

An intelligent volitional culture, in seeking to navigate a sustainable and noble destiny, will override any instinctive proclivity clinging to the operational status quo. An intelligent volitional culture will explore new rational means, and moral visions, via which it can overcome any current operational dysfunctions. It will conscientiously and consistently explore new thinking, new behaviour, such as might profit its expressive tenure and fulfillment.

But this is not the descriptor for the current, quasi-volitional thinking and behaviour of Modern Western culture. And it will be Western culture, risen to the highest pedigree of intellectual, volitional conception amongst human societies today, which will or will not lead the way in navigation through our ecological, political crises.

Why is this Modern Western culture, supposedly so pedigreed in its intellected rationality, in its moral outreach, so resistant to that existential logic which would expeditiously reduce human populations? Why the resistance, when the logical action of reducing human populations would synonymously represent that ultimate act of environmentalist and humanitarian care, by reducing global demographic overload? For global demographic overload is the first cause of all our crises today.

We must first up face the fact that, as a moral and political corporation, Modern Western culture has committed to an egalitarianist contract vastly empowering the voice of the Commons. Being that the Common Man is neither highly intelligent, nor highly aspiring, it is inevitable that Lowest Common Denominator intellect, morality rules in the West today.

And so the dumb, selfish prerogative of the Commons, vastly empowered by Egalitarian Democracy and by the Internet, propels first resistance to any radical new thinking, to any break out from the dumb Anthropocentric State.

Then, of the two dominant political lobbies operative in the West today, we find that both are promoting ruinous human population increase. The Right faction, representing entrepreneurial interests, has locked its vision into a constant economic growth ideal. The Constant Growth paradigm requires constant growth in markets, in production, in global population, to feed an ever escalating materialistic Greed Prospectus.

The protracted ecological and economic dysfunctionality of this model behaviour, the immediate ecological and human damages, the moral degeneracy, all of these products are ignored. Locked into the model, the entrepreneur, Right-wing lobbyist, the economist and the entire Capitalist Culture are committed to facile and craven materialistic deliverance for the few today, unanimous ruination for tomorrow.

It might be hoped that the aligned Green/Left lobby stands upon an agenda sincerely and intelligently committed to securing geoecological health, rejuvenation. But it does not. The Western Green-Left lobby is a ruse environmentalist organization, one which has sacrificed any rational environmentalist logic, any rational humanitarian logic to a manic and disfigured Socialist ideology, agenda.

Compared to the contemporary Green-Left politicker, the mythical Jesus of Nazareth might be cited as a moral rationalist. At least the first Christian movement was sincerely dedicated to the emancipation of a truly suffering Commons, despotically imprisoned beneath a cudgelling Autocratic State.

But today’s Green-Left clown has nailed all moral hope upon an underling-patronizing vision, which makes mockery, not decent moral sense out of the Enlightenment egalitarianist plea. Yes, the modern Green-Left ideologue is so committed to egalitarianist compensation that the human underling, everywhere, must be championed.

And, in the search to find some mythical Modern World overlord, who can be cited for all human plus ecological ills in the world today, the Green-Left lobby turns upon White Western Patriarchal Society. The Green-Left passively but enormously invites global population increase, by inviting excessive breeders and volitional incompetents, worldwide, and under false refugee pretexts, into the Western home. And any call for population decrease? Nil.

Summarily, we may say that logistical and moral rationality do not figure in any mainstream address to the tandem geoecological and geopolitical crises caused by Modern Man. There is no call to a rational and decent vision for global depopulation, not just because of the logistical and moral difficulties. In the final analysis, it is the trenchant anthropocentric mindset congealed in the collective mind, a dumb, fated mindset, which impedes any true volitional progress.

If Western culture is to properly assume the intelligent, noble lead in navigating these conjoined geoecological and geopolitical crises, this is a sketch map for the procedure. The West must seize dominant geopolitical control to effectively dictate global governance; a new Western intelligentsia must reinvent modernist conceptions of moral vision, and of political, economic, religious, and educational institutions.

The ultimate logistical aim will be to reduce global human population to 500 million by the year 2270; the ultimate moral aim will be to create a human culture acting as guardian protector of Life on Earth, acting as the stargazing and adventuring seeder of life in our cosmic region.

This is a much abbreviated synopsis of the rationale and vision articulated in the series of Human Destiny books by this author, and in the attenuated essays.