A short-lived journey

Journeys undertaken on a train are particularly special. The rattle of wheels a standard-issue melancholy-breaker, the gentle yet suspiciously precarious swaying, and most of all, the sourceless wind that is the locomotive cutting with sure speed through the still airs of tunnels and valleys, plains and shores.

Sights of life are reduced mercilessly to pictures whipping by; they cannot be anything more in the eyes of the hurrying traveller. That character of inevitability is inescapable about industrialism: everything has been compacted, shrunk into an image of its essence, packaged, sealed, stamped and sold. Even summer rain, which would in a past era have coursed willfully along the stern bark of a banyan or a Saraca, is now identified as an argent streak slapped against the Perspex.

I'm not complaining, however: I don't yearn for the slower journey or the prolonged farewell. I yearn for the loneliness that the fervour of a modern lifestyle should ultimately deliver. The quick opening and shutting of doors, the picturisation of a smile, the slapdash demise of the raindrop, the diminished journey, the extended destination. The short-lived beauty that I behold through the window befits the needs of a new world. Even the brewing cyclone and the storms descending from the distant mountains do little to wither the black smoke out of a factory before I lock my gaze with the next miracle.

Even the journey is not a journey anymore: it is a jarring and tumultuous transition from the serenity of home to the invariance of a four-hour train ride to the visceral duties due the workplace. The traveler simple vanishes at one location and appears at another, only to vanish again and reappear, an existence that is direly contiguous. Perhaps it is for the best, perhaps it is for the worst, but it is, and that's the truth.

Would that I had to trace by foot what I was instead doing by train, and would have despaired. The persistence of visions would have broken my spirit, the conviction of changelessness discouraged me from my enterprise. Accuse me of what you will—fickle-mindedness, for sure—but why must the I be culpable? If you would rather be yourself and don many masks than keep changing your person while wearing an eternal guise, then what more would you ask for?

The nature of machines

Every time there's a man-made disaster that's happened, a kind of talk finally emerges about Mother Nature biting us back for what we did and how it was a disaster waiting to happen. I don't think there's any such thing as a "disaster waiting to happen" (disasters happen because no one could have predicted their occurrence) but I digress.

We tend to say such things because they are a kind of background on which our civilization is based. Without it, we'd be nothing: all of our most important resources would disappear and the habitability of the world would decline alarmingly. Like some theoretical physicists say, we're background-dependent.

However, all that would still be just as right as it was about 200 years ago if our form of engagement with nature hadn't changed. With the advent of machines, humans moved out from within the resources-processing interface and into the processed-consumption interface.

Obviously, two-hundred years prior, the price of a product could have been determined by how dangerous it was to acquire the resources required to make it. Today, the price of the product is determined by how many people want to consume it.

As Adam Smith argued in the Wealth of Nations (Book 01 chapter 07):

The market price of every particular commodity is regulated by the proportion between the quantity which is actually brought to market, and the demand of those who are willing to pay the natural price of the commodity, or the whole value of the rent, labour, and profit, which must be paid in order to bring it thither. Such people may be called the effectual demanders, and their demand the effectual demand; since it may be sufficient to effectuate the bringing of the commodity to market. It is different from the absolute demand. A very poor man may be said in some sense to have a demand for a coach and six; he might like to have it; but his demand is not an effectual demand, as the commodity can never be brought to market in order to satisfy it.

The industrial interface has created a quick process through which absolute demand can become effectual demand (albeit for the purpose of capitalization): it makes previously unaffordable products wanted at first, and then cheaper, and then accessible.

In other words, our background dependence has shifted away from simply nature and towards simply industry. In fact, our engagement with nature is mediated in significant part by our engagement with various industries. Even if we ignore the very-real possibility that there's no clean way to do certain things, the immediate focus is more on consumption patterns than on industrial processes.

That's because everything is demand driven. If there is enough demand for a commodity, then it must be manufactured until the need has been satiated. Such thinking leaves no space for the evaluation of options during the resources-processing stage.

Who, then, watches the watchers? Who has an eye or, better yet, a hand over demand? Is there any such thing as consumer social responsibility? I suppose it's only been gaining traction for a decade or so with the coming of social media and greater general awareness on and accessibility of environmental issues.

However, it's not enough. Just because there are more people consuming than there are people producing doesn't mean the consumers will won; it can never be a war of numbers. On the other hand, I believe that those who engage with the environment in producing things for us to consume should have some say - and how much say should be the focus of policy-level debate. Consumer social responsibility can, at best, influence only how much wealth is created and not how it is created.

If anything, we should've learnt this from the penetration of social media, and technology by extension, into our lives: the way technology develops is hinged significantly on our perception of its capabilities. What technology becomes capable of doing is navigated by what we want it to do more than anything else.

Looks like I digressed anyway. What I (actually) wanted to ask was: with this new background-dependence on industrial processes, will the biggest disasters "waiting to happen" change from the natural kind to the industrial kind? Will they focus less on things such as resource depletion and more on possible resource use?

We've started to toy with industries in an effort to mitigate their impact on nature: if something's going wrong with the natural world, we quickly take a step back and make the necessary corrections on the industrial whiteboard. But because of a changing dynamic, surely this knee-jerk must have long-term effects.

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This is an extension of something that Isaac Asimov touched on in one of his non-fiction pieces called 'The Robot Chronicles'.

Musings on the nature of wealth

The way we live dictates what we think are problems, and what we think are problems determines what we'd like to address and get out of the way first. In this context, there has definitely been a transition from preserving growth in the long-term living standards of the future generations to preserving the earth as it is. That's because the way we look at long-term living standards has changed.

The biggest risk we now face, consequently, is a definition of growth that is critically temporal. In between nature and man, there's the machine (resource-processing → processed product). How we grow and how much we grow is how well-oiled the machine is and what it's built to do, and our dependence on it is utterly unavoidable. Therefore, it is important to keep the machine running because if it breaks down, it will be man and nature once again.

And man-and-nature wouldn't be so bad if not for countries like India. In India, globalization is halfhearted, and capitalism fights a battle every day against a socialist old-order that refuses to fade. Man-and-nature cannot be allowed to happen in India because efforts to sustain an improvement on our long-term living standards are inadequate and, in fact, need to be stepped up. Only then do we stand a chance of competing in a future where wealth will be more valuable.

And wealth will be more valuable because of two reasons.

1. It will purchase relatively more valuable portions of the consumption pie than it does today.


2. It will provide us with the leverage to outlast conflicts because larger shares of the pie will have to come at the cost of someone else's.

Like The Economist argued in an article that appeared on December 18 last year:

Insuring against catastrophe means trying to boost future wealth, and that means that if you're going to borrow, it's important to channel that borrowing into investment. The good thing current consumers get as compensation is the ability to burn away cheap fossil fuels. If disaster prevention is the key, by contrast, then consumers can borrow now for the purpose of consumption, but they must compensate the future by facing strict limits on carbon emissions.

And strict limits on carbon emissions in the future means expenditure.

This brings us to the evaluation of how our wealth is created. Wealth is born in the presence of demand, and demand exists because commodities exist. Demands control the price of commodities, but the price must also be controlled by decisions made by the manufacturer. When dependence on industry outstrips dependence on nature, wealth creation will outstrip wealth itself.