Creating abundance

In the last post I wrote about how the condition of abundance creates motive for mutualism – giving to others does not reduce one’s own lot. So, how can this condition be created?

1. Technology. There are many different science fiction stories about how technology might be used to make humanity’s basic needs free and universally accessible. Probably the most common idea is somehow incorporating photosynthesis into human skin, to either replace or supplement food. (For instance, see “The Green Leopard Plague” by Walter John Williams.) Another common idea is having cheaply made household units that can re-arrange molecules to turn any matter, such as garbage, into different matter, such as food and medicine. If we consider that humans require relatively few basic things to survive – clean air, water, and food – then focusing technology on making clean water and food as free and abundant as air might be one way of completely transforming the economy.

2. Checks on population growth. A quantity need not be unlimited to create the condition of abundance. There just needs to be enough of it relative to the population such that one can gain no benefit from denying it to others. To put it another way, society has figured out a method of denying use of land to people who need to use it, even when it is not being used. This method is possession or ownership of private property. Society has not figured out a method of denying use of air to people who need to use it. (Although I might add that the quality of air could go down enough in the future that people would have to use supplemental oxygen tanks or special indoor air systems to breathe, and this would allow a method of denying use of air.) Currently there is enough breathable air relative to the population that breathing air is free and universally available. Your breathing air does not impinge on my breathing air. Society hasn’t yet been able to divide air up and privatize it.

Similarly, once there was so much land that food was abundant – with a few hours of work a day, there was enough food for people to gather that everyone could be fed. The world was literally like a garden filled with fruit, and all it needed was the plucking. One of the conditions that has changed since that time is the unchecked population growth of the human species. Intensive agricultural production has not led to conditions of abundance, although it has led to population growth. As the amount of available food increases, the population also increases, and because there is no check to growth, both intensive agriculture and human population continue to increase. A planet overrun by billions of humans is not ideal. What is ideal is a stable human population that remains stable even with an increase in food. This requires checks on population growth.

How is this to be accomplished? There are a lot of bad answers and not so many good ones. A bad answer would be for the Western world to attempt to forcibly sterilize people in the developing world, as was attempted in some parts of India. Another bad answer is to use governments to enforce a regime of Zero population growth. A possible answer for checking population growth is artificially limiting food supply, although it is not the most desirable method because it would most likely be done by governments and leave the system of private property (or government-owned property) in place. Another possible bad answer is letting population growth run unchecked until the interaction of environmental destruction and intensive agriculture tops out and the maximum amount of food is produced. After a famine, the population would reach equilibrium. Yet another bad answer is voluntary human extinction, for which a movement exists.

A Vision of Unchecked Growth

In order to check a population, one can limit births or increase deaths. Factors that affect births include food supply, medicine, and reproductive capacity. Factors that affect deaths include food supply, medicine, predation, disease, danger of accidents, addiction, killings, suicide, war, and crowding stress. Human society is engaged in the project of increasing access to factors that increase births (and the number of children who grow into adults) and decreasing factors that shorten the human lifespan and cause death. This project, while coming from the best of intentions, is fundamentally flawed. The goal of this project is to increase the number of humans and the length of human life, but is not concerned about the environmental quality of life. It will lead to a crowded planet, full of humans, and not very full of other species. Without biodiversity, the ecosystems that humans depend on for survival will be very susceptible to disease and collapse. This problem can be mitigated if we as a species advance technologically until we no longer depend on cultivating the earth for food (we all have those nifty household units I mentioned above, for instance) – we advance past the point of needing agriculture. In this case, the problem of human dependence on the earth is mitigated only for humans and not for non-human animals, and the problem of commodification is not addressed.

Solutions

To return to the beginning, if we want to create conditions of abundance to promote mutualism, we can begin to do that on a small scale if we remember that an abundance can be limited in quantity, as long as it exists in greater quantity than is desired. The voluntary simplicity movement, for instance, is predicated on the idea that humans don’t need to live lifestyles driven by consumption of commodities. By reducing demand for commodities and increasing desire for valueless activities and objects, conditions of abundance are created on a microcosmic scale. Dumpster divers do the same thing – they find uses for food and objects that are free and available, that have so little value that they can’t be sold and are literally thrown into the garbage. While creating conditions of global, sustainable abundance is going to take a social revolution, there already exist communities that subvert market economics and work through mutualism. Spreading these communities and creating more opportunities for interactions that aren’t commodified may be the next step.