NOWHERE MAN in NOWHERE LAND -- THREE

  Relentless Escape to “Nowhere Land!”

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

Originally © March 17, 2016/August 1, 2021

                                  

NOWHERE MAN INCREASINGLY ISOLATED 

 

Haste Makes Waste to Place & Space


He who knows what sweets and virtues are in the ground, the waters, the plants, the heavens, and how to come at these enchantments, is the rich and royal man.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), Essays, Second Series, 1844


Utopia has fascinated the mind of man since Plato with him thinking and writing about how to create the world into an earthly paradise. Thomas More’s “Utopia” (1516) became the boilerplate for the novelized versions that followed. Less well known are the works of Italian Tommasso Campanella's “City of the Sun” (1602) and the German humanist Johann Andrea’s “Christianopolis” (1619), the latter being the most modern of the three.

These visionaries dreamed the same dream of an ideal world where people were happy, caring, and living in harmony. They all assumed there would be a natural world extant in which to place such a utopia.

Closer to our time is Edward Bellamy’s “Looking Backward” (1888). Bellamy’s novel was in the tradition of man’s individuality and social perfectibility as envisioned by Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. The novel chooses the year 2,000 to be when everything comes together as desired, or 112 years in the future to when it was written. Bellamy envisioned a society that no longer needed currency (i.e., money), where the distribution of wealth was such that everyone had the same equal credit no matter their status in life, function, or competence.

This society was one in which crime was treated as a disease, where the President of the United States was controlled by the US Congress, and a woman, chosen as an ombudsman by other women had the power to veto any act of Congress that failed to support equally the rights of women.

Incidentally, Senator Bernie Sanders, Democrat running for his party’s presidential nomination in 2016, promotes an agenda not inconsistent with that proposed by Edward Bellamy some 128 years ago.

 * **

The 20th century produced a spate of dystopian novels most famously George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” (1949). There was also Yevgeny Zamyatin’s “We” (1923), Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” (1932), Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451” (1953), Jack London’s “The Iron Heel” (1908), and Sinclair Lewis’s “It Can’t Happen Here!” (1935), among others.

These pessimistic dystopian novels have been arguably more predictive than the optimistic utopian novels of the same period.

Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” suggests Big Brother is watching your every move unobtrusively and now we know that is so, electronically through drones and hidden surveillance cameras everywhere.

Moreover, the government and special interests invade our privacy through our computers – e-mail, Facebook, and message accounts.

This is justified as a kind of doublethink for national security and therefore for our own good. Orwell’s novel creates the mood of hopelessness in the face of this ubiquitous fear, which has been personalized since 9/11 with the equivalent of Big Brother in the U. S. government's newly created Homeland Security.

In “We,” Zamyatin uses the regimentation of a mathematical society to reduce man as a citizen to a series of numbers (digitized) in a bureaucratic format in which there is no place for love or individualism as these sentimental variables are controlled by a set of algorithms. Today our credit cards are digitized as are our handheld electronic devices.

Alas, "We" does a frontal lobotomy on the brain without surgery through systemic conditioning and calculated programming.

“We” is set in the future where a spacecraft engineer lives in One State, an urban nation constructed entirely of glass which assists in mass surveillance. The state is scientifically managed and people are known only by their given number. Society is run strictly by logic or reason and individual behavior is based on a set of equations outlined by One State. This short novel is all the more disturbing because surveillance, the secret police, and behavior modification are too familiar with all of us today.

Huxley’s “Brave New World” involves the same artificial biological selection that is similar to current cloning as well as the use of mind-altering drugs. The novel is set in London in the year 2540 A.D. (632 A.F. or “After Ford”) and anticipates reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation, and classical conditioning that B. F. Skinner would perfect a couple of decades later with his behavioral modification psychology.

Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451,” written in the wake of WWII when Nazis Germany had burned thousands of classics, most written by Jewish scholars or Communist writers, presents a future American society where books are outlawed and “firemen” burn any that are found. The title refers to the temperature at which Bradbury believed paper burns. The subtext metaphor is the suppression of ideas that may be challenging to the state.

“Fahrenheit 451” was written in the era of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) of the U.S. House of Representatives that was investigating possible Communist Party affiliation of people in government, the entertainment industry, publishing, and business.

It was also the era of the “Red Scare” with the prominence of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his televised hearings in which he made colossal but unproven assertions that communists were in all the fissures of government, especially the US State Department. Adding intrigue to the intrigue, former communist Whitaker Chambers accused Alger Hiss of the State Department, an adviser to US Presidents, as an espionage agent of the Soviet Union. Chambers attempted to prove his case with the so-called “pumpkin papers.” Junior Senator Richard M. Nixon would ride this national paranoia to prominence capitalizing on the nation's collective hysteria. It was truly a scary time speaking as a witness to the period.

Jack London’s “The Iron Heel” is a departure from his writings about the Far North, and adventures with dogs in that frigid environment, and yet it is one of the earliest dystopian novels, especially as it refers to a future oligarchic tyranny in the United States where everyone is under the "iron heel." London's prescient social and political views indicate he anticipated many of the societal changes that have taken place while showing little interest in technology.

Sinclair Lewis's novel, “It Can’t Happen Here!” seems a hastily written somewhat sentimental dystopian novel during the rise of fascism in Germany and Italy in the early 1930s.

Given the 2016 presidential candidacy of Donald Trump of the Republican Party, a reader might see an uncanny resemblance to that campaign and the subsequent story in the novel.

Lewis describes the rise of Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip, a populist candidate of the U. S. Senate, who is elected to the Presidency of the United States, after promising drastic economic and social reforms while promoting patriotism and traditional American values. But once elected, Windrip takes draconian control of the government and imposes totalitarian rule with the help of a newly organized ruthless paramilitary force in the manner of Adolf Hitler’s SS Troops.

The novel centers around one fearless journalist, Doremus Jessup, who dares to oppose the new regime in print, on the radio, and in campus speaking engagements. He is forced to go underground and watch as the economy weakens and with it Windrip’s administration.

The charge, at the time, was that the novel was loosely based on Huey Long, the former Governor of Louisiana and U.S. Senator in 1932. He intended to run for the presidency against President Franklin Delano Roosevelt of his party until his assassination in 1935. Long, too, was a populist like Windrip denouncing the rich and the banks and calling for “sharing the wealth.” He was in command of a wide network of supporters and was not above using forceful action to get his way.

[I read all these books, but the latter two books when I was a very impressionistic thirteen-year-old, yet they have stayed with me in broad terms all my life, giving me some idea of the power of images on one’s conscience.]

One must remember that dystopian novels are meant to provoke. They share a somewhat common cavalier style of using easily identified references and/or ideas often of an incendiary nature to make their point.

* * *

That said Haynes Johnson in “The Age of Anxiety: McCarthyism to Terrorism” (2005) develops a convincing argument that anxiety continues to dominate our existence. He writes:

“Fear, as a factor is gaining or holding political power.  It works as well if not better in the new millennium.”

Johnson, seeing the United States increasingly divided as a house against itself, writes of the 2004 presidential election:

The real story of the moral values factor in 2004 was not that Americans were suddenly shocked into political action by the questions of whether abortion or same-sex marriage should be legal. They were troubled by something more elusive, and powerful: fear of threats external and internal, real and imagined; threats from terrorists lurking in the shadows’ threats from Americans practicing “immoral” acts around them; threats from Americans deemed unpatriotic and irreligious; threats to the accepted “American way of life” by “un-American” elements of society.

It is no accident that dystopian novels have found an audience with their specific warnings.

Thomas Friedman created quite a stir with his “The World is Flat” (2005) as it fits nicely into the mindset of the preferred optimism of utopia. Wowed by the wonders of technology, Friedman connects the dots to a quasi-utopian world in which people around the globe are working in unison and harmony on sophisticated gadgets to solve the world’s problems. The romantic view brings to mind the words of Edward Bellamy in “Looking Backward” (1888):

“There is no public discontent with the government, and there is only wonderful international cooperation.”

Alas, if it were only so.


WE ARE RUNNING OUT OF ROOM

Man is outgrowing the planet because of his preferences and treacheries. For these inclinations, it seems likely that by 2040, thirty to forty percent of all species will be extinct or on the threshold of being extinct. Poachers, alone, in Africa, are killing 40,000 elephants a year for their ivory tusks, with the elephant population that was once in the millions, now is down to 400,000 in 2016.

With a global population of some seven billion, a full one billion or 14 percent do not have access to a safe water supply which is critical to sustaining life.

More than 2.6 billion people or 37 percent of the world population do not have access to an adequate sanitation system and therefore are exposed to many diseases and maladies that could easily be otherwise avoided.

Many children are dying of starvation in subterranean Africa, which is now complicated by raging civil wars throughout the continent. With the chaos in the Middle East, especially in the regions of Syria and Iraq, more than a million refugees are displaced with few countries interested in giving them sanctuary. As a consequence, by the year 2020, which is only four years away, it is estimated that more than 130 million children younger than five will be undernourished with threatening health conditions.

To put the population explosion in perspective, it took from prehistoric times until 1800 for the world population to reach one billion souls. By 1925, or 125 years later, the world population had reached two billion; by 1975, or some 50 years later, it had reached four billion; by 2000, or only 25 years later, it had reached 6 billion, and now today, 2016, or 16 years later, it is more then 7 billion, and counting. The world’s population increases by 80 million each year, or 220,000 each day or 15,000 each hour of each day.

Incredibly, to put this in perspective, the world’s population has grown more in the past fifty years than in the previous four million years.

* * *

Not surprisingly, as has been the case throughout man’s history, the most incredible population expansion in the world began after WWII, which had been the bloodiest war in man’s history with 100 million souls perishing. The optimistic prediction is that the world’s population will increase to 9.5 billion by 2055, and then slowly stabilize at that level.

Meanwhile, the challenges remain to husband that population. Currently, women in Third World countries walk great distances daily to gather water from often tainted ponds and streams and then search barren landscapes for sufficient wood for heating their homes and cooking, while their men make a meager living farming small plots of land that are often of spent soil.

It is in this climate where people suffer from extensive poverty, but also from the moral deprivation of exploitation by revolutionaries that can’t even leave the poor at peace.

It is not difficult to imagine that after years of economic deprivation, poor sanitation, and constant exploitation by outsiders that a place and space becomes a fertile bed for radicals to excite the people to anger, violence, and even terror.

While the United States, one of the richest countries on the planet, a country of some 320 million, has its share of malcontents and agitators, four billion souls are desperately poor with three billion surviving on less than $2 a day, and one billion on less than $1 a day.

Despite this, the battleground of the planet’s survival is not in these Third World countries, but the United States. Over the next fifty years, because of immigration and the low infant mortality rate, the United States population is likely to soar to 420 million or more. The implications of this 100 million increase in population are enormous:

· Americans are energy hogs. The United States is only 3 percent of the world’s population but consumes nearly 25 percent of the world’s energy in fossil fuels, gas, and coal.

· The average American produces five times the “greenhouse gases” of any other person in the world.

· Adding another 100 million Americans over the next fifty years will increase this number by a factor of two.

· Americans live in a high-tech post-industrial society that requires enormous quantities of energy to maintain that lifestyle.

· The American lifestyle places 100 times the stress on the planet’s environment and resources compared to the less developed Third World.

The question that must be asked is this:

“Can the planet earth survive self-indulgent man?”

The jury is still out. That is because China, India, and Brazil are now expanding at a colossal rate, imitating the American model with a consummate drive to catch up and surpass the United States.


WE ARE RUNNING OUT OF POTABLE WATER!

The most essential substance to sustaining life is potable water. Yet, more than 90 percent of the water that covers the earth is not available for human consumption. 97 percent of the water of the earth is undrinkable seawater. Desalinization is an option but the process is still expenses and the technology is not readily available to remote rural areas even if it were economical.

To make matters worse, 2 percent of the water of the earth is locked up in the polar ice cap. Global warming, however, is melting the polar cap and what that augurs for the future is still not apparent.

The main source of fresh potable water is derived from rain and snow or banked in the earth’s aquifers. This is only 1 percent of the earth’s water supply.

One of the ironies of nature is that 20 percent of the world’s freshwater supply is located in the remote and sparsely populated Amazon basin of South America. Meanwhile, many of our greatest rivers are threatened with running dry, among them are the Nile in Egypt, Colorado in The United States, and the Mekong and Yellow River in China.

One of the reasons for this is population growth across the world. In 2005, for the first time in man’s history, the urban population of the globe exceeded the rural population. The world is committed to progress, which means moving toward technology, and all that it promises. This has changed the focus to sophisticated industrialization and urbanization and away from farming and pastoral tranquility.

People are abandoning family farming for corporate farming in the agribusiness where farming takes on the appearance of the factory model with machines and science replacing people. In 1900, more than 80 percent of Americans were in agriculture feeding a population of 76 million; today 2 percent of Americans are in agriculture today feeding a population of 320 million.

In a century of rapid progress and urbanization, the transition has not been a smooth one. Many ancestral farms have disappeared with farmworkers now in cities involved in menial factory jobs. They encountered crushing poverty for the cyclic nature of industrial employment. Slums have grown in the shadow of these tall stately buildings along landscaped boulevards against a horizon of glass and steel skyscrapers. This same scenario is repeated across the globe.

In 1950, when I was a boy, there were 86 cities throughout the world with a population of one million; in 2005, there were more than 400; in 2015, there were more than 600 cities with a population of one million.

These numbers are important in terms of the physical health of citizens. Take Flint, Michigan. The Flint water crisis was a result of the City of Flint changing its water supply in April 2014 from the treated Detroit Water and Sewage Department water, which was sourced from Lake Huron as well as the Detroit River, to the Flint River, a river in which scores of heavy metal using industrial manufacturers poured their corrosion inhibitors into its stream with reckless abandon. The Flint drinking water, as a result, had a series of problems that culminated with lead contamination, creating a series of severe public health problems. The corrosive Flint River water leaked into the drinking water from corroded pipes causing extremely high levels of heavy metals in the potable water.

In Flint, alone, up to 12,000 children have been exposed to this drinking water with a range of serious health issues from headaches to respiratory problems, and possible severe growth problems as well. It is believed that this water has contributed to an outbreak of Legionnaires’ Disease, which has killed ten people and affected another 77.

The Flint River Crisis has put Governor Rick Snyder of Michigan, and Mayor Karen Weaver on the hot seat, although Weaver did not become mayor until 2016, well after the change in water supply was voted by the Flint City Council to save money.

It wasn’t always common knowledge that the source of drinking water was that important. Some one hundred years ago a connection was made between health and the potable water supply.

English physician John Snow (1813-1858) stumbled on the connection between the cholera outbreak in Soho, London in 1854 with the city’s water and wastewater system in that district. Changes were made to the system with an immediate improvement in the health of the citizens of Soho. The technology Snow developed would come to be used worldwide.

* * *

Unfortunately, even today, despite the technology being available, 3-5 million people die in remote areas across the globe from water-related illnesses. That translates into 20,000 to 30,000 per day. The quality of water has become a major human rights issue.

In urban slums around the world, especially in Third World countries, with no regulated sanitation system, raw sewage is invariably dumped into the rivers. Haiti is one of the worst offenders as it is also one of the world’s poorest countries.

Gangs in Haiti control the potable water supply and charge exorbitant rates for the water. In many such places, it costs the average person a day’s wages for a week’s supply of potable water.

In one African community, the principal of an elementary school built a small dam with his own hands. It took him three years (1992-1995) with the dam creating a reservoir to collect the spring water, and then to allot it out to farmers of the region for irrigation. This has had the miraculous effect of bringing vegetation to life.

In another story, the United States and Mexico cooperated in creating the Falco Dam across the Rio Grande River in 1955. This river is a pond compared to the Amazon, but essential for the region.

The dam was designed to create a reservoir to support the requirements of the region well into the present century, but it has not succeeded. In the mindless advance of society, people often fail to see what has been given up for what has been gained. A community’s water supply can easily be taken for granted, which is a terrible mistake.

In the last sixty years, or since the Falco Dam was built, new cities have sprung up on both sides of the border. Commerce has flourished. The population of the Falcon Dam region of the Rio Grande River basin has expanded from a population of 200,000 to more than 20 million with the need for potable water increasing proportionately. This segues public health issues as it taxes the capacity of the sanitation system to meet ever-increasing public demands.

Quite dramatically, etched in stone markings aligning the walls of the Falcon Dam reservoir banks, the reservoir is now shrinking in volume. First to suffer will be the local farmers when there is little water for irrigation with vast areas going from fertile fields to dried-out plains. Then it will be the citizens of the cities.

At one time, the world’s wetlands were 12 percent of the world’s landmass. Now, half of the wetlands are gone, victims of rivers running dry due to excessive farming or huge explosions in populations. Gone are the breeding grounds for plants and animals; the ecosystems that cleanse the river beds; the woodlands that eased the burden of flooding by the retention of water.

Closer to home for me is the Mississippi River, the “Father of Waters,” as I grew up on the banks of its shores in Clinton, Iowa. The Mississippi River wetlands decreased over the years with Spring bringing inevitable flooding to the city. In 1965 the flooding was catastrophic, burying the city and causing $millions of dollars in property damage. Clinton was about 33,000 in 1965, today it is 24,500. Flooding damaged the soul of Clinton.

The wetlands once absorbed the seasonal high waters of the Mississippi keeping the flooding to a minimum. But from March through May 1965, with the melting snow from upriver, and the constant raining, and in the absence of the wetlands as a buffer, despite the efforts of hundreds of citizens creating levies of sandbags, the river won, and Clinton and the farms and factories around the city for miles inland were submerged in river water. It was a bleak year for Clinton County.

A dike was built along the seven-mile coastline of the river bordering Clinton, which has been landscaped beautifully, and fortunately, has held to this day.

It should be mentioned that Clinton, Iowa’s potable water source is artesian wells from an aquifer system in which a veritable river flows through a rich limestone bed hundreds of feet below the surface.

Such wells across the world hold 30 percent of the world’s freshwater supply. But alas, water tables are falling everywhere and such wells are going dry. Wells are the principal source of water in many Third World Countries.

The Great Plains of the United States are often called “the breadbasket of the world” for the production of wheat, soy, barley, oats, and corn to the world. These plains are maintained by an elaborate irrigation system taken from the largest aquifer in the world. To produce this grain cuts drastically into our diminishing water supply. Stated another way, it is not an equal tradeoff. The aquifer is reduced by 1.5 feet and replenished only by 0.5 inches in rainwater each year. Since 1955, in the last sixty years, this aquifer has lost a third of its capacity. This has farmers worried.

WE ARE RUNNING OUT OF THE WILL TO SHARE FOOD

We have enough food to feed the world, but when generous nations attempt to do just that, corruption intervenes and the people who need the food never see it or are charged exorbitant prices for the food beyond what they can pay. Then there are civil wars, gang wars, clan wars, and outright fraud in governments that prevent the needy from getting food. A billion people on the planet go hungry every day. Consequently, in a desperate attempt to keep body and soul together, many places over-cultivate and overgraze the land available, which only adds to the problem.

In 1965, alone, more than 30 million in China died of starvation due to the famine. The nightmare of extreme hunger in China today is long gone, and China is a progressive nation and is booming. Along the Yangtze River Delta, an important waterway in China, few go hungry as the rich rice fields and diversified farms provide ample sustenance. There is however a cloud even to this rosy picture as the farmers now must compete with factory developers for this rich land, and farmers are invariably the losers. You can’t eat products made of steel, plastic, cloth, and wood from machines. Beyond this, it is a matter of numbers.

· One thousand tons of water can produce one ton of wheat worth $200.

· One thousand tons of water in industrial output can produce an equivalent value of $14,000, or 70 times as much as from farming.

If the only goal is economic growth and job creation, which is the litmus test of most industrialized countries, then the future looks rather dismal for humans. Industrialized nations and China is no exception, potable consumption of water is not on the agenda. Economies of scale favor the advantage to the products of machines to water to produce wheat.

Across the world, farmlands are being turned into giant industrial parks where instead of producing 3 tons of rice per year, as was once common in China, factories on this land now harvest 120,000 pairs of jeans ready for the affluent American and European market.

This has been the oft-repeated situation since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution and shows little signs of slowing down. It is a manifestation of the “cut and control” philosophy of capitalistic culture. China, a communist country, has adopted the capitalistic system with a vengeance.

Tens of thousands of skilled farmers are rushing into newly created urban communities where the factories are located. They are programmed to do menial repetitive work and become part of the giant industrial machine losing their connection to the land and with it nature and their identity. Sociologists long ago invented the terms alienation and self-estrangement.

Modernization with its “cut and control” philosophy was meant to free the individual with increasingly more sophisticated technology. Instead, it has increased the feeling of helplessness and dependence leading to frustration and yes, alienation.

This has led to an ironic situation. While China and India and other Southeast Asian nations are desperately attempting to modernize and industrialize, the West is being challenged by the millennials who pray for a simpler and less complicated existence, one of less hype and less a frenetic pace, one in which you can breathe and experience joy at the same time. But these millennials could not exist without all the accouterments of modernization, especially their iPhones and other electronic wonders.

It may seem a little dated, but Peter Berger’s The Homeless Mind: Modernization and Consciousness (1973) shows how technology is leading to the establishment of institutional dependencies. These dependencies are producing social patterns that are destroying man’s sense of place and space in society.

At one level, the planet is seemingly wasting away due to self-indulgent man, and on another level, man seems lost between a public face and a private voice. With drones and ubiquitous cameras everywhere, along with everyone with a camera in their cell phones, there is no longer any sanctuary from the white noise of life. If this weren’t bad enough, the planet is heating up with the human combustibles of modernization as man seems relentless in his escape to Nowhere Land. perhaps on another planet.

NEXT: PART FOUR: GLOBAL WARMING IS REAL!