Jumping off the Cliff
When I was a child one of the myths we were taught as if it was science was the claim that when lemmings over populated their environment to the extent that there was not enough food, they would engage in acts of mass suicide by jumping off the nearest cliff. I remember watching the Disney movie, White Wilderness, about this when I was 11. It turns out that there is no proof of this, just as the idea that Eskimos would leave their elderly on the ice to die en masse has also been debunked, yet nonetheless the concept of extreme self-regulation of species continues.
There are species that work to limit their populations when they over breed. Squirrels, for example, decrease in fertility when their feeding areas are strained. It might work on the genetic level rather than as a conscious choice (Hey, what do you say we stop making babies?), but the result is the same – there are fewer squirrels.
The great plague of the 13th century known as the Black Death killed one-third of the population of Europe, mostly those with weaker immune systems, thought we do not have data from that time to confirm this. What we do know is that this mass self-extinction event resulted in a lack of manpower for work in agriculture leading to the end of serfdom, a rise in wages for those that survived, which in turn created something new called a middle class, and that this new income distribution played a part in the renaissance a century later.
I term it self-extinction because there is no doubt that the plague was spread by humans, and they took no effective steps to stop its dissemination or deal with it once they had it. It was totally avoidable but it happened nonetheless because of human behavior, from the unwillingness to universally adopt what the Venetians termed quarantine to the failure to impose hygienic standards (like washing the streets) to the employment of denial (religion) as a defense strategy.
The same can be said of the present pandemic. On June 10, the Center for Disease Control published statistics for confirmable deaths from COVID-19 to that date in the United States. Of the 95,563 deaths reported, 88, 549 (93%) were 55 years of age or older, and 7014 (7%) were 54 years of age or younger. Statistics from Europe, Asia and South America are similar. The disease is killing the elderly, and those with faulty immune systems, people who suffer from obesity and diabetes, both of which are influenced by human behavior. Most of this vulnerability is concentrated in lower income groups, which also tend to be people who are not Caucasian.
We know that the spread of the disease can be curtailed by restricting population movement, avoiding overcrowding and adopting hygienic methods, yet this has not been done universally, and the disease is still spreading. Part of the reason is that Caucasian people are in charge of most of the systems that can effectively implement these measures, and because very few rich white people are dying, the task lacks the urgency it might otherwise have. (Yes, there is injustice in the world). If you look carefully, you will see that the people who have the means to protect themselves are doing do.
The present disease will probably not reach the dimensions of the Black Death, but if it did on the other side of it we would likely see a human population that was younger and fit and suffered less from the debilitating diseases of the 21st century in particular. The world health organization says obesity has tripled since 1975. The current obesity rate in the United States is 36%.
It is difficult to speculate what global changes this would cause, but without doubt it would decrease the number of people that routinely take drugs on a daily basis because of some defect in their metabolism, and the number of people with more resilient immune systems would increase dramatically, leading to lower infection rates in future communicable diseases. Yeah, it works like the lemmings jumping off the cliff. Afterwards there is more food to go around.
Contrast this to the results of one of the favorite occupations of human beings during the 20th century – war. The average age of soldiers killed in World War 1 was 27; in World War 2 it was 26; in Vietnam it was 19. The estimates of dead (both military and civilian) as a result of armed conflict in the 20th century surpass 150 million, three times the number killed by the Spanish flu in 1918-19. That is 6% of all people on planet earth in 1950. The loss of a human population of this size, many in the prime of their lives, quite clearly had a significant effect on what came after.
And it did not make things better. The British called it the lost generation, and their standard of living fell for the next six decades (and they won!) but whatever you called it the result was immense suffering for all regardless of outcome.
Nonetheless, we – human beings – seem to engage in this kind of behavior on a routine basis. We subject ourselves to mass extermination for one reason or another that leads to major changes in how we conduct out affairs. There was absolutely no reason to subject the earth to the bloodbath of World War One, only human caprice. It ended the rule of monarchs and ushered in the age of democracies. World War 2 was just an extension of the stupidity of the previous war, this one run by democracies instead of kingdoms.
COVID 19 is leading to a reduction of the number of elderly in the world. Right now we are nearing half a million dead, but it is likely we will pass a million before we are through. I doubt that is enough to move our destiny one way or another except perhaps on a local basis, but still it is only one brick in the wall. The world health organization estimates that almost 3 million people died of obesity in 2016, yet no economies collapsed.
Our decision to involve a global economic crisis with a world pandemic is another expression of particularly human behavior – we make things bad for ourselves. It seems like the idea of things continually evolving in a positive direction is an annoying itch we just can refrain from scratching. "Everyone is sick? OK, let's make sure they don’t have jobs!"
Maybe we are the real lemmings here. We can avoid war just as we can avoid pandemics. This is entirely within our control. If you want an example compare the current US response to the Chinese. In the first country more than 2 million are infected and deaths will certainly pass 150,000. In China, with a population five times the size of the United States, less than 85,000 are infected and less than 5 thousand dead. It's the same virus in both countries. What is different is human behavior.
In The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins put forth the idea that the real force of reproduction had nothing to do with sex or any other cerebral function but rather occurred at the level of the gene. Maybe it’s the same with self-extermination. Maybe there is some force inside of us, at a very basic level, and thus not subject to our control, that propels us to do utterly stupid things leading to extinction.
Maybe our higher functions – our ability to reason and solve problems – are held hostage to this more basic force and sometimes are helpless to resist it. Perhaps emotional patterns like denial, racism, infallibility, invincibility, and more – become allies of the not only the irrational but also the destructive force that holds us hostage.
How else can you explain our head-long rush to destroy the planet or deny the humanity of people outside our immediate frame of reference? We do things that just don't make sense, but maybe making sense is not the real arbiter of our existence. Maybe there is something deeper, that same impulse that those mythical lemmings had that made them jump off the cliff. Maybe when the Disney guys were putting forth that theory in the middle of the twentieth century they were unwittingly talking about us.
The idea is that when things get too good, we just have to make it bad. That is clearly not a rational decision, but it is a decision nonetheless. I am sure that very few obese people walk around with a conscious death wish, but they still behave in a suicidal fashion. What is decisive is their behavior, not their intentions.
If we are the lemmings, is there a chance that we can change this very basic impulse in us? We have always been smart enough to figure out that creation and destruction are linked. All major religions do it (some better than others). Freud posited that our drive toward life (Eros) is balanced with a similar drive toward death (Thanatos). But in the end, death always wins, at least on an individual basis. Is there any way to change this?
Yuval Harrari suggests that we have won in the fight against the three main forces that have inhibited the evolution of the human species for our history until now – disease, warfare, and hunger. He writes that our next great conquest will be mortality. Through technology, in a short period of time, we will be able to sustain existence for an unlimited period of time and thus achieve immortality.
But that is on an individual basis. The way things are going by the time we can do that we will have killed the planet and each other in the process, because the basic problem is below technology and reason. We are lemmings, and until we address that issue we will continue to create great plagues and great slaughters. Such, apparently, is our nature.