PROGRESS AND PYRRHUS.
Meditation 2007:3 from the
Pyrrhus from
Few of us, today, have the foggiest notion
about the life of this born despot. But quite a few remember one of his
expressions, after a slaughter at Ascoli in southern
My question for today is if the trebling of
mankind during my lifetime, 70 plus, also should be seen as such a “Pyrrhic
victory” over the rest of nature.
Genetic studies have now – undeniably – show
that we, too, are parts of nature, results of Darwinian
evolution.
We love to label our human achievements as
“progress”. If, for religious or for existentially chosen reasons, human life is
our highest value, the ability to increase the production of food more than
threefold in the latest seventy years, permitting a few billion new children to
survive and grow up in ever better health conditions, can certainly be seen as
“progress”.
From a human point of view, that is! But hardly
in the eyes – if they had any - of the
many animals we have extinguished, or the many plants that are no more, or the
climate that seems to be less and less tolerant of the costly ways in which we
have created that “progress”.
Wouldn’t it be useful for us to contemplate the
fact that in pure evolutionary theory, valid also for mankind, there is no place
for the idea of “progress”.
In evolution there is change. And there is also
something called homeostasis, that is, a blind tendency towards some balance
between all the small changes.
So it was, for instance, for two of the twenty
now dead prototypes of ourselves, Homo
habilis and Homo erectus. Both of
them succeeded to live, in relative balance with the rest of nature, for almost
one million years, more than four times as long as we, Homo sapiens, have existed.
Moreover, recent research indicates that these
two forefathers even succeeded to live side by side for almost half a million
years. Why then, we should also ask, can’t Homo hebreus and Homo arabus, or Homo socialisticus and Homo capitalisticus do so? Why do they
have to destroy so much of nature to kill each other? In such a very short
historical time?
The trebling of mankind in my lifetime can, let me repeat, surely be
seen as “progress” by us who now live, and especially by us who also live well.
But it has taken place at the cost of the rest of nature. No other animal, that
I know of, has ever created so much change in such a short period, seriously
disturbing the homeostasis of nature. Perhaps it is time for us to contemplate
the possibility that our fabulous short-term victory over the rest of nature is
a “Pyrrhic victory”: One more such trebling and we are
lost?
Gunnar Adler-Karlsson