Saturday, October 29, 2022

Book Summary and Review II: Civilized Man's Eight Deadly Sins - Konrad Lorenz




This review was updated on the 19th of February, 2023. I would like to thank Ultimo Reducto and his partner in Naturaleza Indomita, A.Q., for their suggestions and corrections.


The book1 by Konrad Lorenz that I review in this paper was published originally in Germany nearly fifty years ago, in 1973. In it, Lorenz investigates eight problems that have been created by the human civilization and threaten its existence. As we will see during our investigation, modern technology is the common thread that links all of these problems together. We can see that these problems have become more widespread and intense as modern technology has continued to develop since 1973.

1. Overpopulation

Organic life, like a dam, is situated in the middle of the universal energy flux. Living things absorb energy to their metabolisms by taking advantage of the negative entropy, and this energy increases their mass. As their mass increases, their capacity for energy absorption also increases. That, in turn, accelerates their rate of enlargement. This process is an example of a positive feedback loop, and if positive feedback loops don’t end up in a catastrophe, it is thanks to negative feedback loops that balance them. Some relentless physics and probability laws counter this energy absorption and enlargement tendency inherent in organic beings. Thanks to these laws, living things and ecosystems reach homeostasis. But according to Lorenz, men, due to their technology, surpass the boundaries these laws set, and increase their mass with a positive feedback loop unchecked by a balancing negative feedback loop. 

Overpopulation forces people to live as big masses in enormous cities. Men aren’t adapted to live in close physical proximity with hundreds and thousands of people. For this reason, modern man is inclined to ignore people whom he doesn’t know personally. Moreover, being in perpetual and close proximity to many people diminishes his capacity to care even for his close ones. According to Lorenz, some of the pathological behaviors modern city dweller exhibits are due to this crowded and unnatural environment. Lorenz refers here, especially, to some pathological violent acts we see in metropolises. Experiments on animals and observations on people have demonstrated that crowded environments increase aggression.

However, Lorenz doesn’t mention that overpopulation is one of the most influential factors in the destruction of wild Nature. The construction of the buildings that are necessary to accommodate milliards of people, the clearance of wild lands for agriculture, the extraction of the resources that those humans need, etc. result inevitably in the destruction or subjugation of wild Nature.

Today, many people think that anxieties about overpopulation that were much more common during the 60s and 70s turned out false, and overpopulation isn’t a problem anymore. During the 70s, when Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb came out, the main concern was that the expected population increase would render food sources insufficient, cause global famines, and social upheavals or wars would follow. As it is well known, the world population of 3,5 milliards in the 1970s is approaching today to 8 milliards. But this doesn’t mean that there is no overpopulation problem today. As Lorenz indicates, humanity has continued to increase its population by suspending the negative feedback loops that would normally act on this population. This has been achieved thanks to new technological developments in agriculture: the widespread adoption of more efficient crop types, artificial fertilizers, and chemical pesticides. Therefore, the overpopulation problem as Lorenz defines it in this book has continued unabated: a positive feedback loop unchecked by natural limits that have been suspended by technological means. But this can be done only so long, and as Lorenz also indicates in his book, unchecked positive feedback loops in Nature generally end in a catastrophe. Besides, the toll exacted on wild things to sustain this population boom has been enormous and is getting bigger as the population continues to grow.

2. Devastation of the Environment

The species that constitute an ecosystem have very complex relations of interdependency among each other. Predators and preys are dependent on each other. Ecosystems have reached their current equilibria by passing through long evolutionary processes. Though some relatively rare natural events might destroy or radically alter some ecosystems quickly, the evolution of ecosystems, like the evolution of species, happens very slowly. 

But humans, due to their technology, have an ecosystem that changes very rapidly.2 The exponential growth of technology causes rapid and deep transformations in natural ecosystems that humanity depends on for survival. Here Lorenz is speaking about both the rapid and deep transformations humanity causes in Nature and the rapid and fundamental changes that occur in the artificial environments (cities, countryside, etc.) which are created by the human civilization. These transformations, according to Lorenz, are detrimental to the health of the ecosystems: to “humanity’s ecosystem” and also to wild ecosystems. Exponential growth in technology changes cities physically and demographically in a rapid fashion. This rapid change also affects the routines of everyday life (from the forms of work to free time activities), and the relations among people (the structure of the family, the relations between men and women, etc.)

Lorenz focuses specifically on the aesthetics of the cities. According to him, the rapid geographical spread of the cities devastates the aesthetic quality of the living environment of humans. He compares the cities that were built during the Middle Ages with the recent development of the suburbs, and remarks that the latter have no aesthetic quality. The lack of aesthetics in these recent developments stems from the fact that they are mass-produced. They spread rapidly like cancerous cells. The living environment of humans changes so rapidly that the equilibrium that takes for Nature a long time to be reached is no longer present in human ecosystems. Lorenz attributes the beauty of Nature to this equilibrium which is created only through a long evolutionary process. Modern cities have lost their aesthetic quality because only a similar evolutionary process can create a functional and healthy whole.