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By Root 2144 0

with Britain, and thereby accomplished the feat of building a First World democracy remote from any other (except New Zealand), but are now beginning to appreciate that those values also have downsides. In modern times a reason why Montanans have been so reluctant to solve their problems caused by mining, logging, and ranching is that those three industries used to be the pillars of the Montana economy, and that they became bound up with Montana’s pioneer spirit and identity. Montanans’ pioneer commitment to individual freedom and self-sufficiency has similarly made them reluctant to accept their new need for government planning and for curbing individual rights. Communist China’s determination not to repeat the errors of capitalism led it to scorn environmental concerns as just one more capitalist error, and thereby to saddle China with enormous environmental problems. Rwandans’ ideal of large families was appropriate in traditional times of high childhood mortality, but has led to a disastrous population explosion today. It appears to me that much of the rigid opposition to environmental concerns in the First World nowadays involves values acquired early in life and never again reexamined: “the maintenance intact by rulers and policy-makers of the ideas they started with,” to quote Barbara Tuchman once again.

It is painfully difficult to decide whether to abandon some of one’s core values when they seem to be becoming incompatible with survival. At what point do we as individuals prefer to die than to compromise and live? Millions of people in modern times have indeed faced the decision whether, to save their own life, they would be willing to betray friends or relatives, acquiesce in a vile dictatorship, live as virtual slaves, or flee their country. Nations and societies sometimes have to make similar decisions collectively.

All such decisions involve gambles, because one often can’t be certain that clinging to core values will be fatal, or (conversely) that abandoning them will ensure survival. In trying to carry on as Christian farmers, the Greenland Norse in effect were deciding that they were prepared to die as Christian farmers rather than live as Inuit; they lost that gamble. Among five small Eastern European countries faced with the overwhelming might of Russian armies, the Estonians and Latvians and Lithuanians surrendered their independence in 1939 without a fight, the Finns fought in 1939-1940 and preserved their independence, and Hungarians fought in 1956 and lost their independence. Who among us is to say which country was wiser, and who could have predicted in advance that only the Finns would win their gamble?

Perhaps a crux of success or failure as a society is to know which core values to hold on to, and which ones to discard and replace with new values, when times change. In the last 60 years the world’s most powerful countries have given up long-held cherished values previously central to their national image, while holding on to other values. Britain and France abandoned their centuries-old role as independently acting world powers; Japan abandoned its military tradition and armed forces; and Russia abandoned its long experiment with communism. The United States has retreated substantially (but hardly completely) from its former values of legalized racial discrimination, legalized homophobia, a subordinate role of women, and sexual repression. Australia is now reevaluating its status as a rural farming society with British identity. Societies and individuals that succeed may be those that have the courage to take those difficult decisions, and that have the luck to win their gambles. The world as a whole today faces similar decisions about its environmental problems that we shall consider in the final chapter.

Those are examples of how irrational behavior associated with clashes of values does or doesn’t prevent a society from trying to solve perceived problems. Common further irrational motives for failure to address problems include that the public may widely dislike those who first perceive