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Joy in the Present
      

20th November 2007 | Draft

Root Irresponsibility for Major World Problems

the unexamined role of Abrahamic faiths in sustaining unrestrained population growth

-- / --

Introduction
Table: Assessment of faith-based death warrants effectively authorized
Comment
Problem displacement
Misleading focus on proximate causes
A Terrifying Truth?
Euphemisms and spurious rationalizations
Contradictions associated with "right to life"
Maximizing suffering -- or "optimizing it"?
Methodology for requisite analysis
Assertion of moral authority
"Binding of Isaac": archetypal ethical dilemma for the Abrahamic faiths
Implications of a founding myth for future faith-based governance
References
This document is elaborated in the light of work over 30 years on the analysis of interdependencies of world problems, remedial global strategies and values, as profiled in the Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential -- together with profiles of the understandings of human and spiritual development of different belief systems.

Introduction

A document with the above title calls for a number of preliminary comments:

  • many problems confronted by policy-makers would clearly be of considerably less catastrophic implication if the global population was:
    • at a much lower level
    • increasing at a much lower rate
  • the standard response is that:
    • humanity has the ingenuity to respond to its major policy challenges
    • resources are, in principle, more than sufficient -- provided they are appropriately distributed
  • unfortunately there is considerable evidence over many decades that in practice
    • institutions of global scope are not capable of mobilizing, focusing or implementing any consensus policy for effective (rather than tokenistic) redistribution of resources
    • the willingness to reduce any disparity in resource dissemination is very low, notably in the lifestyles of those associated with such institutions, and in any by which they are replaced
  • considerable reliance is placed on arguments that procreation:
    • is effectively a fundamental right of individuals in secular society
    • is specifically encouraged by scriptural authority (eg "go forth and multiply", Genesis 1:22)
    • is a natural manifestation of "human nature" over which it is not to be expected that credible policy constraints can be exerted, even if desirable
  • politically it is argued that:
    • any constraints on procreation are political suicide for those considering or recommending them; efforts to do so have been extremely unpopular and have encouraged processes to subvert them (China's "one child policy")
    • the issue can be avoided by focusing on more immediate problems (irrespective of whether they continue to be aggravated by the population issue)
    • the issue is of longer term (rather than shorter term) significance and may therefore be left to the responsibility of subsequent political authorities
    • efforts to encourage family planning on an individual level are politically more viable and are satisfactory where they are acceptable
  • economically and politically it is argued that:
    • the working population, notably required to finance social security and pension schemes for the elderly, is in decline
    • there is an increasing shortage of workers for essential functions in society
    • an increasing population is vital to sustain consumption levels on which healthy economic growth (and government fiscal income) is dependent
    • national populations functioning below the "replacement level" constitute a major threat to the future of national culture and identity
    • any worldwide efforts to restrain population growth, in the light of whatever rationalization, are seen as a covert means for ensuring the political or economic advantage of one nation or ethnic group over another -- to which "competitive breeding" is typically seen as a legitimate means of ensuring that faith-based values are passed on through the progeny

Within this context, however, it is important to recognize the manner in which:

To the extent that the matter is discussed, however, it is argued that:

  • the set of problems by which humanity is confronted is so complex that it is methodologically inappropriate to seek to identity causative factors, especially root causative factors
  • any cause-effect analysis seeking to isolate causes susceptible of strategic intervention is itself inappropriate as a methodology

This leads to a situation in which:

  • the increasing challenges of society are accepted fatalistically as a fact of life, whatever the predictable outcome
  • considerable attention is given to highlighting isolated examples of fruitful small-scale initiative as instances of hope, despite the manner in which hope-mongering is used to obscure the rate at which the scale of problems is increasing and the factors inhibiting replication of such initiatives on a larger scale
  • the tendency to frame the challenge for humanity simplistically, avoiding any effective use whatsoever of the analytical tools considered essential to the strategic deployment and management of technical projects that frequently contribute to the exacerbation of the current condition, ignore its seriousness, or exploit the policy hubris associated with it

Given the doctrinal position of the Abrahamic faiths, in practice, with regard to population issues, the questions raised in what follows are to what extent these religions are specifically responsible for:

  • inhibiting effective discussion of these issues
  • inhibiting formulation of appropriate and effective strategic responses
  • effectively increasing the degree of suffering in the world under conditions where redistribution of resources has proven in practice to be unrealistic in the short term
  • effectively increasing ensuring the death of people, possibly of other faiths, as a consequence of failure to address these issues

The purpose of this document is to focus attention on these issues and the questions they raise, and to clarify the responsibility of the Abrahamic faiths in this matter, if any. If, as such faiths may claim, they have no responsibility in the matter, then they should neither fear the raising of such questions nor any analysis that might justify their perspective.

This argument may appear to be inappropriate:

  • in raising issues associated with profound beliefs and centuries-old traditions that deserve every respect
  • in framing the question in terms of responsibility and therefore culpability
  • in being inadequately substantiated (irrespective of any inhibition of relevant analysis)
  • in evoking the potential significance of a founding myth common to the Abrahamic faith (the Binding of Isaac), seemingly irrelevant to any analytically substantiated policy argument (despite the increasing role of faith-based governance)

Nevertheless, however, the case would appear to merit careful consideration, given:

  • the gravity of the situation in which humanity finds itself
  • the commitment, or complicity, of the Abrahamic faiths in the early provocation of "end-times" scenarios through which it is believed that the difficulties of humanity will be resolved by divine intervention

It should be stressed, as noted above, that the following argument is formulated in the light of work (partly managed by the author) over 30 years in profiling thousands of problems, remedial strategies and human values (and their many interdependencies) as recognized by many international constituencies of every belief system. This included appreciative recognition of the variety of understanding of human and spiritual development associated with those belief systems. The material associated with the resulting Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential is maintained in archival form for open web access -- with associated tools for visual exploration of independencies. The work has been substantially funded by the European Commission (Ecolynx - Information Context for Biodiversity Conservation, 1997-2000) and positively assessed for further funding by the World Bank (Interactive Conceptual Environmental Planning Tool for Developing Countries, 1998-1999).

Table: Assessment of faith-based death warrants effectively authorized

. . Questions & Answers Estimates Conclusion
. Consequence Aggravated directly by increasing population?

Suffering and death reduced with fewer people?

Primary
opponents of population restraint? 		Faith-engendered suffering
(megadukkhas
per year)

Associated "mortality"
(per year)

 Faith-based death
warrants effectively
authorized
(per day)
Primary shortages . . . . . . .
Food hunger (850 mill.), malnutrition, starvation, death yes yes Abrahamic
faiths		 ? 15 mill. (children) 24,000 [1]
Water safe drinking water,
thirst, crop failure, disease 		yes yes Abrahamic
faiths		 ? 5.3 mill. [2] 14,500
Health care, sanitation disease, death yes yes Abrahamic
faiths		 ? ? ?
Shelter, homelessness exposure, disease, death yes yes Abrahamic
faiths		 ? ? ?
"Secondary" shortages . . . . . . .
Land
(agriculture) 		inability to grow food yes yes Abrahamic
faiths		 ? ? ?
Land
(infrastructure) 		inability to build shelter yes yes Abrahamic
faiths		 ? ? ?
Employment inability to purchase essential goods yes yes Abrahamic
faiths		 ? ? ?
Non-renewable resources
(energy)		 wood burning (deforestation), inaccessibility of essential utilities yes yes Abrahamic
faiths		 ? ? ?
Non-renewable resources (materials) rising cost of goods,
inaccessibility of essential utilities 		yes yes Abrahamic
faiths		 ? ? ?
"Tertiary" problems . . . . . . .
Immigration pressure on facilities yes yes Abrahamic
faiths		 ? ? ?
Violence
(faith-based) 		suffering, death consequentially yes Abrahamic
faiths		 ? ? ?
Violence (resource-based) suffering, death yes yes Abrahamic
faiths		 ? ? ?
Environment (pollution) global warming, disease, flooding consequentially yes Abrahamic
faiths		 ? ? ?
Environment (degradation) extinction of species consequentially yes Abrahamic
faiths		 ? ? ?
Substance abuse disease, death consequentially yes Abrahamic
faiths		 ? ? ?
Discrimination, injustice, exploitation suffering, violence consequentially yes Abrahamic
faiths		 ? ? ?
Unprotected sex population increase, abortion, HIV/AIDS (40 mill.), death yes yes Abrahamic
faiths		 ? ? ?
Inadequate education inappropriate (collective) response, suffering yes yes Abrahamic
faiths		 ? ? ?
Poverty . yes yes Abrahamic
faiths		 ? ? ?
Prolonged terminal incapacity maximal suffering and family expense (prior to death) yes yes Abrahamic
faiths		 ? (maximal
prolongation of suffering) 		?

Comment

The above table is designed to give focus to an earlier argument presented in Begetting: challenges and responsibilities of overpopulation (2007). This was associated with a draft proposal for a Universal Declaration of Responsibilities of Human Intercourse (2007).

As indicated in the press release of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), presenting its Global Environmental Outlook (2007):

The human population is now so large that "the amount of resources needed to sustain it exceeds what is available... humanity's footprint [its environmental demand] is 21.9 hectares per person while the Earth's biological capacity is, on average, only 15.7 ha/person... the well-being of billions of people in the developing world is at risk, because of a failure to remedy the relatively simple problems which have been successfully tackled elsewhere.

In reporting on that document, in the light of an interview with the Executive Director of UNEP, James Kanter (UN issues 'final wake-up call' on population and environment. International Herald Tribune, 25 October 2007) notes:

Over the past two decades the world population has increased by almost 34 percent to 6.7 billion from 5 billion; similarly, the financial wealth of the planet has soared by about a third. But the land available to each person on earth had shrunk by 2005 to 2.02 hectares, or 5 acres, from 7.91 hectares in 1900 and was projected to drop to 1.63 hectares for each person by 2050, the report said.

The result of that population growth combined with unsustainable consumption has resulted in an increasingly stressed planet where natural disasters and environmental degradation endanger millions of humans, as well as plant and animal species, the report said....

"Life would be easier if we didn't have the kind of population growth rates that we have at the moment," Steiner said. "But to force people to stop having children would be a simplistic answer. The more realistic, ethical and practical issue is to accelerate human well-being and make more rational use of the resources we have on this planet."

The report "prepared by about 390 experts and reviewed by more than 1,000 others across the world", acknowledges the recognition by the Brundtland Commission (20 years previously) of the range of environmental and other "problems driven by growing human numbers". Unfortunately it focuses narrowly on the problems it selectively identifies without focusing on the underlying issue of how to restrain the growing human numbers that it implicitly acknowledges can thereby only continue to aggravate those problems -- as previously recognized by the Club of Rome Limits to Growth analysis in 1972. This reflects the long-term fundamental flaw in international strategic thinking -- responding with the greatest expertise on secondary and tertiary issues without appropriately analyzing means of addressing their continuing cause. It is a shameful exercise in strategic evasion -- achieved by strategic tunnel vision on issues -- such climate change -- that are politically more acceptable and supposedly susceptible of technical solutions (with unpredictable consequences).

It is curious that in an otherwise remarkable recent synthesis of the "tectonic stresses" accumulating "deep underneath the surface of our societies", Thomas Homer-Dixon (The Upside of Down: catastrophe, creativity and the renewal of civilization, 2006) indeed identifies "population stress" as one of these stresses. However he does this, not in terms of overpopulation, but solely as "arising from differences in the population growth rates between rich and poor societies, and from spiraling growth of megacities in poor countries". And yet his other four "stresses" (energy, environment, climate and economic) are directly dependent on unrestrained population growth. Each would be significantly reduced if population growth was addressed -- an issue he avoids in considering possible responses to imminent catastrophe. If anything is "tectonic", it is the unconsciousness with which the population issue is recognized by our current global civilization (cf John Ralston Saul, The Unconscious Civilization, 1995).

Global policy making has become a vast exercise in envisaging "credible" strategies -- as with the response to climate change -- that avoid addressing the unpleasantness of the increasingly high probability of imminent mega-deaths and civilizational collapse -- as a direct consequence of population capacity overshoot. The fabrication of that credibility recalls the persuasive tale of The Emperor's New Clothes.

Whereas campaigns worldwide are now focusing on collective and individual behaviour patterns (sorting household waste, etc) to reduce environmental problems, no attention is given to the fact that every additional birth significantly undermines any progress thereby made -- by further increasing demands on the environment.

Which constituency ensures that root causes are not meaningfully discussed? A systemic analysis of dependencies would establish the degree to which the Abrahamic faiths are at the root of the challenge. Why is that analysis not undertaken?

"The causal chain of the deterioration is easily followed to its source. Too many cars, too many factories, too much detergent, too much pesticides ... too little water, too much CO2 - all can be traced easily to TOO MANY PEOPLE"
Paul R Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, 1968.

"All species expand as much as resources allow and predators, parasites, and physical conditions permit. When a species is introduced into a new habitat with abundant resources that accumulated before its arrival, the population expands rapidly until all the resources are used up."
David Price, Energy and Human Evolution, 1995

Problem displacement

A recent issue of a newsletter of the the Global Footprint Network (Why the Number of Feet Matters, 1, 12) indicated that:

A recent feature on population in the Economist discusses economic challenges when a nation’s population falls.  In this feature, How to deal with a falling population, 28 July 2007, the Economist tries to minimize concerns about world population by saying that we are “hardly near the point of [resource] exhaustion”.

The Economist received a flood of letters insisting that rising world population and resource depletion are indeed serious problems.  So many comments were sent in that the Economist published a follow-up piece, Population and its discontents: lighten the footprint but keep the feet. This too highlighted deep misunderstandings about the relationship between population and humanity’s demand on our biosphere, and in particular, confusing population growth rates and population size.

A comparison can be fruitfully made between the forms of displacement in the case four patterns of denial variously relevant to threats to human life:

  • overpopulation has long been denied as a significant factor for policy consideration, despite dramatically increasing numbers and an accumulation of consequent issues (Rosamund McDougall, Overpopulation denial is a fatal game, Biologist, 53, 3, June 2006; Russ Finley, Overpopulation: the modern denial In: Poison Darts: protecting the biodiversity of the world, 2004)
  • climate change denial, previously characteristic of the majority of policy-makers and experts, has gone through a number of stages in which the evidence has been variously interpreted. However it could be inferred that it has not been rational argument but rather increasingly disastrous weather conditions that have been most convincing.
  • concerns relating to the nature of the denial of the Holocaust, namely the dangerous inappropriateness of questioning the evidence as presented, have become such a highly charged political issue that "denial" has been criminalized in some countries and extraordinary proposals, considered reasonable, have been made at the highest level to ban it across Europe (EU aims to criminalise Holocaust denial, Financial Times, 17 April 2007)
  • a curiously contrasting case is provided by efforts in various countries towards suppressing dissent, even criminalising dissent, most recently as part of the "war on terror". With respect to the UK, for example, it has been argued that the new crime of "glorifying terrorism", recently introduced under the Terrorism Act 2006, would lead to the suppression of legitimate debate on the causes of terror (Arun Kundnani, Criminalising dissent in the 'war on terror', Institute of Race Relations, 2 May 2006) (see also Warping the Judgement of Dissenting Opinion towards a general framework for comparing distortion in rules of evidence, 2002; William Norman Grigg, Criminalizing Dissent, New American, 6 December 1999)

The Holocaust example raises the question as to the appropriateness of criminalising denial of a past phenomenon whilst failing to consider the criminalisation of phenomena for which evidence of comparable quality and weight exists for the probability of much higher suffering and fatality. The question is especially relevant in that a prime purpose of criminalising Holocaust denial -- a phenomenon of the past -- is to counter potential distortions of evidence that might obscure the risk of such an event being repeated in the future. Curiously this argument does not apply to the consequences of numerous fatal conflicts induced by the Abrahamic faiths -- despite the bagged evidence of bodies (where these have not been bulldozed into mass graves or incinerated)..

On the other hand, it might presumably be argued, following the twisted logic of the last example, that evocation of the threat of overpopulation should itself be criminalised -- to avoid inducing terror in the population as to the accumulating impacts of its consequences. This logic was evident at a certain stage of the climate change debate in cases of penalisation of advocates of recognition of the phenomenon -- a process even more evident with regard to advocats of "family planning".

Misleading focus on proximate causes

There are both tragic and curious examples of the focus on proximate causes:

  • in the Ukraine in 1932-33 an estimated 7-10 million people died in what in the West is termed the Great Famine (known to Ukrainians as the Holodomor), and explained by Soviet authorities as a bad harvest. The current president of Ukraine indicates that "Their intention was to exonerate themselves of responsibility and to suppress knowledge of both the human causes and human consequences of this tragedy...To talk of the Holodomor was a crime against the state... The Holodomor was an act of genocide designed to suppress the Ukrainian nation." (Viktor Yuschenko, The Holodomor, Wall Street Journal, 27 November 2007). Most modern historians agree that the famine was caused by the policies of the Soviet government, rather than by natural causes; and is held to have been deliberately engineered by the Soviet leadership.
  • an incident in which a passenger vessel sank in the Antarctic as a result of a collision with an iceberg was described under a heading "iceberg blamed for holing MV Explorer" (Guardian, 24 November 2007).
  • roadside trees are readily blamed as a cause of accidents when struck by vehicles -- irrespective of consideration of the speed of the vehicle or the condition of the driver. Authorities may then face considerable pressure to remove the trees. Similar arguments may be used with respect to wild animals.

The mortality data collected globally by the World Health Organization on "causes of death" focuses systematically on proximate causes. It avoids any indication of the conditions that brought about the indicated cause of death, relying as it does on the categories of the International Classification of Diseases -- not on what caused the "disease". The "cause of death" is therefore systematically obscured by authoritative data that purports to indicate it. For example, the data obscures the fact that:

  • of the 11 million children younger than 5 (dying yearly worldwide), more than half die from hunger-related causes. But, according to Freedom from Hunger (Hunger Information, 2007), few of these deaths are the direct consequence of starvation but rather of common illnesses (like diarrhea, acute respiratory illness, malaria and measles) that move in on vulnerable children whose bodies have been weakened by hunger -- the prior cause of their death. Not the root cause however.
  • about 40 percent of deaths worldwide are estimated to be caused by water, air and soil pollution; such environmental degradation, coupled with the growth in world population, are major causes behind the rapid increase in human diseases, which the World Health Organization has recently reported. Both factors contribute to the malnourishment and disease susceptibility of 3.7 billion people [more]. Not the root cause however.

Despite this avoidance of any focus on root causes, when it comes to natural disaster, however, it would appear that there is a form of recognition of a root cause that is consistent with the worldview of the Abrahamic faiths -- since such crises are known to the insurance industry as "Acts of God". And, curiously, under those conditions, the World Health Organization (Responding to health aspects of crises, 2004) then recognizes that:

Most of the morbidity and mortality associated with such crises stems from people lacking the essentials they need for life. Systems at local level that normally provide people with accessible food, water, shelter and sanitation, ensure personal security and protection from harm, and deliver healthcare, do not function, and national systems are unable to compensate.

The point could be emphasized even more strongly by exploring the "cause of death" declared by mortality statistics on the occasion of massacres. Clearly the proximate cause of death may indeed be failure of body physiology -- irrespective of whether this was due to weaponry. gas or radiation. The question that is so poorly addressed is the degree of religious responsibility for the intentional process resulting in the massacres of which such "causes" are then merely consequential symptoms. Why the focus on "symptoms" and not on the nature of the "disease"?

Whilst it is recognized that the slaughter of the 20th century, often in the form of massacre (whether genocidal or not), has been the bloodiest in recorded history (Matthew White, Death Tolls for the Man-made Megadeaths of the Twentieth Century, 2005; List of Massacres, Wikipedia), almost no attention is given statistically to the religious responsibility for such massacres, or the assessment of the degree of religious complicity in them. Exceptions include efforts to document Zionist massacres of Arabs (List of Massacres) that of indigenous peoples (List of massacres by Christians and Jews of Indigenous Australians), especially under the mandate of "pacification" and "in the Name of God" as in the Americas (American Indian Holocaust). Striking recent examples include:

  • The philosopher Bertrand Russell denounced WWI as wholly Christian in origin as "the three Emperors were devout, and so were the more warlike of the British Cabinet". In 1957 he claimed that the Christian Church "has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world".
  • Adolf Hitler announced in a 1922 speech: "My feelings as a Christian point me to my Lord and Saviour as a fighter". 6,000,000 Jews die under his orders in human catastrophe allegedly inspired by Martin Luther's pamphlet, Jews and Their Lies.
  • 60,000 Orthodox Christians, Jews and Muslims were massacred in the period 1941-5 by fanatical Catholic "Ustashi" soldiers under Croatian leader Ante Pavelic. 
  • The genocidal massacre in Rwanda in 1994, through which hundreds of thousand were killed, took place in what has been considered the most Christian country in Africa, with both perpetrators and victims sharing the same faith

Like Hitler, instigators of some major massacres (Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, etc), have had a poorly recognized degree of relationship with religion, such as through attendance at Christian religious educational establishments. The influence of Christianity has however been much debated in specific cases such as Rwanda, for example (The Church and the Rwandan Genocide, Wikipedia). The role of religion is now debated with regard to the cultivation of what is specifically framed as terrorism (Religious Terrorism, Wikipedia), especially in the case of Islam (Islamic Violence, Wikipedia). Such non-proximate influences are of course not recognized medically as a "cause of death". Is it a "forensic" perspective that is lacking in examining the role of religion in such deaths?

The question might be fruitfully asked as to whether the degree of slaughter engendered by the Abrahamic faiths over centuries is in some way a perverted corrective response to their unconscious collective recognition of the consequences of their thoughtless population policies over that same period (cf John Ralston Saul, The Unconscious Civilization, 1995). Are these faiths also complicit in the process whereby the religious underpinnings of the many bloody conflicts are erased from collective memory -- as is now the case with the debacle in Iraq (Madeleine Bunting, The Iraq war has become a disaster that we have chosen to forget. Guardian, 5 November 2007).

It remains curious that every possible argument is otherwise advanced to avoid any recognition (or discussion) whatsoever of the accumulating consequences of unrestrained population increase. This notably accords with two undeclared agendas:

  • dependence of essentially unsustainable economies and business models on increasing numbers of people as consumers of products and services, effectively a vast exercise in pyramid selling, on which governments are dependent for tax income, associated with complicity with
  • dependence of Abrahamic faiths on early global catastrophe and system failure, beyond the capacity of humanity to resolve, that will thereby trigger the intervention of a variously prophesied saviour.

Despite the concerns expressed by the Executive Director of the UN Environment Programme, the