Earlier this year, The New Yorker reminded its readers about The Club of Rome. I am referring to an article by Idrees Kahloon, Washington Bureau Chief for The Economist. His article was titled, "The World Keeps Getting Richer. Some People Are Worried." It was published in the June 3, 2024, edition of the magazine. In the article, Kahloon reminds us that The Club of Rome, founded in 1968, has its origins in a rebellion against what the founders called our "suicidal ignorance of the human condition.”
The "ignorance" against which The Club of Rome was attempting to fight was, actually, ignorance of the following fact, a fact well known to anyone who has been reading my blog postings: "Our World," the world in which we most immediately live, is not a world that exists - or that can exist - on its own. Human civilization (another name for the world that we have created) is utterly, and absolutely, dependent upon the "World of Nature," and this "World of Nature," the world on which we ultimately depend for everything, is a world of limits.
LIMITS! What a challenging concept! Our human tendency is to think that whatever limits appear to constrain us can be, and must be, and should be overcome by human ingenuity and enterprise. "Enterprise" is particularly valued by the billionaire class, and by the business oligarchs who largely determine what happens in our human world.
The Club of Rome was talking about limits, way back in 1968, and placed itself in direct opposition to the idea that all apparent "limits" are simply temporary impediments to the realization that we can do anything we want to do.
As I have said, often enough, in the daily blog postings that appear here, we can, in fact, do "anything," but only in the "Human World" that we create. My "Two Worlds Hypothesis" is insistent that we live in and have obligations to TWO worlds - two different worlds, both of which we inhabit simultaneously.
Most immediately, we live in a world of our own creation. Ultimately, however, we and the human world that we immediately inhabit - and that we create - are absolutely limited and constrained by the "World of Nature," most typically called Planet Earth:
I invite your attention to Kahloon's article. He is impatient with those, from Malthus on, who emphasize "limits." Kahloon is an advocate of "economic expansion," and he claims that efforts to promote economic expansion are far from being "part of the problem," as many declare. According to Kahloon, those who think that endless efforts to expand our economy is a problem are simply paying undue attention to a "myth we'll have to outgrow."
Looking at that picture of Earth from space, it seems to me that while our planet is definitely commodious, it is ultimately limited. It appears that Kahloon has not yet come to grips with the fact that while we do have no limits to our human ingenuity, as our ingenuity operates within the world that we create, the ultimate reality we inhabit, revealed by that picture above, makes very clear that the "limits" imposed by the World of Nature are no myth at all.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thanks for your comment!