What Is Different About Today’s Crises?

ON AUGUST 25, 1974, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved its front-cover “doomsday clock” three minutes closer to midnight. These scientists thus signaled their fear that the threat of nuclear holocaust recently grew by that much, bringing the clock to nine minutes before midnight.

However, those who are aware of the clock’s history know that, since 1947 when the atomic scientists started it ticking, their clock has moved eight times, but in both directions.

Many people believe that the course of history is very similar to that “doomsday clock.” They say that crises come and crises go but somehow mankind always muddles through. Their outlook is just what a discerning prophet 1,900 years ago said it would be: “Why, from the day our forefathers fell asleep in death, all things are continuing exactly as from creation’s beginning.”—2 Pet. 3:4.

It is obvious, these persons agree, that global economic and political systems are currently under severe stress, but are not the world’s best minds focusing on the problems? The United Nations special session on natural resources and recent world conferences on the sea, population and food demonstrate unprecedented unity of effort, do they not? And does not growing détente between East and West brighten the picture even more? “It’s really détente,” says West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt. “It is a much less dangerous world . . . The menace has gone, at least it has shrunk.”

Optimists are also sure that, given enough time, technology will figure out a way to restore shrinking food supplies, check swelling populations and develop new resources to meet growing energy demands. As one publication promoting technology says: “Science and technology must answer our problems. If they don’t, nothing else will.”

Time, technology and diplomacy have managed to keep mankind out of the ultimate crisis before. Why should today’s crises be any different?

Understanding the Difference

Atomic scientists and world leaders have for years feared a nuclear doomsday, and that threat continues, especially in view of the suddenly escalated arms race. But now something new has been added. What?

Secretary-General Waldheim told the U.N. special session on natural resources:

“What is new is the sudden and dramatic urgency of the present situation and the acute acceleration of the historical process which has brought us face to face with a global emergency.” (Italics added)

What does that mean? We can better understand it if we compare the past six thousand years of recorded history with a span that is easier for our minds to grasp. Think of this period as if it were scaled down to thirty years in the life of your own family, and note the “acceleration” of problems.

Imagine that you start out with just one child, an eight-room house and a steadily growing income. Even on such a reduced time scale, it would be twenty years before your family would have a second child to provide for! And not until the twenty-ninth year would it grow again—this time by two more children—to four.

But suddenly, in the thirtieth and last year, your household and its needs mushroom. During just the next eight months, it quadruples—to sixteen suddenly filling your eight-room house to capacity! Imagine your consternation if you were told that the number in your household would double again—to thirty-two—within just two months! But mere numbers are not the only problem that confronts you.

Suddenly spurting family needs during the past eight months have already used up your savings and driven you into debt. Also, your home has just reached capacity—at the very time that family growth is really gaining momentum. There is not the time or money to expand it. Everything must go into just keeping up. Thus your household is at a turning point. From now on, it is more and more dependent on each member’s sharing what he has.

But suppose five members of the household insist on having over two thirds of the food and other provisions. The remaining eleven, then, just have to divide up what is left the best they can. Thus the demands of a few stretch your home and income to their limits even more quickly than otherwise. Your problems are entirely different from just a few months before.

Is the foregoing illustration just exaggerated fiction? Not according to a swelling number of world leaders and scientific experts.

Little more than 2 percent of recorded history has suddenly witnessed about 75 percent of humanity’s increase in numbers. In fact, Waldheim asserts that about a fourth of the people who have ever lived are alive today! Continued growth at even the present rate would put one person on every square foot of the earth—oceans and all—in less than 700 years.

Thus numbers alone make a turning point quickly inevitable. “Without doubt,” says Scientific American magazine, “this period of growth will be a transitory episode in the history of the population.” (Italics added) But the problem right now is not so much mere numbers as it is the sudden rapidity with which they came upon the world’s already shaky institutions.

Suddenly exploding numbers have brought exploding needs for food, clothing, shelter and education. But for the first time, the ability of science and technology to keep pace with these demands is in question: “Technology, long the hope of believers in miracles,” declares The Wall Street Journal’s chief European correspondent, “is being overtaken so rapidly by population growth that even the world’s top scientists are throwing up their hands in despair.”

But even more restricting to earth’s capacity than technology’s failures are the artificial limits imposed by selfish and divisive economic, political and religious barriers. As a result of these, for example, less than a third of earth’s people are using about two thirds of its food and almost all its energy and resources. The other two thirds of humanity must divide up (usually unequally) what little is left.

These pressures are converging on the world at the very time in history when earth’s capacity, under its present administration, is buffeting the limits. Is it any wonder that formerly stable institutions are staggering under the burden? This “acute acceleration of the historical process” has suddenly brought the world to a turning point. Says Nobel-Prize-winning Harvard professor George Wald:

“Human life is now threatened as never before, not by one but by many perils, each in itself capable of destroying us, but all interrelated, and all coming upon us together.’’

The “interrelated” nature of today’s perils is in itself convincing evidence that they are truly different. Let us see how these newly interrelated crises are affecting the world.