SH20 - The seeds of destruction
01/07/2007 . Source: Mark R. Leeper 
I frequently claim that I have what I call Luck of Leeper. At one point I said that this was just very bad luck. And I really have had some amazing runs of chance events going against me. They are sort of in the nature of vacations ruined because when I visited Spain it had the worst rains and flooding in fifty years. More recently I have been saying that Luck of Leeper is worse than one would expect on small things and much better than one would expect on the big things. The big things include on my first date finding someone whose interests are so close to mine that I did not have to look any further. I had no breaking up, no broken hearts, not even an old girlfriend I can complain about. Bingo! Right the first time.
Of late I have been thinking that there is another very important thing that I just lucked into. The shank of my life was lived in the second half of the 20th Century. I used to think that I was born earlier than I would have liked and that there is a great future like in the best sense of the science fiction I read. Of late I have been thinking that the second half of the 20th century (I call it SH20, pronounced "S-H-2-O") may well prove to be a sort of high point for humanity.
Conditions for living got considerably better in the 20th century, particularly the second half. But the improvements in so many areas could not last because what made the good times good actually brought about their end. The "Golden Age" bore the seeds of its own destruction. In one area after another the second half of the 20th Century was the best time. Maybe people who have lived at many eras in history think of their own time as the best. But I would like to look at some of the many fields in which I think the time from the 1950s to the year 2000 were the best time.
A good example is antibiotics. I was born into the Age of Antibiotics. Tuberculosis appeared to have largely been defeated. Polio was on its way out. For a while it seemed that these diseases were a thing of the past. But while the treatment for Tuberculosis killed off almost all of the disease, it left behind the drug resistant strains and a big vulnerable population for them to attack. It looks like TB is coming back. It was just in the news that a tubercular patient with a drug-resistant strain was allowed to fly across the United States. Antibiotics tend to be only temporary solutions.
By killing off organisms susceptible to their killing power they leave behind organisms that are immune. Antibiotics effectively breed for strains of bacteria that are resistant to them. A given antibiotic's efficacy is then limited in time. It gives a window of time that is a respite from the organisms it kills. During SH20 we used antibiotics fairly freely--as many as we could find as soon as we found them. Some are nearing the end of the time of their efficacy. The old enemy diseases they fought are coming back.
Polio may be coming back for a different reason--a political reason. In parts of the world it is becoming a religious rallying cry that polio vaccination is a plot by the dastardly Americans. There are very prevalent conspiracy theories that polio vaccination is the weapon in a plot to make Muslims sterile. The faithful are refusing to be inoculated. Places like Pakistan are becoming breeding grounds for polio because the conspiracy theories manipulate the faithful. So polio also may be making a comeback after having been kept at bay during SH20.
Let us look at economics. It was during that half century that the lot of the average worker was the best in history. In World War II when there was a freeze on worker salaries. Corporations still competed for the best employees of the limited pool that was available. What could they offer besides salary? They could offer security. This was when the benefits package became a major part of the compensation.
Corporations would take care of their own. And corporations that did not give good benefits packages could not compete for employees. But in the years that followed medical care both got better and more expensive--a lot more expensive. Doctors could raise their rates without too much opposition. There was little sales resistance from most employees because the corporation was picking up the tab. Eventually the price ballooned to the point that corporations were taking a heavy hit. They had to withdraw the umbrella of employee support. It looks like most workers are going to be on their own to provide for themselves. With medical and drug prices very inflated suddenly the American worker is less secure, not more.
I have been reading several people's predictions for the 21st Century. Some make it seem likely that from many different aspect, the last half of the last century may well have been more comfortable than this half of this century will be. Last week I was talking about SH20 (pronounced S-H-2-O), the second half of the 20th century. These 50 years are FH21. It was in SH20 that the lot of the average American worker may have peaked in that time and may be headed downward. The causes of downward trend may well be just how good things were at that time. Let us look at some other aspects of the changing times.
With the prosperity of SH20 more people had cars. Industries expanded. There was demand for energy. This all dumped a lot of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Now the climate is behaving strangely. Suddenly the environment is doing things that it has not done in tens of thousands of years or maybe a lot more. And I mean suddenly. Climate change is generally slow but it is happening in just a very few short years after big industrial expansions. That may be coincidence, but I do not think that is the way the smart would bet. In any case it is clear that there are large changes in the environment. The weather is behaving is very new ways. We have lost what is currently about half of a major city in the United States to extreme weather and the extreme weather changes may well be just the beginning.
Meanwhile countries all over the world, particularly India and China, want the same sort of prosperity that we have had for the last half-century. Humans will be dumping a lot more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as that happens. This is an area where nobody can with any assurance accurately predict the future, but I suspect we have to be ready for some very nasty environmental shocks. The age of carelessly dumping more carbon dioxide into the air with little consequences may be coming to an end. China and India are industrializing.
Within a short time China will be putting more carbon dioxide in the air than the United States is. And China is concerned about environmental changes, but they say that what is happening is the result of years of western industrialization. They are willing to compromise, but the United States has to make sizable cutbacks first. In the last half of the 20th century we reaped the benefits of the industrial society, without thinking much that it would have to be regulated sooner or later.
Another area where things my be past their prime is with travel. In the 1950s and 1960s more people were driving and the Interstate Highways were developed. Traveling by car became a lot faster. But more and more people drove. That meant there were more traffic jams. The travel times are starting to increase again. Much the same has happened with air travel with congestion over cities. The drive time for a trip from Manhattan to Boston really decreased in the second half of the 20th century, but as the amount of traffic increased drive time is rising again.
Air travel in the meantime has gotten either more expensive or less comfortable or both. These days flying coach class, the way the majority of people fly, means being confined to a little, uncomfortable capsule of space. This is because the airlines have to squeeze more profit from a flight in large part because the plane runs on petroleum and there is more competition internationally for petroleum so its price has gone up. To pay for it the airlines have to put more passengers in each plane. Air travel has become much less comfortable. Meanwhile security concerns have made getting on the planes less convenient and more stressful. The pleasure many of us used to feel in flying has turned the flying experience into a trial that many of us just want to get over with.
Speaking of security, I am sure there will be some people who will remember SH20 as a time of fears about the atomic bomb. We lived in fear of what the Soviets might do. Perhaps that is true, but the Soviets were a less threatening enemy for us than our current ones. While there might have been some in the USSR who were hawks, the real truth was that all along the Soviet Union was something of a paper tiger. They were constantly covering up the fact that they just did not have the economy to oppose us effectively. And they had to fight a constant two- front war. They were opposing the West and at the same time opposing their own people who were desperate to leave a totalitarian system that was rotting from within. The Berlin Wall was intended not to keep others out but to keep their own people in. There was barbed wire across Eastern Europe for the same reason. They had the resources to be scary, but not to be effective. And at heart they really did not want a nuclear war.
In 1945 nuclear energy saved the United States from having to invade Japan. It probably saved literally millions of lives. Ironically it probably meant fewer Japanese died in the long run. As the years passed it allowed both the American and Soviet military to have much smaller armies because they could enforce their will without large standing armies.
But what sustains our power also sustains the power of our enemies. We are probably in more danger of having a nuclear confrontation than ever were in the second half of the 20th Century.
Today we are fighting more determined enemies in what is at heart a religious war. There are Islamic fundamentalists who believe that if there is a nuclear war they automatically win and very possibly are willing to demonstrate that belief. The principle is that God will take the faithful to Paradise and will punish the dead of the other side. The philosophy in the late 20th century of Mutually Assured Destruction, really the most powerful nuclear deterrent of the Cold War, is now broken at a time when it is not just a tiny handful of countries that have nuclear weapons but a large number. If we thought we were close to having a nuclear conflict in the Cold War most signs say we are much closer right now.
I will conclude this discussion of the shape of things to come next issue.
Mark R Leeper
(c) 2007 Mark R Leeper |
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