Reducing everything about man's activities to its basics, there appear to
be three powerful driving forces which are in constant interplay with one
another. Until, say, a few decades ago, different dramas were being played
out in regions in different parts of the world. More recently, however,
they have joined together into a drama which is now pretty well world-wide
-- that is, affecting all continents and islands and reaching into even the
most isolated inhabited pockets.
All three forces have their origins way back in the genetic history of DNA
(generally), and at present we have no idea of the crucial mutations which
gave rise to them. However, we now have enough data to be able to place
dates on when they began to become significant -- for which read problematical.
The first force is innovation. At around 40,000BC man suddenly started to
become amazingly creative. For two million years before then, man's
artefacts were confined to four simple tools -- pounders, axes, spearheads
and scrapers -- and little more than three status ornaments that could be
easily carried on the person in those nomadic times -- necklaces, body
paint and head-dresses (the last only being inferred from evidence of the
few remaining hunter-gatherers). As to the four tools, they had improved
slightly over the preceding two million years, but each slight change took
hundreds of thousands of years to be implanted and to propagate among
groups around the world.
But, from 40,000 years ago, probably in Europe or the Middle East man
suddenly started to invent all sorts of other objects and to carry out all
sorts of new activities. He made many more types of highly-honed stone
tools, also spring-launched spears (atlatls), bone flutes, figurines and
whiled away his time in drawing and painting -- and, so the latest evidence
suggests, map-making and pictographic words. From then onwards, innovations
grew exponentially, today being largely formalized in research and
development groups in businesses and academia.
The second force is population. Over millions of years, our genes had
already provided an automatic method for hunter-gatherer man -- the
contraceptive effects of breast-feeding -- which prevented too high a
population growth rate. Usually no more than three children per mother.
But, once man's innovative ability had produced a new farming technology at
around 8,000BC in several parts of Eurasia, then larger families would have
been desirable for necessary help at seeding and harvesting times. Mothers
would have interrupted their feeding schedules and become maximally fertile
quite soon in the current child's life.
From then onwards world population surged exponentially from, maybe, two
or three million to the billions we have today. However, in the last decade
or two, as agricultural people started crowding into the major cities all
round the world, the fertility rate has been declining steeply, although
the world's present excess will still take at least another two generations
to stabilize.
Meanwhile, for a generation or so past, those parents who are living in the
advanced countries have started to decrease their family size to less than
the necessary two children for population replacement. Whether this is from
the stress of urban living or, more likely, the simple fact of the huge and
growing expenses of childrens' education, is not yet known. Strictly
speaking, Western man is going extinct unless some big -- and as yet
unknown -- changes are made in life and work patterns.
The result is that there is now rising tension between agricultural people
seeking to migrate into the advanced countries and the latter's resident
populations. Also, there is an interplay between the higher educational
standards required by an increasingly technocratic society and the costs
and abilities of state education to supply it. As it stands today, a small
minority of children in expensive private education in all advanced
countries supply the bulk of administrative, business and scientific
personnel who run the show.
The third strong force has been the magnification of the male pecking order
from relatively restricted and benign levels in the hunter-gatherer tribe
to that of the leaders of the major nations with the ability to wage wars.
For example, the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was initiated by no more than
about half-a-dozen individuals around President Bush (plus Tony Blair). But
this has been a relatively minor war compared with the full-scale
nationalistic wars that took place in 1914 (WW1) and 1939 (WW2). Today, the
costs of armaments -- never mind the costs of actually waging large-scale
war -- mean that those sorts of wars between advanced nations cannot be
afforded by any longer. All advanced countries are slashing their defence
expenditures.
Although that may be a relief, WW1 laid a land-mine which has not yet
exploded. Within a few week-ends of the start of the 1914 war, all the
participating nations realized that it was going to be far more expensive
than first envisaged. There simply wasn't enough gold-backed money
available for governments to borrow. So they had to print additional money
and, to prevent anybody exchanging it for gold at the bank, went off the
gold standard at the same time.
It would be tedious to relate the coming-ins and going-outs of the
gold-backed currencies from then onwards as future wars were fought and
having to be paid for -- including those in Korea and Vietnam but, suffice
it to say, the last flimsy backing of a national currency with gold was
severed in 1971 when President Nixon took the dollar off gold. Since then,
currency speculation and inflation -- serious as it was before then -- took
off, sometimes in wild spurts.
It is these national money-printed currencies, particularly those of the
American dollar and the European euro, which is causing the present chaos
and a state of paralysis in the composite mind of Western economists -- who
ought, if the subject has any validity at all, be able to clearly point to
a solution. But they can't and it is this chaos which is going to have to
play itself out in the hands of fumbling politicians during the coming
weeks and months -- either continuing the present tightrope or to fall into
deflationary economic depression or hyperinflation.
However, the three massive forces which are in play within and between one
another have three different time-scales for their solution. The problem of
population -- of both over-fertility and under-fertility -- will take at
least another three or four generations before the world has a sustainable,
properly-fed population. The technological problem of a scalable,
sustainable, efficient biofuel replacement (hydrogen) for burning fossil
fuels will probably take at least one more generation of genetic research
and development. However, the problem of currency needs to be solved
quickly. We need to get back to a commodity-based currency (it doesn't have
to be gold in principle -- it's only the most convenient material) as we
had before the foolishness (one might say, the criminality) of WW1.
Fortunately, the currency solution has already been worked out. In the
West, the so-called Austrian school of economists -- though still ignored
by most academic economists so far -- have been studying this ever since
1914. In the East (and the Middle East), the Chinese and Russian
governments (and oil-nations) have more recently been proposing a world
currency both for their own benefit and for their trading partners in the
West.
But the most thought-provoking sign of sanity is that although Western
central banks have been deriding gold-as-currency for all of the last
century and, indeed, actually started getting rid of it at give-away prices
some decades ago, they are now hanging on to their gold and, some rumours
have it, actually beginning to buy it -- just as China and Russia are doing
so more transparently. Although it may be laughable -- to both
gold-sceptics and gold-proponents alike -- to say this, I am beginning to
think that a few key people (in government Treasuries and in one or two
investment banks) are already realizing that a commodity-backed currency,
beyond the reach of politicians, is now the only answer to world-wide
economic stability. In solving this problem we may be nearer than we think,
though it may still take a substantial economic crash to bring it about.
Keith
Keith Hudson, Saltford, England
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