Marian L. Tupy

Abundance doesn’t end

It is political decisions that limit growth and freedom.

Speaking to his ministers at the Élysée Palace last Thursday, the très sérieux Emmanuel Macron called for unity and sacrifice as he announced the end of the age of abundance because of a parade of horrors, including global warming, war in Ukraine and the ongoing supply problems.

‘What we are currently living through is a kind of major tipping point or a great upheaval,’ said Macron. ‘We are living through the end of what could have seemed an era of abundance…the end of the abundance of products, of technologies that seemed always available…the end of the abundance of land and materials including water.’

What is abundance, though? It is the product of modernity – a singular episode in the 300,000-year history of our species that gradually lifted humanity from starvation, disease, early death, ignorance, and permanent war toward historically unprecedented plentitude of food, trebling of life expectancy, management or complete eradication of a plethora of diseases, close to universal literacy and numeracy, and ‘merely’ episodic outbreaks of war.

The fact that people in the West were shocked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine attests to a completely different mindset of us – the moderns – from that of our ancestors, who expected armies to cross borders every spring. The same can be said of our approach to the Covid pandemic. Europeans of yore ascribed pandemics to God’s wrath or the passage of Saturn, not tiny organisms that could be defeated with mRNA vaccines.

Modernity started in the Low Countries and in the United Kingdom some 300 years ago, before spreading to much of the rest of the world. Many factors set the stage for this salubrious break with our brutish past, including the Age of Discovery and the introduction of the New World staples to the Continent, the Scientific Revolution that elevated empirical evidence and practical experimentation above the wisdom of the ancients or pronouncements from authority, the Enlightenment that insisted on the primacy of logic and reason, and the Industrial Revolution that harnessed new sources of energy to make humanity much more productive and vastly richer.

Ideas are not like a jar of jelly beans.

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