Is There No Escaping Nature?
The folks at Common Dreams saw fit to reprint an article by George Monbiot, There can be no escape from nature, which illustrates an odd divide/duality in the Left. One half of the left maintains that the problem with capitalism is that it unevenly distributes economic progress, while the other half argues the problem with capitalism is the very idea of economic progress. Monbiot is on the side of the latter position. Monbiot sees things like space programs as examples of people trying to alienate themselves from the world. Whatever.
Beyond the philosophical point, however, Monbiot makes some pretty dramatic claims about industrialized capitalist societies destroying public health which don’t really stand up to serious scrutiny,
Yet, even as we defy mortality, the horrors associated with old age are multiplying. The incidence of some cancers has risen by 200% since 1950, with the scarcely publicised result that 60-year-olds are more likely to die of cancer today than they were 50 years ago. The cause, it appears, is the ever-increasing burden of toxic chemicals to which we are exposed.
In the era of eternal youth, we shut our ever more ancient old people away, perhaps because they remind us of the inexorable biological processes that will lead to our own demise. We are, as a result of our attempts to avoid the constraints of nature, in danger of exchanging a life that was nasty, brutish and short for one that is nasty, brutish and long.
Have some cancer incidences risen by 200% since 1950 — absolutely and, as I pointed out the other day with breast cancer, that is a very good thing since it represents an enormous improvement in our ability to detect cancer earlier and often. The phrase “some cancers” is extremely deceptive because it is so broad. The ability to detect nonlethal tumors, for example, has increased dramatically thanks to new techniques and as a result the detection of nonlethal cancers has skyrocketed.
Also some cancers have risen because of other health problems. The rate of non Hodgkins lymphomas skyrocketed beginning in the mid-1970s which some environmentalists initially blamed on pesticides. Unfortunately it had a much more tragic cause as it turned out to be a side effect of the rise of the AIDS/HIV epidemic.
Similarly one wonders what is meant by the claim that people 60 years of age are more likely to die of cancer today than in 1950. Part of that could be detection, but since the author lives in Great Britain it could also be part of the UK’s government-run health system’s explicit decision not to aggressively treat cancer. Survival rates for cancer patients in the United States, for example, are typically twice that of people living under state managed health care systems in countries such as Canada and Great Britain (in large measure because aggressive cancer treatment is relatively expensive).
Finally, I’ve always found this strain of anti-technological babble to be ridiculous. Monbiot writes disapprovingly that, “Our attempts to cheat life have progressed to an attempt to cheat death. Human beings, we are told, will live for 150, even 200 years, by the end of the century. Some people are now convinced that they can evade death altogether.”
I’m definitely on the pro-cheating death side of the ideological divide and hope that not only does science find ways to let people live 200 years, but that it becomes available in a pill that is cheap enough for everyone in the world to use. Probably not likely in my life time, but if the choice is between helping people live longer and defying “nature,” I say screw nature.
Source:
There can be no escape from nature. George Monbiot, The Guardian of London, November 2, 2000.
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