Progress = Plenticide

In our grandparents' time (the Era of Progress), believe it or not, 'increasing biodiversity' was seen as the problem not the solution!

And their solution to this 'problem' was wholesale plenticide of all this unneeded and hence unwanted biological plentitude ------ via the chemists' synthetic autarky.

Man-made food pills would replace all the plants and animals we used to eat but now would no longer would need.

They'd all become "useless mouths" and "life unworthy of life".

And artificial wool and other synthetic fibres (remember artificial leather shoes ?!) would replace all those now useless sheep and cotton plants etc that we used to need hanging around.

Fossil fuels - and ultimately atomic fuels - would replace our need to burn trees and crop residue.

No longer would we need wind, water and sun to make mill wheels turn or to dry hay (what was hay mommy ?) - we could all move permanently indoors under plastic domes - atomic energy would split water held in rocks to provide us with oxygen and hydrogen fuel.

Progress was taught to all of us in the form of a metaphor -- viewed as a sort of arrowhead, moving forward and upward through evolutionary time and space.

This arrowhead was very wide, back in the distant past when there were lots of species hanging about but as time moved forward, evolutionary progress ensured that were fewer and fewer, bigger and bigger species - ending at the pointy end of the arrowhead with just one big - dead clever - species remaining : us.

Evolution's progress all made it inevitable --- but still it never hurt for the fit among us to 'speed the plow' by tugging gently at the ankles of the 'unfit' at the end of their rope.

Here cue Eugenics, Euthanasia, Aktion T4, the Hunger Plan Est and the Holocaust.

Progress consisted in draining much of the gene pool as possible, as fast as possible, by dividing the world into normal and deviant or into successful 'progressive' species and living fossils.

Deviant homosexual Romas would be converted to normality - or jailed.

Other Romas - a sort of living fossil among humanity - would fade away in time, it was certain.

Though some, like the Nazis, very much wanted to 'gas up' the process .

It was a great tale, a Man-flattering tale, but was any of it true ?

Nope !

The fossil record instead showed that the arrowhead was totally the wrong scientific metaphor (and trust me - truly successful scientists don't need to be good accountants but they all need to be great poets.)

The more accurate metaphor to express the movement of Life through Time from its tiny beginnings was a radiation outwards.

Still the arrowhead shape, yes, but with the tiny pointy end now at the beginning of Life on Earth with one tiny microbe, The Mother of Us All, and the broad end of the arrowhead at our present day - with our millions of discovered and undiscovered separate unique species.

Within that broad width of Life, species constantly came and went and some new species were bigger and more complex than their forebears while others were smaller and less complex than their forebears.

Biodiversity was abundant in all directions but there was no trend to a linear progress in any direction forward or backwards.

Worse ---- the whole social value theory of evolutionary linear Progress actually hung on a fragile intellectual claim.

For it wasn't enough for the proponents of Progress to show the original many many small species gradually reducing over time to a few big species, not if they were very big but not really any smarter than their tiny forebears.

Ever upward evolutionary Progress had to be ever upward progress in intelligence, however difficult it was to define intelligence across the species.

Ever upward linear Progress required that the tiny, ancient, simple microbes to be very stupid in intelligence - just as it required the newest species at the pointy end of Progress (Civilized Man) to be very smart in intelligence.

In 1945, two Manhattan-based scientific events (science being seen as the top intellectual activity) hit this theory so hard that it never really recovered.

Progress then quietly died away, circa 1965.

In August 1945, a whole bunch of the good guys of science dropped a bomb that they had just invented, a bomb that was seen as capable of destroying all human life on Earth.

That alone made it awfully hard to square this sort of high scientific intelligence with the other meaning of intelligence that we are always lecturing our errant teenagers about - intelligence as the ability to recognize the right choice and then to do it.

The other Manhattan based scientific event was actually a non-event : the failure of the the smartest (human) chemists in the universe , centred at Cornell University's Manhattan medical campus, to make commercial synthetic penicillin.

Far too difficult a scientific feat for the smartest beings in the universe to pull off - but something tossed off easily by some of the oldest, simplest , stupidest beings around --- tiny penicillium cells.

Progress's solar plexus : meet the fatal punch ......

We genuinely regret species loss - but we don't lose sleep over it

Morally, mass species extinction through plenticidal indifference is like the Nazi Hunger-Plan-in-slow-motion

If the Nazi Final Solution had been totally successful, ten million European Jews would have died violently by gas or bullet.

If the Nazi Hunger Plan had been totally successful, thirty million Eastern European Slavs and Jews would have slowly and quietly ebbed to death through hunger and cold.

If extent of intention rather than extent of execution marks the true magnitude of evil - and I believe it does, as do most people who have thought about it, then the Hunger Plan - though too little known - was the far greater Nazi evil.

There is always a market for movies made up of violence porn - and scenes of mass murders by bullet or gas chambers fills that pornographic need.

Slow starvation deaths makes for bad Hollywood

But extended scenes of slow starvation deaths are much more - not less - painful to watch --- even, or perhaps especially, for violence junkies.

Hollywood has no interest in making movies about slow quiet destructions of human lives and cultures by benign plenticidal neglect.

Slow quiet death (through inadequate land and hence food & fuel resources) to all aboriginals who refused to join modern progressive scientific industrial society was always and everywhere the implicit Hunger Plan from the 1870s to the 1970s.

Our extra special animus against relatively small numbers of powerless aboriginals requires some explaining.

It was because of their great moral power : they dared to question the unquestionable good of Progress and Modern Science and Technology, even as they themselves were clearly slowly starving to death in dismal living conditions.

They dared assault our innermost superego and awake long suppressed doubts we all had about the path of Progress- and for this they must die to let our superegos regain control.

Thirty years later - would the US Civil War have even been fought ?

In 1865, fighting and dying to defend the right of one person to buy another person for the equivalent today of a million dollar home, seemed to make great economic sense.

But that quickly changed as mechanization replaced human hand skills and as the cheap energy slaves embodied in engines and fossil fuel replaced the energy from fragile human and animal slaves. 

In the 1890s, King Leopold II of Belgium and his minions expected to extract great wealth from the Congo - but mostly from inert non-living wealth.

They saw no real economic need to keep the people of their Congo alive as forced labour, for working on future renewable resource plantations for example.

They quickly killed off half the entire population - ten million - the world's greatest mass murder ever.

King Leopold's plenticidal indifference

Some they deliberately murdered - but most died through plenticidal indifference.

For to their modern minds, the Congo seemed to have a plentitude of people-to-be-fed-and-clothed - far more than needed to exploit it successful with machinery and fossil fuels.

Best to let the excess 'useless mouths' died quietly from hunger - off stage.

They almost got away with it - perhaps if they had laid off those public capitations of heads and hands - they might well have.

Today, similarly, we can't really get away with the roundup and deliberate killing of a few hundred wolves or feral ponies without a huge hue and cry.

But if 95% of all the frogs in the world die because of a fungus disease spread worldwide as a consequence of a 1950s human pregnancy test, we will all purse our lips for a moment, sigh and then get about with our lives.

Our consciences almost clear.

The world is filled with a plentitude of frogs and frog species - how many do we really need anyway - won't one or two species be more than enough ?

The Sixth Extinction by plenticidal indifference and the Aboriginal (and other) Hunger Plans --- you tell me the moral difference...