Читать книгу Muddling Toward Frugality - Warren Johnson - Страница 10

Adaptation is necessary for the historical continuity of all living things. While it is true that organisms living in a stable, mature, natural environment may not need to adapt to survive, just as human beings in a stable cultural situation do not have to change very much, this certainly is not the situation we find ourselves in now. In a number of ways, the present world is far from a state of equilibrium. More than any single factor, the quality of the future will depend on the effectiveness of our adaptation to the forces of change that are at work in our world today—the wisdom and creativity that we put into finding a new balance.

Unlike the members of a traditional society, Americans are a relatively adaptable people. We have had to adapt steadily to the requirements of industrialism, and even though it has not always been a smooth adaptation, it does prove our flexibility. At times one could even get the impression that we are addicted to change, but this is belied by our intense resistance to basic political and economic shifts. It is safe to say that no society looks forward to fundamental change; it is just too threatening.

Luckily, adaptation is not an all-at-once, no-second-chance process. It is an ongoing process that entails a great many experiments, dead ends, and setbacks. It is far more a matter of muddling along than anything resembling planned social change. Evolution exhibits the same hit-or-miss characteristics. Superficially, it may appear inefficient as species evolve and then disappear. But in the long run, it is very efficient as species are replaced by others that are more successful in utilizing the opportunities the environment offers. In human terms, a better adaptation to existing conditions will make irrelevant much that has gone before, in the way that modern technology made obsolete many mining, logging, and farming communities. There was nothing that the people caught in these places could do. They could only encourage their young people to leave and to seek jobs elsewhere. The future may do the same thing to many of us and to many of the first efforts to adapt to frugality. But if time is available to permit these processes to proceed slowly, the necessity to adapt should not put an intolerable burden on any single generation. And technology should be able to play a very helpful role here, offsetting many scarcities as they appear and developing ways to utilize renewable resources.

Time is essential; the process of adaptation cannot be hurried. There is no substitute for time to try things out. There have been many ideas in the recent past that seemed so good at first but have not worked out: urban renewal, Operation Headstart, and pollution taxes are a few examples. Experience is a good teacher, but often a slow one. At other times, ideas that at first seemed to be insignificant ended up having tremendous impact. I think of Thoreau’s essay on civil disobedience, which gave Gandhi a strategy for gaining independence for India. The same strategy was later utilized by the civil rights movement in the United States during the 1960s. It was an idea whose time had come, but it took many years to realize this, and there was no way of anticipating that it would happen.

What ideas will play the same role as we muddle toward frugality? Only time can supply the answer. If we go with the grain of the times and accept the limits of resources and environment, it seems safe to say that a number of generations should have time to explore different paths into the future and to develop methods of livelihood increasingly based on renewable resources, the only safe basis for a long human era. But if we resist change and try to deny the existence of scarcity in our push for continued growth, our remaining resources will be rapidly depleted and the necessary adaptation delayed, forcing a precipitous and dangerous rate of change later, something that may not be possible to accomplish without violence.

What are the human qualities that could lead to violence? Surprisingly, they are some of the qualities that have been most honored in Western civilization ever since the Renaissance. In a remarkable book titled The Comedy of Survival, Joseph Meeker distinguishes between two types of heroes, the tragic hero and the comic hero.³ He describes them as they are depicted in classical literature, although we need not be restricted to this one source; it is a universal distinction. The tragic hero is the one we have tended to honor; the one who is willing to risk everything for a goal he knows to be right, who is unswerving in defense of moral principle, and who is not hesitant to take on powers greater than himself. Yet different people see the same situation differently, and such single-minded zeal has led to wars in the past. Today, terrorists who employ indiscriminate violence see themselves as risking their lives for a noble objective. It is this same mentality that is apt to challenge resource limits, rather than accept them. On top of all this, the tragic hero is usually an unpleasant individual to be with; he takes himself very seriously; he is unwilling to compromise; and he is condescending to anyone who disagrees with him.

In contrast, the comic hero is usually relegated to the status of a buffoon—base and silly, although innocuous. His goal is simply to survive and to enjoy himself as best he can. He is unwilling to fight; instead, he tries to outwit his enemies and the authorities. His victories are small; survival and life are what are important to him; no cause could be worth dying for. The comic hero is friendly toward life and takes things as they are; life is an end in itself, rather than a struggle between right and wrong. Meeker suggests that perhaps it is time that we honor these virtues. He argues that it is the comic hero who will better insure our survival—the human animal adapting to the world as it is and enjoying what it has to offer, rather than trying to make it over into something that it is not and cannot be. It has been said that true heroism is to see the world as it is and to love it. This would seem to be a valuable quality, and it may turn out to be the key to the successful adaptation to scarcity.