An
Inconvenient Truth
When Joshua Slocum put in at
In much the same way, there are those who deny that the holocaust ordered by Hitler and carried out in the concentration camps, ever took place. No amount of evidence, of documentary proof, is enough to shake them in their conviction. It is hard to escape the conclusion that sometimes people believe whatever they want to believe, and are able to close their eyes or somehow explain away any amount of evidence.
The same process may be observed in operation regarding the problem of overpopulation. More than 150 years ago the Reverend Malthus wrote of the coming crisis facing our too-successful species. He observed that population tended to increase in geometric ratio, by two, then four, then eight, then sixteen etc., whilst the means of sustenance could only be added, farm by single farm. In a finite world, these simple mathematics would soon lead to a crisis, and mass starvation, unless measures were taken to contain the population explosion. Many years ago, at school we were told that perhaps there was no need to worry, as ‘for every mouth born there is also born a pair of hands’. In those days the population of the planet was under two billion. Today, during a single generation, it has reached over six billion. The idea that every pair of hands born could support the extra mouth has been now proven faulty, as the amount of arable land shrinks, and in an effort to feed ourselves we are destroying our environment at an unprecedented rate. Yet today there are those who still assert that Malthus was no more than a scaremonger! Only the other day I read an article in a reputable paper claiming that the ‘doom merchants’ had been unduly worried by Malthus, who had now been shown to be quite wrong. The article did not go into further details. This is the way we tend to deal with inconvenient truths.
A final example of the amazing ability of homo sapiens to turn a blind eye to reality
when it is uncomfortable can be found in our attitude to the discovery made by
Charles Darwin. What was called ‘the theory of evolution’ 150 years ago has
today been shortened to ‘evolution’, as new discoveries and
This human tendency to refuse to accept an inconvenient truth makes efforts to control and abolish weapons of mass destruction much more difficult. It is not enough to show that hydrogen bombs are quite insanely destructive (one H-bomb tested was 8,000 times more powerful than the atom bomb that destroyed Hiroshima), immoral, expensive, a distraction from addressing the real problems we face, fostering the culture of militarism, with all its huge costs and carbon emissions, etc., etc. Some people, and perhaps especially those in power who see our bomb as a boost to their international status, will continue to turn a blind eye to the inconvenient truth. This adverse psychology, this unwillingness to face an uncomfortable reality, is an additional, largely unrecognised extra problem we face in the struggle to achieve a more cooperative, saner world.
H.D.