Sermon Archive	Sermon Archive
2000 Story Skyscrapers & Naked People MEDITATION There is not a speck of doubt in my mind. In these complex times where we must be content with others taking action on so many issues about which we know so little, we need comfort. Perhaps it is the distraction of a movie or a good book, a child, or a trip, or taking a risk with investments or a bungee jump, or a free fall from an airplane. Or perhaps the comfort is in a hand held, or through caring for another in need, or giving money to the food bank, or working there yourself. We must have the comforts we seek or life becomes too hard, but in the comfort there can lurk a troll, a dragon, a beast of great proportions, the demons of the underworld . . . for they can distract us from the clarity we need in this world as we face challenges to our very existence. In the silence that follows, consider your comforts and balance them with your commitments to making this world a safer and more gentle place for us all. FIRST READING Paul Ehrlich, who wrote The Population Bomb in 1967, wrote this little essay in 1968. It is dated, but instructive of the fears he lives with at that time. "Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of humankind have already been born. More than three and a half billion people already populate our moribund globe, and about half of them are hungry. Some 10 to 20 million will starve to death this year. In spite of this, the population of the earth will have increased by 70 million in 1969. For humankind has artificially lowered the death rate of the human population, while in general, birth rates have remained high. With the input side of the population system in high gear and the output side slowed down, our fragile planet has filled with people at an incredible rate. It took several million years for the population to reach a total of two billion people in 1930, while a second two billion will have been added by 1975! By that time some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation in famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980's. Of course more massive famine may be avoided if other events cause a prior rise in the human death rate. Both worldwide plague and thermonuclear war are made more probable as population growth continues. These, along with famine, make up the trio of potential "death rate solutions" to the population problem - solutions in which the birth rate-death rate imbalance is redressed by a rise in the death rate rather than by a lowering of the birth rate. Make no mistake about it, the imbalance will be redressed." ["Eco-Catastrophe" by Paul R. Ehrlich, 1969, edited for gender bias, as reprinted in Clem et al editors, No Room For Man(Totowa, N.J.: Littlefield, Adams, & Co., 1970, p. 162-3.)] SECOND READING "The blind conviction that we have to do something about other people's reproductive behaviour, and that we may have to do it whether they like it or not, derives from the assumption that the world belongs to us, who have so expertly depleted its resources, rather than to them, who have not. Put in this way, the Z P G intellectual position is totally illiberal, yet some - I would say most - liberals hold some such belief. . . . There is very little satisfaction to be had in averting births . . . There is much more satisfaction to be had from keeping alive the babies who are already there, in improving the health of their mothers . . . There is even more satisfaction in learning from the people just how amazing human beings are, how graceful, how resilient, how funny and how sad. Strange to relate, the poor get more opportunity to develop all these sides of themselves than do the rich, who are much more the same the world over. Let us therefore abandon the rhetoric of crisis, for we are the crisis. Let us stop wasting energy worrying about a world crammed with people standing shoulder to shoulder and counting babies born every minute (one in every five of them a Chinese and just about all of them foreign) and begin to use our imagination to understand how it is that poverty is created and maintained. Let us get to know Lady Poverty up close, so that we loose our phobia about the poor. If we must be afraid, let us rather be afraid that humankind, the ecological disaster, now has no enemy but his/her own kind. Rather than be afraid of the powerless, let us be afraid of the powerful, the rich sterile nations. who, whether they be of the Eastern of Western variety, have no stake in the future. The birth of every unwanted child is a tragedy, for itself and for the unwilling parents, but in spite of all the attention we have given to the matter, more unwanted children are born to us, the rich, than to them, the poor. This may seem a paradox, but the time gives it proof." [Greer, Germaine, Sex and Destiny(London: Secker and Warburg, 1984, p. 417 - 418.)] SERMON Both hymns, one theist and the other humanist, sing the praises of life itself. Neither is able to muster a measure of warning about the perils of such myopia. While I prefer to end a service on a note of hope, the final hymn warns us against the ways we follow. The contrast must be made. The comforting words, the hope, the praises sung, the celebrations, necessary as they are, are not enough in a world in deep trouble. The world faces a problem which is global and affects each nation, yet is so personal that talk about it excites a response from the deep private wells of sexual energy, draws a response from the protectionist feelings for our families, and unites our religion and our politics in rigid reaction. The problem is population. How many is enough? No one has yet to answer this. Guesses about the future are rarely on the mark. Where did all this population stuff start? We can go back to Greece. Sparta kept its male population stable through infanticide. Plato recommended zero population growth for his utopian Republic. Aristotle thought a populous city was hard to govern and that population should be limited by late marriage and exposure of deformed children. The outlines of the modern debate are traced to the late eighteenth century - well before Malthus, the one remembered for his forecasts. In 1761, Robert Wallace, wrote Various Prospects of Mankind, Nature and Providence, recommending equality as a remedy for distress and selfishness. His utopia, he predicted, would self destruct because of overpopulation. To solve the problem he predicted that women would be cloistered and men would be castrated, and people would be executed when they reached a certain age. [Harrison, Paul,The Third Revolution[London: I. B. Tauris, 1992, p. 10.] Such pronouncements could not remain unchallenged. William Godwin, father of Mary Shelley, the creator of Frankenstein, wrote in 1793, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, in which he stated that there was plenty of land available to support a grand increase in population. As the population increased, he wrote, our desire for gratification of the senses would weaken and population would level off, there would be no war, no crime, no administration of justice . . . no government . . . There would be neither disease, anguish, melancholy, nor resentment. Every man will seek the good of all. [Godwin, William, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976, p. 767-77.)] Godwin's dreams produced the standard against which all other statements about population were then measured. Thomas Malthus, who had taken religious vows in 1797, wrote that it was not possible to have a society in which everyone worked for the good of all. He predicted that population would increase geometrically (2,4,8,16 . . .) while food production would increase arithmetically (1,2,3,4,5 . . . ) [Himmerlfarb, Gertrude, On Population: Thomas Robert Malthus(New York: Random House, 1960)] In his second edition, in 1803, Malthus modified his beliefs so much that he really disowned his first thesis. He said that everything would be OK because people would exercise self-control. So population need not outrun the food supply. Economists jumped on the band wagon and Ricardo formulated the 'iron law of wages', which stated that wages could not rise much above subsistence or the level needed to replace present workers. Socialists hated Malthus' pronouncements in the first edition. Marx blamed overpopulation on capitalism not the laws of nature. He said that any overpopulation was only in relation to an economic system. Engles wrote that the pressure of overpopulation was not on the means of subsistence but on the means of employment. (Harrison, p. 14) The debate slowly shifted emphasis so that by 1879, American land reformer, Henry George was writing that the real cause of poverty was not overpopulation, but unjust laws, warfare, excessive rents, lack of secure tenancies and other social maladjustments. The potato famines of Ireland were cited by Malthusians of proof of the theories. Famines always became proof for Malthusians, and there have been constant famines for them to cite: China in the late 1920's, the Soviet Union in the early thirties, India in the early forties, China again in the fifties, Nigeria in the sixties, Ethiopia, Bangladesh and Cambodia in the seventies, and the Sub-Sahara in the eighties. While some famine was seen as the result of natural catastrophe, e.g., the floods of Bangladesh, it was only in the nineties that the average person began to see famine as a political problem, especially through the situations of Somalia and the former Yugoslavia. Danish economist Ester Boserup turned all this thinking on its head in her book, The Conditions of Agricultural Growth, published in 1965. Boserup theorized that it was not change in agriculture that determined population levels, but population which determined new methods in agriculture. Following her beliefs, it is Third World nations which have large population growths which will advance the fastest, at least in terms of food production. In 1976, a British historian extended the theory to the industrial revolution in his book, Poverty and Progress. He said, "Changes were made under duress . . . They were not introduced when the traditional economic system was functioning in ecological equilibrium, but when scarcity threatened the continuation of the established system." [Wilkinson, Richard, Poverty and Progress(London: Methuen, 1973, . 136.)] All of this conjecture has turned us a bit from the population problem to justice and economics. But, let's face it, population is only a problem when something breaks down. It could be the pension plans which will not have enough money to pay us when we retire unless we bring in massive numbers of refugees. We must do this because our fertility rate is too low to give our society enough of our own children to solve the problem. And we will endure cultural changes as a result. This is a population problem. While the feeding of Somalians would not have become a problem if there were millions fewer, there are other ways to see Somalia . . . with political or with climatic problems that happened to devastate a land and a people. Amongst all the Jeremiads issued today, one stands out. It was dreamed up by a Birmingham University Professor, John Fremlin. In 1964 he projected the population growth of humans on the earth over the next 890 years. At that time there would be 60,000 trillion people (60 quadrillion). The heat from their bodies would turn metal red hot. This problem aside, he predicted the evaporation of the world's oceans to make room for 2000 story skyscrapers which would be inhabited by naked people. There would be no resources for clothing. People would spend their entire lives in apartments communicating through a central computer. He said that any more people would destroy the atmosphere - so that was the total limit of people which the earth could handle. (from Globe and Mail, by Adrian Berry) All the statisticians are filled with the prejudice of their assumptions. We can go on and on and get ourselves even deeper into fantasy with different assumptions. The basic assumptions of all these hypotheses remind me of the story about an economist, a chemist and a physicist who landed on a desert island with no food. A can of beans washed up on shore and they rushed to it. The physicist said, let us bash it on a rock and eat the contents. No said the chemist, we should build a fire and heat the contents until the sides split. We will then have opened the can and have hot beans. The economist admitted that there was a real dilemma and said they should go about solving the problem methodically. First he said, In solving the problem let us assume that we have a can opener . . . It is not only blaming all problems on overpopulation and many of the basic assumptions which cause confusion, there is also a great deal of ignorance in looking at what statistics are available. "The rate of global population increase was 2.1 percent per year in 1961. It then began falling and after a while reached a low of 1.7 percent in 1979 where it seemed to stay for ten years. The press, addicted to optimism, reported that the population growth is slowing. It was both true and false. The percentage had gone from 2.1 percent to 1.7 percent, but the absolute rate of population growth, a body count, turned up another story. While 2.1 percent growth in 1961 meant 64 million new people a year, the 1.7 percent rate in 1988 meant 93 million new bodies each year. How did this happen? The smaller percentage on a larger number of people still made for more babies each year. The press, our opinion makers, is apparently unable to appreciate the difference between percentages and actual babies. (Hardin, Garrett, Living Within Limits(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993, p. 11-12)] Our old assumptions are being challenged by human behaviour. At one time we believed, and many people still do, that wealth is the means to get a lower birth rate. But wealth also brings a slowed death rate which is a result of increased longevity, so the size of the population increases, there are more people in wealthy societies. The theory supposes that there is only one way to drop the fertility rate of the world and that is to increase the wealth in areas which are poor. Poor people have historically had more children than wealthy people. We are now seeing a drop in the fertility rate of the Third World without much of an increase in the wealth of the people. The December 1993 issue of Scientific American carried an article that documented dramatic fertility rate decreases throughout the Third World. Why? Mass communication tools have brought education about reproduction, birth control, and family planning. In the 1950's demographers Kingsley Davis and Judith Blake described four direct influences on fertility: use of effective contraception, the age at which women first marry, the length of time after childbirth before women conceive again, and the use of abortion. Of all these, it is information on family planning brought through television to more and more people around the globe which is having an impact. The article also demonstrated dramatic influences on fertility rates from use of contraception and increased education of women. [Robey, Rutstein and Morris, "The Fertility Decline in Developing Countries," Scientific American, December, 1993, p. 60-67.] Are you confused yet? Too many theories? Too many numbers? Too much you can't even begin to understand how to help? What is one to do? The answer in this complex age always means belonging to groups of people who have a like minded purpose - or even more effective is an umbrella group of groups which can agree on a purpose. Our own task force on population under the Social Responsibilities Committee is undertaking some exciting ventures to work on the population problem. Whitman Wright, and his committee, the Family Planning Project, are seeking to establish a network of groups concerned with the population problem. They have received encouragement from many sources. You may want to note their open meeting on Tuesday evening with Michael Shenstone, an expert on what Canada is doing about the population problem. The meeting is in Whitman's home, and you are invited. What can be done? Literature has all sorts of radical visions. There is the puritan sexuality in Atwood's Handmaid's Tale. Perhaps less well known are the dying rooms in the movie Solent Green where old people may come to end their lives when the want to. There are the brutal images of a world gone mad in Shark Ship by C. M. Kornbluth. Some people have lived on ships for generations, and they have done fairly well. They have maintained their numbers. But people on land have bred themselves into a mess, they are brutal and strange, and finally agreed to have only one child per family. Nakedness of any sort which may promote sexual feeling is evil. The land people carry brutal competitive ways from an overpopulated world into their world of diminishing numbers. They started out with 2 billion people and by the 32nd generation, the last couple would have the single last child. The story is about the clash of the sea people and the land people. The sea people finally get away when one of their women strips naked and walks toward the land people. Seeing evil incarnate, the land people run away. In Triage by William Walling, war has been ended in human society and the result has been runaway population with no corrective. The measures that have to be taken to check population growth include outlawing illegal births. You need a permit to give birth to a child. It is not illegal to get pregnant, but birth requires a permit. Death can result. More than one author has recently turned the wonders of virtual reality on the population problem. It is possible that population will outstrip jobs and rather than have people sit idle, they will attend virtual reality stations and work there all day, believing that they are working when in actuality they are not. Virtual reality jobs just keep them from getting into trouble. It becomes a way to earn your welfare. Garret Hardin suggests that we send colonies into space, but they would have to be made up of people who agree not to breed beyond a certain point. In a sense, he says, we have to keep the hardy breeders here to perpetuate the problem and send the people who could solve the problem of overpopulation into space to set up colonies on other planets. What do I believe? I suspect that agriculture and water will determine the limits to population. That assumes we do not die from exposure to ultraviolet rays, heat trapped by greenhouse gasses, radiation from thermonuclear explosions, or some of our own wastes gone haywire. For now we seem to have come near the end of the line in great leaps of agricultural production - though the advanced methods used in the developed West can be used in developing and Third World nations to increase the levels of production, with the resultant loss of top soil and poisoning of water supplies. But that is not the immediate problem. The real problem is that we have yet to devise a way for people to get along even in one nation - so that food bound from the United Nations to Somalians is often taken by the war lords and used for their own purposes - food bound for the poorest in the old Yugoslavian Republic sometimes never reaches its destination - we can not even deliver what we have. There is a terrible disproportion of wealth in this nation, in the United States, in other Developed nations and the disproportions are growing worse - and in developing nations it is worse and in Third World nations it is despicable. Socialists and capitalists will argue till the last person dies, there has to be a better way! While we must work on the issue of population control, it is only one of many hard issues facing the world today. Those who say that population is not a problem, I am afraid are just living in a fantasy world. For whether it be through unjust laws, poorly distributed wealth, bad farming techniques, women subjected to the sexual desires of men with no cultural supports to say no, or any one of a number of other problems, population difficulties seem to crop up again and again and in more and more areas. While over population may not be the problem, it is a common denominator in indicating that there is a problem in the system. Where are the solutions? Perhaps the first step is in how we relate to one another. "One is not allowed in the modern culture to speak about love, except in the most romantic and trivial sense of the word. Anyone who calls upon the capacity of people to practice brotherly and sisterly love is more likely to be ridiculed than to be taken seriously. The deepest difference between optimists and pessimists is their position in the debate about whether human beings are able to operate collectively from a basis of love. In a society that systematically develops in people their individualism, their competitiveness, and their cynicism, the pessimists are in a vast majority. That pessimism is the single greatest problem of the current social system . . . and the deepest cause of unsustainability. A culture that can not believe in, discuss, and develop the best human qualities is one that suffers form a tragic distortion of information. 'How good a society does nature permit?' asked psychologist Abraham Maslow. 'How good a human being does society permit?' [Maslow, Abraham, The Farthest reaches of Human nature(New York: Viking Press, 1971)] This revolution in our thinking will have to be a societal transformation that permits the best of human nature rather than the worst to be expressed and nurtured. Many people have recognized that necessity and that opportunity. For example, John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1932: The problem of want and poverty and the economic struggle between classes and nations is nothing but a frightful muddle, a transitory and unnecessary muddle. For the Western World already had the resource and the technique, if we could create the organization to use them, capable of reducing the Economic Problem, which now absorbs our moral and material energy, to a position of secondary importance . . . Thus the . . . day is not far off when the Economic Problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and . . . the arena of the heart and head will be occupied . . . by our real problems - the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behaviour and religion. [Keynes, J.M., foreword to Essays in Persuasion(New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1932.)] Aurelio Pecci, the great industrial leader who wrote constantly about problems of growth and limits, economics and environment, resources and governance, never failed to conclude that the answers to the world's problems begin with a 'new humanism': The humanism consonant with our epoch must replace and reverse principles and norms that we have hithertofore regarded as untouchable, but that have become inapplicable, or discordant with our purpose; it must encourage the rise of new value systems to redress our inner balance, and of new spiritual, ethical, philosophical, social, political, aesthetic, and artistic motivations to fill the emptiness of our life; it must be capable of restoring within us . . . love, friendship, understanding, solidarity, a spirit of sacrifice, conviviality; and it must make us understand that the more closely these qualities link us to other forms of life, and to our brothers and sisters, everywhere in the world, the more we shall gain. [Pecci, Aurelio, One Hundred Pages for the Future(New York: Pergamon Press, 1981, p. 184-5.)] It is difficult to speak of or to practice love, friendship, generosity, understanding, or solidarity within a system whose rules, goals, and information streams are geared for lesser human qualities." [ed. fr. Meadows, et al, Beyond the Limits(Post Mills, Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing Company, 1992, p. 233 - 234.)] There are some vary basic things which must change about who we are together or else the limits of water and arable land will become a mute point! 1 Our hymns can lull us into a false sense of security. The predictions of Malthus did not come true. The warnings of Paul Ehrlich have fallen short. Yet the ethical concerns of Germaine Greer are real. They are related to population, especially as she talks about women and about unwanted children. In the end, population seems to crop up when we talk about nearly any grave problem the world is facing . . . and I am afraid that solving any of these problems, including the population conundrum, will mean we have to change the way we think about ourselves. If we do not give the better side of humanity a chance, a tragic end may be our fate. AFTERWORD "Population has become a battleground on which everyone wields their favourite sword. For free-market conservatives free markets are the answer. Social justice is the solution for egalitarian socialists. More gentle technology and stronger pollution controls for the critics of modern technology.	What to expect on Sundays Religious Sources "Views From These Pews"