The Boiling Frog
18 May, Schauspielhaus Wahnfried, Radenau
(The following is an excerpt from the book "The Story of B" by Daniel Quinn)
We all know stories of frogs being tossed
into boiling water -- for example, a young couple being plunged
into catastrophic debt by an unforeseen medical emergency. A
contrary example, an example of the smiling boiled frog, is that
of a young couple who gradually use their good credit to buy and
borrow themselves into catastrophic debt. Cultural examples exist
as well. About six thousand years ago the goddess-worshipping
societies of Old Europe were engulfed in a boiling up of our
culture that Marija Gimbutas called Kurgan Wave Number One; they
struggled to clamber out but eventually succumbed. The Plains
Indians of North America, who were engulfed in another boiling up
of our culture in the 1870s, constitute another example; they
struggled to clamber out over the next two decades, but they too
finally succumbed. A contrary example, an example of the
smiling-boiled-frog phenomenon, is provided by our own culture.
When we slipped into the cauldron, the water was a perfect
temperature, not too hot, not too cold. Can anyone tell me when
that was? Anyone? Blank faces. I've already told you, but I'll ask again, a
different way. When did we become we? Where and when did the thing
called us begin? Remember: East and West, twins of a common birth.
Where? And when? Well, of course: in the Near East, about ten
thousand years ago. That's where our peculiar, defining form of
agriculture was born, and we began to be we. That was our cultural
birthplace. That was where and when we slipped into that
beautifully pleasant water: the Near East, ten thousand years ago.
As the water in the cauldron slowly heats,
the frog feels nothing but a pleasant warmth, and indeed that's
all there is to feel. A long time has to pass before the water
begins to be dangerously hot, and our own history demonstrates
this. For fully half our history, the first five thousand years,
signs of distress are almost nonexistent. The technological
innovations of this period bespeak a quiet life, centered around
hearth and village -- sun-dried brick, kiln-fired pottery, woven
cloth, the potter's wheel, and so on. But gradually,
imperceptibly, signs of distress begin to appear, like tiny
bubbles at the bottom of a pot. What shall we look for, as signs of
distress? Mass suicides? Revolution? Terrorism? No, of course not.
Those come much later, when the water is scalding hot. Five
thousand years ago it was just getting warm. Folks mopping their
brows were grinning at each other and saying, "Isn't it great?"
You'll know where to find the signs of
distress if you identify the fire that was burning under the
cauldron. It was burning there in the beginning, was still burning
after five thousand years . . . and is still burning today in
exactly the same way. It was and is the great heating element of
our revolution. It's the essential. It's the sine qua non of our
success if success is what it is. Speak! Someone tell me what I'm talking
about! "Agriculture!" Agriculture, this gentleman
tells me. No. Not agriculture. One particular style of
agriculture. One particular style that has been the basis of our
culture from its beginnings ten thousand years ago to the present
moment -- the basis of our culture and found in no other. It's
ours, it's what makes us us. For its complete ruthlessness toward
all other life-forms on this planet and for it's unyielding
determination to convert every square meter on this planet to the
production of human food, I've called it totalitarian
agriculture. Ethnologists, students of animal behavior,
and a few philosophers who have considered the matter know that
there is a form of ethics practiced in the community of life on
this planet -- apart from us, that is. This is a very practical
(you might say Darwinian) sort of ethics, since it serves to
safeguard and promote biological diversity within the community.
According to this ethics, followed by every sort of creature
within the community of life, sharks as well as sheep, killer bees
as well as butterflies, you may compete to the full extent of your
capabilities, but you may not hunt down your competitors or
destroy their food or deny them access to food. In other words,
you may compete but you may not wage war. This ethics is violated
at every point by practitioners of totalitarian agriculture. We
hunt down our competitors, we destroy their food, and we deny them
access to food. That indeed is the whole purpose and point of
totalitarian agriculture. Totalitarian agriculture is based on the
premise that all the food in the world belongs to us, and there is
no limit whatever to what we may take for ourselves and deny to
all others. Totalitarian agriculture was not adopted in
our culture out of sheer meanness. It was adopted because, by its
very nature, it's more productive than any other style (and there
are many other styles). Totalitarian agriculture represents
productivity to the max, as Americans like to say. It represents
productivity in a form that literally cannot be exceeded.
Many styles of agriculture (not all, but
many) produce food surpluses. But, not surprisingly, totalitarian
agriculture produces larger surpluses than any other style. It
produces surpluses to the max. You simply can't out produce a
system designed to convert all the food in the world into human
food. Totalitarian agriculture is the fire under
our cauldron. Totalitarian agriculture is what has kept us "on the
boil" here for ten thousands years. Food availability and population
growth The people of our culture take food so much
for granted that they often have a hard time seeing that there is
a necessary connection between the availability of food and
population growth. For them, I've found it necessary to construct
a small illustrative experiment with laboratory mice.
Imagine if you will a cage with movable
sides, so that it can be enlarged to any desired size. We begin by
putting ten healthy mice of both sexes into the cage, along with
plenty of food and water. In just a few days there will of course
be twenty mice, and we accordingly increase the amount of food
we're putting in the cage. In a few weeks, as we steadily increase
the amount of available food, there will be forty, then fifty,
then sixty, and so on, until one day there is a hundred. And let's
say that we've decided to stop the growth of the colony at a
hundred. I'm sure you realize that we don't need to pass out
little condoms or birth-control pills to achieve this effect. All
we have to do is stop increasing the amount of food that goes into
the cage. Every day we put in an amount that we know is sufficient
to sustain a hundred mice and no more. This is the part that many
find hard to believe, but, trust me, it's the truth: The growth of
the community stops dead. Not overnight, of course, but in very
short order. Putting in an amount of food sufficient for one
hundred mice, we will find -- every single time that the
population of the cage soon stabilizes at one hundred. Of course I
don't mean one hundred precisely. It will fluctuate between ninety
and a hundred ten but never go much beyond those limits. On the
average, day after day, year after year, decade after decade, the
population inside the cage will be one hundred. Now if we should decide to have a population
of two hundred mice instead of one hundred, we won't have to add
aphrodisiacs to their diets or play erotic mouse movies for them.
We'll just have to increase the amount of food we put in the cage.
If we put in enough food for two hundred, we'll soon have two
hundred. If we put in enough for three hundred, we'll soon have
three hundred. If we put in enough for four hundred, we'll soon
have four hundred. If we put in enough for five hundred, we'll
soon have five hundred. This isn't a guess, my friends. This isn't
a conjecture. This is a certainty. Of course, you understand that there's
nothing special about mice in this regard. The same will happen
with crickets or trout or badgers or sparrows. But I fear that
many people bridle at the idea that humans might be included in
this list. Because as individuals we're able to govern our
reproductive capacities, they imagine our growth as a species
should be unresponsive to the mere availability of
food. Luckily for the point I'm trying to make
here, I have considerable data showing that, as a species, we're
as responsive as any other to the availability of food -- three
million years of data, in fact. For all but the last ten thousand
years of that period, the human species was a very minor member of
the world ecosystem. Imagine it -- three million years and the
human race did not overrun the earth! There was some growth, of
course, through simple migration from continent to continent, but
this growth was proceeding at a glacial rate. It's estimated that
the human population at the beginning of the Neolithic was around
ten million -- ten million, if you can imagine that! After three
million years! Then, very suddenly, things began to change.
And the change was that the people of one culture, in one corner
of the world, developed a peculiar form of agriculture that made
food available to people in unprecedented quantities. Following
this, in this corner of the world, the population doubled in a
scant three thousand years. It doubled again, this time in only
two thousand years. In an eye blink of time on the geologic scale,
the human population jumped from ten million to fifty million
probably eighty percent of them being practitioners of
totalitarian agriculture: members of our culture, East and West.
The water in the cauldron was getting warm,
and signs of distress were beginning to appear. Signs of distress: 5000-3000
B.C.E. It was getting crowded. Think of that.
People used to imagine that history is inevitably cyclical, but
what I'm describing here has never happened before. In all of
three million years, humans have never been crowded anywhere. But
now the people of a single culture -- our culture -- are learning
what it means to be crowded. It was getting crowded, and
overworked, overgrazed land was becoming less and less productive.
There were more people, and they were competing for dwindling
resources. The water is heating up around the frog and
remember what we're looking for: signs of distress. What happens
when more people begin competing for less? That's obvious. Every
schoolchild knows that. When more people start competing for less,
they start fighting. But of course they don't just fight at
random. The town butcher doesn't battle the town baker, the town
tailor doesn't battle the town shoemaker. No, the town's butcher,
baker, tailor, and shoemaker get together to battle some other
town's butcher, baker, tailor, and shoemaker. We don't have to see bodies lying in the
field to know that this was the beginning of the age of war that
has continued to the present moment. What we have to see is
war-making machinery. I don't mean mechanical machinery --
chariots, catapults, siege machines, and so on. I mean political
machinery. Butchers, bakers, tailors, and shoemakers don't
organize themselves into armies. They need warlords kings,
princes, emperors. It's during this period, starting around
five thousand years ago, that we see the first states formed for
the purpose of armed defense and aggression. It's during this
period that we see the standing army forged as the monarch's sword
of power. Without a standing army, a king is just a windbag in
fancy clothes. You know that. But with a standing army, a king can
impose his will on his enemies and engrave his name in history and
absolutely the only names we have from this era are the names of
conquering kings. No scientists, no philosophers, no historians,
no prophets, just conquerors. Again, nothing cyclic going on here.
For the first time in human history, the important people are the
people with armies. Now note well that no one thought that the
appearance of armies was a bad sign a sign of distress. They
thought it was a good sign. They thought the armies represented an
improvement. The water was just getting delightfully warm, and no
one worried about a few little bubbles. After this point military needs became the
chief stimulus for technological advancement in our culture.
Nothing wrong with that, is there? Our soldiers need better armor,
better swords, better chariots, better bows and arrows, better
scaling machines, better rams, better artillery, better guns,
better tanks, better planes, better bombs, better rockets, better
nerve gas . . . well, you see what I mean. At this point no one
saw technology in the service of warfare as a sign that something
bad was going on. They thought it was an
improvement. From this point on, the frequency and
severity of wars will serve as one measure of how hot the water is
getting around our smiling frog. Signs of distress: 3000-1400
B.C.E. The fire burned on under the cauldron of our
culture, and the next doubling of our population took only sixteen
hundred years. There were a hundred million humans now, at 1400
B.C.E., probably ninety percent of them being members of our
culture. The Near East hadn't been big enough for us for a long
time. Totalitarian agriculture had moved northward and eastward
into Russia and India and China, northward and westward into Asia
Minor and Europe. Other kinds of agriculture had once been
practiced in all these lands, but now need I say it? agriculture
meant our style of agriculture. The water is getting hotter always getting
hotter. All the old signs of distress are there, of course why
would they go away? As the water heats up, the old signs just get
bigger and more dramatic. War? The wars of the previous age were
piddling affairs compared with the wars of this age. This is the
Bronze Age! Real weapons, by God! Real armor! Vast standing
armies, supported by unbelievable imperial wealth! Unlike signs of war, other signs of distress
aren't cast in bronze or chiseled in stone. No one's sculpting
friezes to depict life in the slums of Memphis or Troy. No one's
writing news stories to expose official corruption in Knossos or
Mohenjo-Daro. No one's putting together film documentaries about
the slave trade. Nonetheless, there's at least one sign that can
be read in the evidence: Crime was emerging as a problem.
Looking out into your faces, I see how
unimpressed you are with this news. Crime? Crime is universal
among humans, isn't it? No, actually it isn't. Misbehavior, yes.
Unpleasant behavior, disruptive behavior, yes. People can always
be counted on to fall in love with the wrong person or to lose
their tempers or to be stupid or greedy or vengeful. Crime is
something else, and we all know that. What we mean by crime
doesn't exist among tribal peoples, but this isn't because they're
nicer people than we are, it's because they're organized in a
different way. This is worth spending a moment on. If someone irritates you let's say by
constantly interrupting you while you're talking -- this isn't a
crime. You can't call the police and have this person arrested,
tried, and sent to prison, because interrupting people isn't a
crime. This means you have to handle it yourself, whatever way you
can. But if this same person walks onto your property and refuses
to leave, this is a trespass a crime and you can absolutely call
the police and have this person arrested, tried, and maybe even
sent to prison. In other words, crimes engage the machinery of the
state, while other unpleasant behaviors don't. Crimes are what the
state defines as crimes. Trespassing is a crime, but interrupting
is not, and we therefore have two entirely different ways of
handling them -- which people in tribal societies do not. Whatever
the trouble is, whether it's bad manners or murder, they handle it
themselves, the way you handle the interrupter. Evoking the power
of the state isn't an option for them, because they have no state.
In tribal societies, crime simply doesn't exist as a separate
category of human behavior. Note again: There's nothing cyclical about
the appearance of crime in human society. For the first time in
history, people were dealing with crime. And note that crime made
its appearance during the dawning age of literacy. What this means
is that, as soon as people started to write, they started writing
laws; this is because writing enabled them to do something they
hadn't been able to do before. Writing enabled them to define in
exact, fixed terms the behaviors they wanted the state to
regulate, punish, and suppress. From this point on, crime would have an
identity of its own as "a problem" in our culture. Like war, it
was destined to stay with us East and West right up to the present
moment. From this point on, crime would join war as a measure of
how hot the water was becoming around our smiling
frog. Signs of distress: 1400-0
B.C.E. The fire burned on under the cauldron of our
culture, and the next doubling of our population took only
fourteen hundred years. There were two hundred million humans now,
at the beginning of our "Common Era" ninety-five percent or more
of them belonging to our culture, East and West. It was an era of political and military
adventurism. Hammurabi made himself master of all Mesopotamia.
Sesostris III of Egypt invaded Palestine and Syria. Assyria's
Tiglath Pileser I extended his rule to the shores of the
Mediterranean. Egyptian pharaoh Sheshonk overran Palestine.
Tiglath Pileser III conquered Syria, Palestine, Israel, and
Babylon. Babylon's Second Nebuchadnezzar took Jerusalem and Tyre.
Cyrus the Great extended his reach across the whole of the
civilized west, and two centuries later Alexander the Great made
the same imperial reach. It was also an era of civil revolt and
assassination. The reign of Assyria's Shalmaneser ended in
revolution. A revolt in Chalcidice against Athenian rule marked
the beginning of the twenty-year-long conflict known as the
Peloponnesian War. A few years later Mitylene in Lesbos also
revolted. Spartans, Achaeans, and Arcadians organized a rebellion
against Macedonian rule. A revolt in Egypt brought Ptolemy III
home from his military campaign in Syria. Philip of Macedon was
assassinated, as was Darius III of Persia, Seleucus III Soter, the
Carthaginian general Hasdrubel, social reformer Tiberius
Sempronius Gracchus, the Seleucid king Antiochus VIII, Chinese
emperor Wong Mong, and Roman emperors Claudius and Domitian.
But these weren't the only new signs of
stress observable in this age. Counterfeiting, coinage debasement,
catastrophic inflation -- all those nasty tricks were seen
regularly now. Famine became a regular feature of life all over
the civilized world, as did plague, ever symptomatic of
overcrowding and poor sanitation; in 429 B.C.E. plague carried off
as much as two thirds of the population of Athens. Thinkers in
both China and Europe were beginning to advise people to have
smaller families. Slavery became a huge, international
business, and of course would remain one down to the present
moment. It's estimated that at the midpoint of the fifth century
every third or fourth person in Athens was a slave. When Carthage
fell to Rome in 146 B.C.E., fifty thousand of the survivors were
sold as slaves. In 132 B.C.E. some seventy thousand Roman slaves
rebelled; when the revolt was put down, twenty thousand were
crucified, but this was far from the end of Rome's problems with
its slaves. But new signs of distress appeared in this
period that were far more relevant to our purpose here tonight.
For the first time in history, people were beginning to suspect
that something fundamentally wrong was going on here. For the
first time in history, people were beginning to feel empty, were
beginning to feel that their lives were not amounting to enough,
were beginning to wonder if this is all there is to life, were
beginning to hanker after something vaguely more. For the first
time in history, people began listening to religious teachers who
promised them salvation. It's impossible to overstate the novelty of
this idea of salvation. Religion had been around in our culture
for thousands of years, of course, but it had never been about
salvation as we understand it or as the people of this period
began to understand it. Earlier gods had been talismanic gods of
kitchen and crop, mining and mist, house painting and herding,
stroked at need like lucky charms, and earlier religions had been
state religions, part of the apparatus of sovereignty and
governance (as is apparent from their temples, built for royal
ceremonies, not for popular public devotions). Judaism, Brahmanism, Hinduism, Shintoism,
and Buddhism all came into being during this period and had no
existence before it. Quite suddenly, after six thousand years of
totalitarian agriculture and civilization building, the people of
our culture -- East and West, twins of a single birth -- were
beginning to wonder if their lives made sense, were beginning to
perceive a void in themselves that economic success and civil
esteem could not fill, were beginning to imagine that something
was profoundly, even innately, wrong with them. Signs of distress: 0-1200 C.E. The fire burned on under the cauldron of our
culture, and the next doubling of our population would take only
twelve hundred years. There would be four hundred million humans
at the end of it, ninety-eight percent of them belonging to our
culture, East and West. War, plague, famine, political corruption
and unrest, crime, and economic instability were fixtures of our
cultural life and would remain so. Salvationist religions had been
entrenched in the East for centuries when this period began, but
the great empire of the West still saluted its dozens of
talismanic deities, from Aeolus to Zephyrus. Nonetheless the
ordinary people of that empire -- the slaves, the conquered, the
peasants, the unenfranchised masses -- were ready when the first
great salvationist religion of the West arrived on its doorstep.
It was easy for them to envision humankind as innately flawed and
to envision themselves as sinners in need of rescue from eternal
damnation. They were eager to despise the world and to dream of a
blissful afterlife in which the poor and the humble of this world
would be exalted over the proud and the powerful. The fire burned on unwaveringly under the
cauldron of our culture, but people everywhere now had
salvationist religions to show them how to understand and deal
with the inevitable discomfort of being alive. Adherents tend to
concentrate on the differences between these religions, but I
concentrate on their agreements, which are as follows: The human
condition is what it is, and no amount of effort on your part will
change that; it's not within your power to save your people, your
friends, your parents, your children, or your spouse, but there is
one person (and only one) you can save, and that's you. Nobody can
save you but you, and there's nobody you can save but yourself.
You can carry the word to others and they can carry the word to
you, but it never comes down to anything but this, whether it's
Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, or Islam: Nobody can
save you but you, and there's nobody you can save but yourself.
Salvation is of course the most wonderful thing you can achieve in
your life -- and you not only don't have to share it, it isn't
even possible to share it. As far as these religions have it worked
out, if you fail of salvation, then your failure is complete,
whether others succeed or not. On the other hand, if you find
salvation, then your success is complete again, whether others
succeed or not. Ultimately, as these religions have it, if you're
saved, then literally nothing else in the entire universe matters.
Your salvation is what matters. Nothing else not even my salvation
(except of course, to me). This was a new vision of what counts in the
world. Forget the boiling, forget the pain. Nothing matters but
you and your salvation. Signs of distress:
1200-1700 It was quite a vision but of course the fire
burned on under the cauldron of our culture, and the next doubling
of our population would take only five hundred years. There would
be eight hundred million humans at the end of it, ninety-nine
percent of them belonging to our culture, East and West. It's the
age of bubonic plague, the Mongol Horde, the Inquisition. The
first known madhouse and the first debtor's prison are opened in
London. Farm laborers revolt in France in 1251 and 1358, textile
workers revolt in Flanders in 1280; Wat Tyler's rebellion reduces
England to anarchy in 1381, as workers of all kinds unite to
demand an end to exploitation; workers riot in plague- and
famine-racked Japan in 1428 and again in 1461; Russia's serfs rise
in revolt in 1671 and 1672; Bohemia's serfs revolt eight years
later. The Black Death arrives to devastate Europe in the middle
of the fourteenth century and returns periodically for the next
two centuries, carrying off tens of thousands with every outbreak;
in two years alone in the seventeenth century it will kill a
million people in northern Italy. The Jews make a handy scapegoat
for everyone's pain, for everything that goes wrong; France tries
to expel them in 1252, later forces them to wear distinctive
badges, later strips them of their possessions, later tries to
expel them again; Britain tries to expel them in 1290 and 1306;
Cologne tries to expel them in 1414; blamed for spreading the
Black Death whenever and wherever it- arrives, thousands are
hanged and burned alive; Castile tries to expel them in 1492;
thousands are slaughtered in Lisbon in 1506; Pope Paul III walls
them off from the rest of Rome, creating the first ghetto. The
anguish of the age finds expression in flagellant movements that
foster the idea that God will not be so tempted to find
extravagant punishments for us (plagues, famines, wars, and so on)
if we preempt him by inflicting extravagant punishments on
ourselves. For a time in 1374, Aix-la-Chapelle is in the grip of a
strange mania that will fill the streets with thousands of
frenzied dancers. Millions will die as famine strikes Japan in
1232, Germany and Italy in 1258, England in 1294 and 1555, all of
Western Europe in 1315, Lisbon in 1569, Italy in 1591, Austria in
1596, Russia in 1603, Denmark in 1650, Bengal in 1669, Japan in
1674. Syphilis and typhus make their appearance in Europe.
Ergotism, a fungus food poisoning, becomes endemic in Germany,
killing thousands. An unknown sweating sickness visits and
revisits England, killing tens of thousands. Smallpox, typhus, and
diphtheria epidemics carry off thousands. Inquisitors develop a
novel technique to combat heresy and witchcraft, torturing
suspects until they implicate others, who are tortured until they
implicate others, who are tortured until they implicate others, ad
infinitum. The slave trade flourishes as millions of Africans are
transported to the New World. I don't bother to mention war,
political corruption, and crime, which continue unabated and reach
new heights. There will be few to argue with Thomas Hobbes when,
in 1651, he describes the life of man as "solitary, poor, nasty,
brutish, and short." A few years later Blaise Pascal will note
that "All men naturally hate one another." The period ends in
decades of economic chaos, exacerbated by revolts, famines, and
epidemics. Christianity becomes the first global
salvationist religion, penetrating the Far East and the New World.
At the same time it fractures. The first fracture is resisted
hard, but after that, disintegration becomes commonplace.
Please don't overlook the point I'm making
here. I'm not collecting signals of human evil. These are
reactions to overcrowding too many people competing for too few
resources, eating rotten food, drinking fouled water, watching
their families starve, watching their families fall to the
plague. Signs of distress:
1700-1900 The fire burned on under the cauldron of our
culture, and the next doubling of our population would take only
two hundred years. There would be one and a half billion humans at
the end of it, all but half a percent of them belonging to our
culture, East and West. It would be a period in which, for the
first time, religious prophets would attract followers simply by
predicting the imminent end of the world; in which the opium trade
would become an international big business, sponsored by the East
India Company and protected by British warships; in which
Australia, New Guinea, India, Indochina, and Africa would be
claimed or carved up as colonies by the major powers of Europe; in
which indigenous peoples all around the world would be wiped out
in the millions by diseases brought to them by Europeans measles,
pellagra, whooping cough, smallpox, cholera with millions more
herded onto reservations or killed outright to make room for white
expansion. This isn't to say that native peoples alone
were suffering. Sixty million Europeans died of smallpox in the
eighteenth century alone. Tens of millions died in cholera
epidemics. I'd need ten minutes to list all the dozens of fatal
appearances that plague, typhus, yellow fever, scarlet fever, and
influenza made during this period. And anyone who doubts the
integral connection between agriculture and famine need only
examine the record of this period: crop failure and famine, crop
failure and famine, crop failure and famine, again and again all
over the civilized world. The numbers are staggering. Ten million
starved to death in Bengal, 1769. Two million in Ireland and
Russia in 1845 and 1846. Nearly fifteen million in China and India
from 1876 to 1879. In France, Germany, Italy, Britain, Japan, and
elsewhere, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands died in other
famines too numerous to mention. As the cities became more crowded, human
anguish reached highs that would have been unimaginable in
previous ages, with hundreds of millions inhabiting slums of
inconceivable squalor, prey to disease borne by rats and
contaminated water, without education or means of betterment.
Crime flourished as never before and was generally punished by
public maiming, branding, flogging, or death; imprisonment as an
alternate form of punishment developed only late in the period.
Mental illness also flourished as never before madness,
derangement, whatever you choose to call it. No one knew what to
do with lunatics; they were typically incarcerated alongside
criminals, chained to the walls, flogged,
forgotten. Economic instability remained high, and its
consequences were felt more widely than ever before. Three years
of economic chaos in France led directly to the 1789 revolution
that claimed some four hundred thousand victims burned, shot,
drowned, or guillotined. Periodic market collapses and depressions
wiped out hundreds of thousands of businesses and reduced millions
to starvation. The age also ushered in the Industrial
Revolution, of course, but this didn't bring ease and prosperity
to the masses; rather it brought utterly heartless and grasping
exploitation, with women and small children working ten, twelve,
and more hours a day for starvation wages in sweatshops,
factories, and mines. You can find the atrocities for yourself if
you're not familiar with them. In 1787 it was reckoned that French
workers labored as much as sixteen hours a day and spent sixty
percent of their wages on a diet consisting of little more than
bread and water. It was the middle of the nineteenth century
before the British Parliament limited children's work days to ten
hours. Hopeless and frustrated, people everywhere became
rebellious, and governments everywhere answered with systematic
repression, brutality, and tyranny. General uprisings, peasant
uprisings, colonial uprisings, slave uprisings, worker uprisings
-- there were hundreds, I can't even list them all. East and West,
twins of a common birth, it was the age of revolutions. Tens of
millions of people died in them. As ordinary, habitual interactions between
governed and governors, revolt and repression were new, you
understand characteristic signs of distress of the age.
The wolf and the wild boar were deliberately
exterminated in Europe during this period. The great auk of Edley
Island, near Iceland, was hunted to extinction for its feathers in
1844, becoming the first species to be wiped out for purely
commercial purposes. In North America, in order to facilitate
railway construction and undermine the food base of hostile native
populations, professional hunters destroyed the bison herds,
wiping out as many as three million in a single year; only a
thousand were left by 1893. In this age, people no longer went to war to
defend their religious beliefs. They still had them, Still clung
to them, but the theological divisions and disputes that once
seemed so murderously important had been rendered irrelevant by
more pressing material concerns. The consolations of religion are
one thing, but jobs, fair wages, decent living and working
conditions, freedom from oppression, and some faint hope of social
and economic betterment are another. It would not, I think, be too fanciful to
suggest that the hopes that had been invested in religion in
former ages were in this age being invested in revolution and
political reform. The promise of "pie in the sky when you die" was
no longer enough to make the misery of life in the cauldron
endurable. In 1843 the young Karl Marx called religion "the opium
of the people." From the greater distance of another century and a
half, however, it's clear that religion was in fact no longer very
effective as a narcotic. Signs of distress:
1900-60 The fire burned on under the cauldron of our
culture, and the next doubling of our population would take only
sixty years -- only sixty. There would be three billion humans at
the end of it, all but perhaps two tenths of a percent of them
belonging to our culture, East and West. What do I need to say about the water
steaming in our cauldron in this era? Is it boiling yet, do you
think? Does the first global economic collapse, beginning in 1929,
look like a sign of distress to you? Do two cataclysmic world wars
look like signs of distress to you? Stand off a few thousand miles
and watch from outer space as sixty-five million people are
slaughtered on battlefields or blasted to bits in bombing strikes,
as another hundred million count themselves lucky to escape merely
blinded, maimed, or crippled. I'm talking about a number of people
equal to the entire human population in the Golden Age of
classical Greece. I'm talking about the number of people you would
destroy if today you dropped hydrogen bombs on Berlin, Paris,
Rome, London, New York City, Tokyo, and Hong Kong. I think the water is hot, ladies and
gentlemen. I think the frog is boiling. Signs of distress:
1960-96 The next doubling of our population occurred
in only thirty-six years, bringing us to the present moment, when
there are six billion humans on this planet, all but a few
scattered millions belonging to our culture, East and
West. The voices in our long chorus of distress
have been added a few at a time, age by age. First came war: war
as a social fixture, war as a way of life. For two thousand years
or more, war seems to have been the only voice in the chorus. But
before long it was joined by crime: crime as a social fixture, as
a way of life. And then there was corruption: corruption as a
social fixture, as a way of life. Before long, these voices were
joined by slavery: slavery as world trade and as a social fixture.
Soon revolt followed: citizens and slaves rising up to vent their
rage and pain. Next, as population pressures gained in intensity,
famine and plague found their voices and began to sing everywhere
in our culture. Vast classes of the poor began to be exploited
pitilessly for their labor. Drugs joined slavery as world trade.
The laboring classes the so-called dangerous classes -- rose up in
rebellion. The entire world economy collapsed. Global industrial
powers played at world domination and genocide. And then came us: 1960 to the present.
Of what does our voice sing in the chorus of
distress? For some four decades the water has been boiling around
the frog. One by one, thousand by thousand, million by million,
its cells have shut down, unequal to the task of holding on to
life. What are we looking at here? I'll give you a
name and you can tell me if I've got it right. I'm prepared to
name it...cultural collapse. This is what we sing of in the chorus
of distress now -- not instead of all the rest, but in addition to
all the rest. This is our unique contribution to our culture's
howl of pain. For the very first time in the history of the world,
we bewail the collapse of everything we know and understand, the
collapse of the structure on which everything has been built from
the beginning of our culture until now. The frog is dead -- and we can't imagine
what this means for us or for our children. We're terrified.
Have I got it right? Think about it. If I've
got it wrong, there's nothing more to say, of course. But if you
think I've got it right, come back tomorrow night, and I'll
continue from this point.
Systems thinkers have given us a
useful metaphor for a certain kind of human behavior in the
phenomenon of the boiled frog. The phenomenon is this. If you drop
a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will of course frantically
try to clamber Out. But if you place it gently in a pot of tepid
water and turn the heat on low, it will float there quite
placidly. As the water gradually heats up, the frog will sink into
a tranquil stupor, exactly like one of us in a hot bath, and
before long, with a smile on its face, it will unresistingly allow
itself to be boiled to death.