Sarah Gorbatov

Ms. Edelman
Humanities 10
April 20, 2020

Population Growth, Disease, and War: The Essential and Eternal Fragility of the Modern Revolution

In the beginning, the Earth materialized in a few stanzas of Genesis​, in just seven days. First, a
chiaroscuro between day and night was drawn, then a firmament was formed, vast and
glimmering waters stirred, and our galaxy freckled with the sun, moon, and stars. Soon, life
began to sprout. Grass, shrubbery, and herbs took root, efflorescing from seed to fruit. Colors
danced upon meadows, and ere long, under a tree’s wavering canopy, there arose Adam and
from his rib Eve. Marveling at His configuration of the cosmos, Our Creator deemed Himself
content and thus left, leaving this Earth to us as a delicate present.

As Richard Dawkins described in ​The Selfish Gene,​ “In the beginning was simplicity.” Now, we
live amidst the “21st-Century Bottleneck,” a time of continuous acceleration and advancement,
dizzying revolution, and momentous transformation. Collective learning and connectivity
between people have created a global network of developers and innovators that are, at this exact
moment, exchanging pioneering ideas, learning to better comprehend the cosmos, refining
modern civilization, and creating revolutionary change. Yet, the incentive behind our panicked
revisionism is the prospect of the technologies we have devised and happy-go-luckily dispersed
into society stabbing us in the back and causing our collapse. Robots and AI are purportedly
coming for our jobs, there are a bulbous wage gap and a severe lack of economic opportunity,
global warming is terrorizing the environment, children in lesser developed countries are not
receiving an education and are coming of age illiterate, governments are murdering their own
civilians, barbarous wars are occurring unbeknownst to us, 1.85 billion people are subsisting in
impoverishment, population trends are exponentially mounting, and a historically singular
pandemic is sweeping the world’s immunocompromised as well as devastating its economic
stability. How did we arrive here? We are more technologically and intellectually powerful than
ever before, but we are simultaneously becoming increasingly more precarious. Are we losing
touch of what it means to be “human,” of what Our Creator intended for us? The answer to this
laborious inquiry lies in our perception of the quintessence of being human and how that
perception has strengthened itself by feeding on the fantasy of its own downfall. To manage this
treacherous, yet reclaimable Modern Revolution, we must embrace both the fragility and virility
of humanity and discern between the two entangled obverses.

In the past three centuries, we have certainly encountered the multifaceted realities affiliated with
technological development and breakthrough. One such reality is the meteoric growth of the
population. In Ronald Lee’s scientific paper “The Demographic Transition: Three Centuries of
Fundamental Change,” he conveys that in 1700 the global population was 0.68 billion, and by
2000, it was already 6.07 billion, a considerable leap from the Great Acceleration beginning in
1950, when it was 2.52 billion. Further, in humanity’s first 250,000 years, about 9 billion people
lived and died. Owing to agriculture, in the last thousand years, about 55 billion people have
lived and died, and bordering on 8 billion of them are alive today. What has engendered this
population upsurge is both increasing life expectancy, given that it was 27 years in 1700 and by
2000 was already 65, and decreasing death rates. While fewer women are giving birth nowadays
and those that do have fewer children—on average, 2.7 in 2000 as opposed to 6.0 in
1700—medical and scientific inventions have broken the obstacles that once prohibited the
population from climbing upward. Naturally, in biology, when an organism is encapsulated in
high densities, either disease creeps in from the shadows or resources peter out, killing the
organism. Why we have not yet been decimated and have, in fact, grown as a population at such
a rapid rate is due to the Industrial Revolution.

Up until the wake of the 18th century, virtually all production in human history was propelled by
human and animal muscle power. Now that we were tapping into fossil fuels and converting
them into energy through machines and engines, we could turn people’s lights on, lift millions of
people out of poverty, mass-produce food, manufacture pesticides, and trade resources and raw
materials such as cotton and metal. Goods that had previously been regarded as luxuries by
common people were suddenly viewed as necessities, and the commonwealth never again
needed to fret over whether there would be bread on the table or water pouring from the faucets.
Coping with scarcity is the bottom line of much of organic history encompassing all species,
especially humans. From Agrarian civilization to the 18th century, at most 20% of the population
was not indigent. Today, if you make barely a substantial income, you are considered part of the
global aristocracy and revel in a standard of living higher than that of Medieval kings. A slight
modification in modes of production and the utilization of fossil fuels culminated in an explosion
of proficiency. This blatantly demonstrated that when newfound aptitude makes way for niches
to extract energy from the environment, evolution proceeds quickly.

At the dawn of the Modern Revolution, roughly 200 years ago, a mere three percent of the
population resided in urban areas, but demographers have concluded that, by 2050, that
percentage will arrive at 70. Living in a metropolis is evidently advantageous. Public
transportation is always accessible, there are many more occupational, recreational, and social
opportunities, and, surprisingly, it is much safer to live in a city than in a suburban or rural area
where the likelihood of death from violence is more than 20% higher. Nevertheless, there remain
the disadvantages of urbanization to acknowledge, such as the lack of privacy, expensive living
and higher rates of impoverishment, pollution, and the faster and more feasible transmission of
infectious disease, as we are currently experiencing with COVID-19. In New York City, the
number of coronavirus cases has surged—of the nationwide 739,919 cases, NYC comprises
136,806 of them with 10,344 deaths—and the city’s healthcare system has been thwarted and
seems on the verge of defeat. The virus is a peculiar beast, sui generis in its molecular
composition, whom it affects, how we have approached its mitigation (through extensive
quarantine, social isolation, and such), and the scope of its communicability and hence its power.

Nonetheless, as much as it might seem callous to trivialize the bad and the ugly, we would blind
to ignore some of the positive attributes of the coronavirus. Most notably, that it has imposed
upon us much wisdom and, as the ​Times of San Diego​ put it, a “sorely-needed lesson of
humility.” We have been reminded of our commanding connectivity physically and
psychologically, to be more hygienic and cautious about our surroundings, to confide in statistics
and data as opposed to emotions and personal beliefs, that the technology and economy we so
copiously rely on can flounder with the blink of an eye, that so much of our lives consist of
vanity and meaninglessness, that through shared affliction we see more of the ones we love and
discover those whom we should take more notice of, that at the end of the day we are all one and
the same, and above all, COVID-19 has reminded us of how to be human again.​ Likewise, as
Peter Frankopan recalled the Bubonic Plague in his 2015 book called ​The Silk Roads: A New
History of the World​, “Despite the horror it caused, the plague turned out to be the catalyst for
social and economic change that was so profound that far from marking the death of Europe, it
served as its making.”

Throughout history, the predominant cause and result of disease has been war. During the
Napoleonic Wars between the years of 1803 and 1815, eight times more British soldiers died
from disease than from battle wounds. During the American Civil War between 1861 and 1865,
nearly 70% of the estimated 660,000 deaths were caused by pneumonia, malaria, typhoid, and
dysentery, and this fatality rate precipitated a 2-year extension of the war. These diseases soon
became known as the “third army.” Máire A Connolly wrote in a 2002 ​Lancet​ report about the
relationship between war and infectious disease, “The deadly comrades have accounted for a
major proportion of human suffering and death.” As for war itself, ​we humans appear to be
incapable of not existing in the flesh of a conflict. However, in most cases, battles and wars are
initiated by governments, not populations. According to Israel W. Charney’s ​Encyclopedia of
Genocide,​ between 1818 and 1991, there had been nearly 200 wars wrangled between
non-democracies and other non-democracies and 150 between non-democracies and
democracies. Between the years of 1900 and 1989, 129,547,000 innocent civilians were executed
by their governments and 38,566,000 through genocide.​ ​It’s almost as if we enjoy waging wars
and massacring each other. A claim that William James, the first educator to offer a psychology
course in the US, made in his 1910 book ​The Moral Equivalent of War​ was that, ever since the
onset of the Modern Revolution, human beings have become progressively more reliant on
violence to soothe our primitive desires and, that, contemporary inventions such as the machine
gun in 1884, dynamite and the torpedo in 1886, the guided-missile later in 1942, and the atomic
bomb in 1945 do not at all aid the situation. James also suggests a solution to this predicament,
which is that we need to find activities that evoke in us the same contentment and purpose as
warfare, just without the bit where millions of innocent people are annihilated. He calls it, “the
moral equivalent of war.”

In countries such as the US and the United Kingdom, which are more economically developed,
stable, and peaceful, life is rich with entertainment, music, art, travel, sports, and careers. We
have not purely everything we need, but everything we want and which satisfies us. In countries
such as South Sudan, Somalia, and Iraq, where simply surviving is strenuous—the
overwhelming majority of people live in poverty, are oppressed, and pray to God they do not
wake the next morning to have to bear the brunt of living yet another agonizing day—it is much
more difficult to attain, let alone feel satisfaction. According to Richard Dawkins, “The rabbit
runs faster than the fox because the rabbit is running for his life while the fox is only running for
his dinner.” In James’ words, warfare is an often vicious attempt to live on a “higher plane of
power,” and sometimes the understanding of that plane is skewed and malicious. For instance, in
the case of the Nazi Party during World War II, when we witnessed modern industrial nations,
which represented the best of the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution, descend into once
unimaginable cruelty. The war forced us to question whether Western dominance could or
should be considered progress and proved true the old Roman adage “homo homini lupus [man
is wolf to man].” If human needs and desires are not met and there is a discernible enemy, or at
the least scapegoat, war is inevitable. If we aim to establish lasting peace in all corners of the
world, we must create more societies that meet our intrinsic necessities, proffer opportunities,
and make us happ​y. How we behave toward not merely the developing world but to everyone in
the ensuing century will determine much of how we are recognized by the thousands of
generations to come and read of our deeds in history.

The eruption of cultural revolution that began 200 years ago has yet to terminate. The Cambrian
explosion carried on for millions of years, the Agricultural Revolution proceeded for thousands,
and we are still in the thick of the Modern Revolution, perhaps only the prelude. If we endure
this bottleneck in history, we will be a stable population of 10 to 12 billion educated and
interconnected innovators. As far as we know, humans are exceptional in the universe, and if for
nothing else, it is our responsibility to our innate curiosity to survive and see where these rising
levels of activity lead. If we can just manage that, the universe will take us in a myriad of
astonishing directions. All we need to do now is ameliorate how we judge our adoption of
technology, in that we do so through a sharper lens. Ultimately, every decision we make
regarding creation and innovation is a trade-off, a compromise. If we decide to be frightened of
vulnerability and forsake the advancement of collective learning, complexity, and discovery, we
will fail. Any progress we have ever made has been the upshot of a gamble, and yet we have
never succumbed. Why should we now? We have too much on the table to withdraw. The
Modern Revolution is salvageable and it must be salvaged. As stated by Mark O’Connell, author
of ​Notes From An Apocalypse,​ “Despite the climate crisis, despite a global pandemic, it has
always been ‘the end of the world for someone, somewhere.’”

In the end, it is not so much that ​the​ world will fall apart, but rather ​a​ world—the insouciant,
leisured, affluent one. In a way, Armageddon has already struck. The “demonic kings” of the
Earth have waged wars against the forces of Our Creator, and the more resilient and invulnerable
we have sought to become, the more fragile we have necessarily become. Rather than
considering the apocalypse an inhuman horror that will inevitably befall us all due to war,
disease, and overpopulation, we should realize that such adversities are corrigible and that they
should never, come what may, obstruct us from reaching our full potential. Besides, what we
present as “humanity” has always outsourced its fragility to others. We have consciously chosen
an epoch of universal benevolence and a globe of justice and security as a pursuit for all, only
through the exploitation and suffering of others. The inconceivable catastrophes that are meant to
galvanize us to secure our stability and create change, people are falling victim to as you read
these words. Most of us envisage ourselves as endued with fortunate and favorable
circumstances that ought to extend to all, and that is precisely what has caused our fragility
throughout history. If everything that defines humanity depends upon such a complex,
unscrupulous, and appropriative mode of existence, then, of course, any abatement of this
hyper-society will be deemed apocalyptic. “​We​ have lost ​our​ invincibility,” we seem to be
convincing ourselves. Soon, ​we​ will be living just as those whom we have relied on to swallow
the true cost of what it means for ​us​ to be human. We have begun to express a sensation of
unprecedented delicacy, but this is not because of the Modern Revolution. We have not abruptly
become precarious, exposed, and vulnerable. Instead, new, not any worse times have shed light
on our essential and eternal fragility.
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