Seeing the high Gods by her beauty's lure Hellenes and Phrygians into conflict drew, And brought to pass deaths, so to lighten earth's arrogant over-increase of her mortals.

Name	Euripides
Life	485 - 406 BC
Country	Greece
Category	Wisdom
Wikipedia	>>

One of the most terrifyingly base acts a Greek adrenalinomaniac ever committed - a Greek version of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac - was Agamemnon's offering of Iphigenia to Artemis . In order to get fair wind towards the Phrygians in Troy, for his Hellenes, Agamemnon was willing to let his own daughter die. This story has been retold many a time. Euripides used it to warn mankind against "hubris", too much arrogance, always punishable by the Gods. Isn't there an element of "Catch 22" in this story. If the Gods first demanded that sacrifice, how could they punish it later? And why? Perhaps, because Agamemnon shouldn't have gone to Troy at all? Perhaps he shouldn't have been so eager for a fair wind? Or is this, perhaps, an early, symbolic example of population control? Euripides is the first, so far as I know, to suggest that warfare is caused by a "population explosion". And that, when mankind was only at the 100 million level! His warning against hubris might now be translated into a warning against unrestricted economic growth. Perhaps Euripides today would say: "Don't ask the gods, or nature, for more economic progress! It will be punished!" Remember Pyrrus. Like all generals, he also wanted to win. He did so in an important battle around 280 B.C. But when he looked at the result, he became famous for saying: "Another victory of that sort and I am ruined". Is it really wise of us today to sacrifice, like Agamemnon, one bit more of nature to get one more million dollars? Would it be wiser, like Pyrrhus, to suspect: "Another 'progress' and we'll be ruined?" Or, even, "Another world war, and we'll be dead." Would such an outcome then be, as Euripides suggested, the result of too many people on a restricted globe? Some figures are a bit scary. As hunters and gatherers, it has been calculated, we could have kept the equilibrium with nature, had we restrained our numbers to some ten million individuals on the whole earth. In the late 1500's, when the great Italian thinker, Giovanni Botero, warned that man's "virtus generativa" soon would surpass his "virtus nutritiva", we were 450 millions on the globe. When Thomas Malthus, in 1798, put some mathematics to Botero's warning, we had doubled to some 900 million individuals. Now, in the year 2000, we are six billion, 60 times as many as when Euripides issued his warning, 600 times as many as we could be without culture. This growth is, to say the least, miraculous! You have all seen a magician showing his very empty hat, out of which he draws a white rabbit. This is an elegant trick. But assume that, out of his one empty hat, he had produced 600 white rabbits! Wouldn't that be a miracle? This is what mankind has done with the help of culture. Out of "natural nature", the one existing before agriculture, with space for about ten million hunter-gatherers, we have created the possibility for 600 times as many humans to live. This is, indeed, another miracle of life, the "miracle of culture". But, take heed! In only 200 years of industrial growth - a very short time in human history - we have grown by more than six times as many as we did in the 2,200 years between Euripides and Malthus. Our ability, so far, to feed such a huge population increase is a great victory of mankind over nature. By sacrificing bit by bit of it, we have, during the last 200 years gotten a very fair "economic wind". Now, however, nature is starting to fight back. Shouldn't allergies, noise, pollution, water shortages, unusual storms, change of the climate, UV-radiation, and too much stress insid and outside our bodies warn us not to continue our population and consumption explosions. If we do, the question is hardly "if", but "when" the Gods will punish our hubris by ruining the natural basis for human

life! We were driven to advance our empire to its present state, influenced chiefly by fear, then by honor also, and lastly by self-interest as well. Thucydides, c. 460-c. 399. Why does mankind continue to struggle, to fight, to engage in warfare and endless competition when we know of the horrors, when our bellys are more than full? The answer to that question still lies in darkness. One of the world's best experts on war, Donald Kagan, for instance, recently said that we today have no better explanation than that of Thykydides, the general and author of The Peloponnesian War, a war between Athens and Sparta from 431 to 404 B.C. The three root causes of conflict and warfare were, for Thukydides, "honor, fear, and interest". That may be so. But we must ask a deeper question yet. Why has mankind been afraid all through history? Why did we, for instance, for centuries fight stupid duels to defend our honor, just because somebody threw a glove on the floor in front of us? And why are we never satisfied with our wealth, however rich we get, but continue to fight for more? Fear is certainly justified. In the Jewish Torah, Deuteronomy 20:16, Moses tells his soldiers to annihilate all Canaanites and "let nothing that breathes remain alive". After another 2.500 years of carnage, we get the same message of annihilation in the Germanic Iliad, Beowolf: "the flying scourge did not mean to leave one living thing". We thus have a very long historical tradition of justified fear, leading up to the even more fearful crimes of Leopold II in Congo, Stalin in Russia, Hitler in Germany, Idi Amin in Uganda and Mao in China. From the evolutionary theory of Darwin, we now even have reason to believe that this human behavior, found everywhere, is an animal inheritance with its base deep down in our genes. If so, this is what we now, in the age of atomic weapons, must learn to control. Perhaps the highly justified fear of death has created a biological basic need in us for being Number One, equally strong as that for food and sex. Perhaps it has been so, in our long history, that being Number One, Cain instead of Abel, was a precondition for food and sex and reproductive success. Perhaps we have an innate need for power, for fratricide, for being Number One, for having the greatest honor. That can be argued. I have done so elsewhere. If that is the case, mankind is in for trouble. Because when our sexual needs lead to a population increase, we will need more land to satisfy our need for food. As Euripides warned us, many small societies will be united by warfare into the few big ones that still exist. Integration means that the number of niches for Number Ones will diminish while at the same time the number of ambitious men who strongly desire to fill them will grow. This is a contradiction that should help us understand why economic progress not only never satisfies the basic needs of mankind, but even intensifies the frustration of the basic needs of power, of being Number One. Cannot such a contradiction also help us to understand why we continue to struggle, to fight, to engage in warfare and endless competition, when we know of the horrors, when our bellies are more than full?