The following is the unedited version of an exposé currently featured
in the 25th revised edition of Malleus
Maleficus' [title withheld]. If you wish to report intrusiveness, defamation or inaccuracies, please email
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Next, Craig Venter announced he was working on a
digital-biological converter for Mars, and predicted that aliens would soon be
able to replicate
humans from digitized DNA broadcast into space for extraterrestrial download. Cool. No big deal. Venter is
a scientist of enormous repute, a Prometheus-like character and DNA pioneer who
is about to open a clinic in San Diego
that will sequence your genome and offer a “longevity plan” which I will not
pretend to understand, but which is said to
extend from the Double Helix to the Dawn of Eternal Life. And while “the
legislation of assisted dying will become a necessity as the population ages
and society becomes less willing and less financially able to look after the
elderly,”[1] celebrities are queuing up for the 6
billion genome digits of the elusive longevity code. Which is all fine and dandy. Except
that to envisage the golden age of human civilization in terms of Morlocks and
Elois entails an altogether greater degree of callousness than that which I am
able to muster.
Venter
may set out to prove that a creative genius can succeed where the scientific
establishment has failed – or where they
simply lack the imagination and the will to proceed. That’s his style. He is
the iconoclast, the risk-taker,
idiosyncratic and endowed with an ego that sends lesser mortals into a
spin. But what I demand to know is how one can distinguish between a viable
project and a delusional scientist. Of course, there is nothing new in the idea
that scientists are in some way
touched by the divine. What has changed is that
they are no longer held responsible for the madness of their schemes, because a
large part of such madness can be attributed to the lunacy of society. I,
too, should love to try my hand at a
little madcap small talk about ‘geo-engineering’- the first refuge of the
thwarted egomaniac - but, alas, there’s no time. Some of us should get real.
Climate change rather than population growth boasts an ever increasing number
of confabulists, such as Harvard physics professor David Keith, whose paper,
published in the journal Environmental
Research Letters concludes that it
would be “comparatively inexpensive” to spray sufficient sulphur particles
68,000 ft above the tropics to cut the rate of global warming in half. Which is
achieved, apparently by creating the
same cooling effect as was generated by the eruption of volcanoes such as
Mounts Pinatubo in the Philippines and St Helens in Northwest America.
Unsurprisingly,
in the hothouse of imagination absurdities abound. As far as ‘climate
remediation’ or ‘planet hacking’ is concerned, there is no beating them. Though
the flaw really is not with the Planet, if you ask me, but with the deteriorating relationship between
the global economy and the earth’s ecosystem, or what you might call a clash
between a thought system based upon mathematical logic, and another that relies
upon mad scientists wanting to save the world with carbon capture technology
and ethically reclaimed light bulbs.
But these are
circumstantial rather than factual distinctions. Perhaps
these extremely self-assured prodigies also find it more difficult than I to
accept the lesson of history that over-expanded civilizations can experience catastrophic
failure. Or that ours must catastrophically fail, because the only long-term
solution to the problem of global warming is a demographic one, and one that
can only be achieved by making fundamental changes within a culture that
regards economic growth as a legitimate activity. What we need is an event that changes our priorities. For whatever the truth about global warming,
the planet is shrinking at an alarming rate. And
it is useful to remember that if the Earth were compressed to half its present radius, we would all
weigh four times as much. Nor is this just about the degree to which necessity dictates
the effect of the size. No, this is about
the fundamentally synonymous roles of economic growth and demographic escalation.
Precisely because growth and productivity are linked to the volume of consumer
population, the only answer to long-term economic decline is more humans and plenty of them.
Within the social economy, multiplication is the only form of
growth, and stasis of any sort to be excluded at all cost. The headcount, in
other words, is fundamental to economic expansion – and in business terms this
is the categorical imperative. Without demographic growth, we drift into
decline. But no population can expand indefinitely. And with the profits of war
far exceeding those of trade, we have at last devised the instrument of our own
destruction. For how otherwise is the world going to defray a demographic
behemoth like runaway humanity?
Militarise
the economy – with the aim not to end, but perpetuate war!
[1]
So professed by Elizabeth Coulouris who chose
suicide rather than a care home.
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