“A full dilemma, moreover, as this book will show, has four horns, not just two. The societal dilemma also includes the need to control inflation, which still threatens the financial structure, and also free access to credit, which has become a principle feature of that structure. Each of these four is dependent on the others and none can be resolved in isolation. Each is a dimension of the whole”.
Traditional scientific thought has brought us the marvels of the computer, TV, car, airplane, high-rise buildings, air conditioning, labor-saving devices, miracles in medicine, and space exploration. But it is bringing disaster along with it. The very success of scientific medicine has already caused overpopulation: cities are crowded, and we are beginning to fight over scarce resources such as fish, fresh water, and oil. Technology applied to agriculture, through fertilizers and the chemical control of pests, promised to feed the starving millions, but at the cost of soil erosion, air and water pollution. New construction technology has enable us to produce high-rise buildings, roads, bridges, and airfields; it has also given us urban blight and decay, turned rich land into concrete deserts, and made peace and quiet scarce resources. And this is without an industrially developed Third World.
This is not news. It is something we have worried about and would now prefer to forget. The optimists still look to technology to dig us out of the hole into which we are sliding, a hole which technological thinking dug in the first place. The pessimists are burrowing into computer games, TV sitcoms, and state lotteries, hoping some windfall will save them and their families. Both optimisms and pessimism, however, are inappropriate since both rely upon one-sided views of the situation. Even so, both are right! The optimist is right because life will always find a way; the pessimist is right because technology cannot be that way.
Technology is the result of abstraction. Science alters the world in order to be able to cope with it. What can be measured or weighed is accepted, and what cannot is ignored or denied. Technology would fit nature, including the human being, to the procrustean bed of logic and so destroy the organic wholeness that gives life meaning. When this organic wholeness is destroyed, there are parts which no longer fit, or fit badly.
February 10th, 2020 ~
I remember back in the 70’s how inflation was so impactful. I was 12 and the gas crisis hit. Since then, there has been this fear of inflation coming back to hit us. Alan Greenspan was always trying to limit inflation. He tried to limit the economy when things were heating up with regulations and not raising the interest rate. Then in the 90’s the banks became so big and so did the investment banks and they allowed to be in the others industry. Was it Glass Spiel Act and derivatives? I think this is what we try to do. We fix something here but we don’t take the whole into account. This is the beauty of Albert Low’s book. He comes up with systems that I wouldn’t have come up with or thought of. He links certain actions with certain departments. For example, he as a really good diagram in the appendix.
There is a new story about locusts in Africa. I remember reading about locusts ruining crops in our history books and never thought this could come back and be an issue in today’s world.