Neither Malthus nor Marx—the one obsessed with the law of reproduction, the other obsessed with the law of production—grasped the fact that the industrial revolution was creating an entirely new relationship between production and reproduction. Unlike all previous major shifts in modes of production, the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century resulted in an enormous spurt forward in labor efficiency accompanied not by an increase but by a decrease in the rate of population growth. From a peak of about 1.0 percent per year in the early 1800’s, the rate of growth fell to 0.5 percent a century later, even though the amount of food and the number of other basic subsistence items available per capita were increasing far more rapidly. Although emigration to the Americas helped to slow the overall European rate of growth, a drop in the birth rate from 45 per thousand to less than 20 per thousand accounts for most of the decline.
This phenomenon is called the demographic transition. Around the world, economists and statesmen pin their hopes for economic development on the expectation that a fall in birth rates is a normal response to the introduction of more efficient technologies. But in anthropological perspective, nothing could be more abnormal. Every major shift in labor productivity has hitherto been accompanied or followed by a rapid increase in population density. This seems to have been true of the paleolithic to neolithic transition, of the Yanomamo shifting from stone to steel tools, of the Mesoamericans shifting from slash-and-burn to chinampas, of the Chinese shifting from rainfall to irrigation. And it appears to be specifically true of Europe from the bronze age on; certainly from early medieval times to the beginning of the nineteenth century, every period of rapid technological change was also a period of rapid population growth.
Let me try to explain why the demographic transition took place. It seems to me to have been caused by the conjunction of three extraordinary cultural events: the fuel revolution, the contraceptive revolution, and the job revolution. I’ll take these up one at a time. By the fuel revolution, I mean the hundred-, thousand-, even millionfold increase in labor productivity brought about by the application of steam, diesel, gasoline, electric, and jet engines to agriculture, industry, mining, and transport. The utilization of these engines on a scale large enough to compensate even for the relatively slow rate of population growth of the past 100 years was entirely dependent on the sudden release of vast amounts of previously untapped energy stored up inside the earth in the form of coal and oil. I have difficulty in imagining how the harnessing of so much energy in such a short span of time would not have resulted in at least modest gains in living standards for substantial numbers of people. That coal and oil happen to be nonrenewable sources of energy (unlike trees, water, wind, and animal muscle power, to which previous generations had restricted themselves) is a significant fact which I shall return to in a moment.
By the contraception revolution, I mean the invention of safe and inexpensive means of reducing fertility through mechanical and chemical devices. The condom was widely advertised during the eighteenth century, but it was made out of sheep gut and used primarily as a protection against syphilis. With the invention of the vulcanization process in 1843, industrial technology could be used for the mass production of “rubbers.” Along with these, the middle class began to use vaginal douches and vaginal plugs toward the end of the nineteenth century, and by the early twentieth century working-class families were doing the same. Infanticide dropped, as can be seen in the sharp decline in infant mortality. And so did the birth rate. Prior to 1830 the English birth rate stood at close to 40 per thousand, approximately the rate found in such modern underdeveloped countries as India and Brazil. By 1900 it had dropped below 30 per thousand and by 1970 below 20 per thousand.
As Mahmood Mandami’s study of the use of contraceptives in India has proven, mere availability of effective and relatively painless and cheap contraceptive devices would not by itself have brought about such dramatic declines in the birth rate. Modern contraception lowers the cost of interfering with the reproductive process. But families still have to be motivated to want to interfere with the course of nature; they have to want to rear fewer children. Here, then, enters the job revolution. As I’ve already suggested, the motivation to restrict fertility is essentially a question of the balance between the benefits and costs of parenthood. With industrialization, the cost of rearing children increases—especially after the introduction of child labor laws and compulsory education statutes—because the skills which a child must acquire in order to earn a living and be of benefit to its parents take longer to learn. At the same time, the whole context and manner in which people earn their livings becomes transformed. The family ceases to be the locus of any significant form of production activity (other than that of cooking meals and begetting children). Work is no longer something done by family members in or near the family farm or business. Rather, it is something done at an office, store, or factory in the company of other people’s family members. Hence the return flow of benefits from rearing children hinges more and more on their economic success as wage earners and their willingness to help out in the medical and financial crises that parents can expect in their waning years.
The availability of painless contraception and the altered structure of economic tasks—the contraception revolution and the job revolution—provide the key to many puzzling aspects of contemporary social life. Longer life spans and spiraling medical costs make it increasingly unrealistic to expect children to give comfort and security to their aging parents. Thus we are in the process of substituting old-age and medical insurance programs for the preindustrial system in which children took care of their aged parents. When this process is completed, the last vestige of significant counterflow in the parent-child account will have disappeared.
The cost to parents of rearing a middle-class child to college age in the United States now stands at $80,000, only a minuscle portion of which is returned in money, goods, or services. (I do not deny that the intangibles, such as the joys of watching children grow up, also influence behavior. But who is to say that the joy of waching ten children grow up to be carhops is greater than the joy of watching one grow up to be a surgeon? Or that it is more rewarding for a woman to rear one surgeon than to be one herself and rear none?) That is why the U.S. birth rate continues to fall and divorces, unmarried consensual unions, childless marriages, homosexuality and homosexual marriages are all on the increase. And that is why experimental modes of family life, sexual “liberation,” and “generation gaps” also suddenly make news.
To sum up: We can now see how technology got the upper hand in the race against intensification, depletion, and declining efficiency. The industrial world tapped an enormous fresh supply of cheap energy at the same time that it was able to apportion this bonanza among a population that was increasing far below its reproductive potential. But the race is far from over. The advantage can only be temporary. We are slowly beginning to comprehend that a commitment to machines that run on fossil fuels is a commitment to depletions, declining efficiencies, and declining rates of profits in the strongest possible degree. Coal and oil cannot be recycled; they can only be used up at a faster or slower rate.
Experts, of course, disagree as to how long the usable supplies of coal and oil will last at present rates of consumption. Dr. M. King Hubert of the Shell Oil Company and the United States Geological Survey calculates that the peak in oil production will occur in 1995 and that coal production will peak in 2100. The real question is not when the last drop of oil will be gone nor is it when the last ton of coal will be mined. The effect of depletion on the standard of living becomes unbearable long before the last blade of grass or last horse or reindeer is gone. The farther and deeper we search for coal and oil, the more costly all industrial operations become. Under these circumstances the rate at which energy is applied to the production of food and other sources of energy merely acts to speed up the rate at which declining efficiencies become manifest in the rising costs of goods and service
s. As coal and oil become scarcer, their costs will go up. And since virtually every product and service in industrial society depends on large energetic inputs derived from these sources, inflation will steadily reduce the ability of the average person to pay for the goods and services now regarded as essential for health and well-being.
How fast and how low standards of living in the industrial nations will fall depends on how long conversion to alternative energy sources is delayed. The possibility of deep impoverishment should not be dismissed. In the face of inevitable and imminent shortages of fossil fuels, we are not yet cutting back on the rate at which we are squandering these resources. In fact, we are still rapidly expanding the scope of fossil fuel technologies and attempting to compensate for rising prices with more and more lavish injections of fossil fuels into “labor-saving” machines and production processes.
Food production, to take the most critical example, has now become totally dependent on our oil supply. Agricultural traction, lifting, hauling, and transport were captured first. Now we have reached the stage where the conditioning of the soil through chemical fertilizers and the defense of plants through herbicides, pesticides, insecticides, and fungicides have also become totally dependent on an ever-increasing supply of petrochemicals. The so-called “green revolution” is an oil revolution in which higher crop yields per acre have been made possible by continuous injections of vast amounts of fossil fuel energy into the production of plant varieties specially bred for their ability to respond to petrochemical inputs.
As David Pimentel of Cornell University has shown, in the United States 2,790 calories of energy are now being used to produce and deliver one can of corn containing 270 calories. The production of beef now requires even more prodigious energy deficits: 22,000 calories to produce 100 grams (containing the same 270 calories as in the can of corn). The bubble-like nature of this mode of production can be seen from the fact that if the rest of the world were suddenly to adopt the energy ratios characteristic of U.S. agriculture, all known reserves of petroleum would be exhausted in eleven years. Or, to put it in a slightly different form: the faster the underdeveloped world industrializes, the sooner the industrial world must develop a new mode of production.
Epilogue and
Moral Soliloquy
Before the fuel revolution, plants and animals were the main source of energy for social life. Scattered about the earth on millions of farms and villages, plants and animals collected the energy of the sun and converted it into forms appropriate for human use and consumption. Other sources of energy, such as the wind and falling water, were no less dispersed. The only way for despots to cut people off from their energy supply was to deny them access to the land or the oceans. This was an extremely difficult task and very costly under most conditions of climate and terrain. Control over water, however, was more readily managed. And where water could be controlled, plants and animals could be controlled. Further, since plants and animals were the main sources of energy, control over water was control over energy. In this sense the despotisms of hydraulic society were energy despotisms—but only in a very indirect and primitive way.
The fuel revolution has opened up the possibility for a more direct form of energy despotism. Energy is now being collected and distributed under the supervision of a small number of bureaus and corporations. It comes from a relatively small number of mines and wells. Hundreds of millions of people can technically be shut off from these mines and wells, starved, frozen, plunged into darkness, rendered immobile by the turn of a few valves and the flick of a few switches. As if this were not already sufficient cause for alarm, the industrial nations have begun to compensate for the impending exhaustion of coal and oil by converting to nuclear power—a far more concentrated source of energy than the fossil fuels. There already exists the electronic capability for the tracking of individual behavior by centralized networks of surveillance and record-keeping computers. It is highly probable that the conversion to nuclear energy production will provide precisely those basic material conditions most appropriate for using the power of the computer to establish a new and enduring form of despotism. Only by decentralizing our basic mode of energy production—by breaking the cartels that monopolize the present system of energy production and by creating new decentralized forms of energy technology—can we restore the ecological and cultural configuration that led to the emergence of political democracy in Europe.
This raises the question of how we can consciously select improbable alternatives to probable evolutionary trends. Surveying the past in anthropological perspective, I think it is clear that the major transformations of human social life have hitherto never corresponded to the consciously held objectives of the historical participants. Consciousness had little to do with the processes by which infanticide and warfare became the means of regulating band and village populations: women became subordinate to men; those who worked hardest and kept the least became those who worked the least and kept the most; “great providers” became great believers; sacrificial meat became forbidden flesh; animal sacrificers became vegetarians; labor-saving devices became the instruments of drudgery; irrigation agriculture became the trap of hydraulic despotism.
Our ancestors, of course, were no less psychologically conscious than we are in the sense of being alert, of having thoughts and making decisions based on the calculation of the immediate cost/benefits of alternative types of action. To say that their consciousness did not play a role in directing the course of cultural evolution is not to say that they were zombies. I suggest that they were unaware of the influence of modes of production and reproduction on their attitudes and values and that they were wholly ignorant of the long-term cumulative effects of decisions made to maximize short-term cost/benefits. To change the world in a conscious way one must first have a conscious understanding of what the world is like. Lack of such an understanding is a dismal portent
As a cultural determinist, I have sometimes been accused of reducing human values to a mechanical reflex and of portraying individuals as mere puppets. These are doctrines that are alien to my understanding of cultural processes. I insist simply that the thought and behavior of individuals are always channeled by cultural and ecological restraints and opportunities. Successive modes of production and reproduction largely determine the nature of these channels. Where the mode of production calls for “big man” redistributors, ambitious men will grow up to boast about their wealth and give it all away. Where the mode of production calls for “big men entrepreneurs,” ambitious men will grow up to boast about their wealth and keep it all for themselves. I do not pretend to know why Soni became a great feast-giver or why John D. Rockefeller became a great hoarder of wealth. Nor do I know why one individual rather than another wrote Hamlet. I am perfectly willing to let such questions dissolve into perpetual mystery.
Cultural causality is another matter. Many humanists and artists recoil from the proposition that cultural evolution has hitherto been shaped by unconscious impersonal forces. The determined nature of the past fills them with apprehension as to the possibility of an equally determined future. But their fears are misplaced. It is only through an awareness of the determined nature of the past that we can hope to make the future less dependent on unconscious and impersonal forces. In the birth of a science of culture others profess to see the death of moral initiative. For my part, I cannot see how a lack of intelligence concerning the lawful processes that have operated so far can be the platform on which to rear a civilized future. And so in the birth of a science of culture I find the beginning not the end of moral initiative. Let the protectors of historical spontaneity beware: If the processes of cultural evolution are what I have discerned, they are morally negligent to urge others to think and act as if such processes did not exist.
I hold it perniciously false to teach that all cultural forms are equally probable and that by mere force of will an inspired individual can at any moment alter the trajectory of an entire cultural sys
tem in a direction convenient to any philosophy. Convergent and parallel trajectories far outnumber divergent trajectories in cultural evolution. Most people are conformists. History repeats itself in countless acts of individual obedience to cultural rule and pattern, and individual wills seldom prevail in matters requiring radical alteration of deeply conditioned beliefs and practices.
At the same time, nothing I have written in this book supports the view that the individual is helpless before the implacable march of history or that resignation and despair are appropriate responses to the concentration of industrial managerial power. The determinism that has governed cultural evolution has never been the equivalent of the determinism that governs a closed physical system. Rather, it resembles the causal sequences that account for the evolution of plant and animal species. Retrospectively, guided by Darwin’s principle of natural selection, scientists can readily reconstruct the causal chain of adaptations that led from fish to reptiles to birds. But what biologist looking at a primitive shark could have foreseen a pigeon? What biologist looking at a tree shrew could have predicted Homo sapiens? The intensification of the industrial mode of production and the technological victory over Malthusian pressures undoubtedly portend an evolution of new cultural forms. I do not know for certain what these will be, nor does anyone else.
Since evolutionary changes are not completely predictable, it is obvious that there is room in the world for what we call free will. Each individual decision to accept, resist, or change the current order alters the probability that a particular evolutionary outcome will occur. While the course of cultural evolution is never free of systemic influence, some moments are probably more “open” than others. The most open moments, it appears to me, are those at which a mode of production reaches its limits of growth and a new mode of production must soon be adopted. We are rapidly moving toward such an opening. When we have passed through it, only then, looking backwards, shall we know why human beings chose one option rather than another. In the meantime, people with deep personal commitments to a particular vision of the future are perfectly justified in struggling toward their goal, even if the outcome now seems remote and improbable. In life, as in any game whose outcome depends on both luck and skill, the rational response to bad odds is to try harder.
Cannibals and Kings Page 23
