Humanity is aging, man is evolving

More time to become humanOlga Vlasova, Expert Magazine
Do you have children?

If not, but the train hasn't left yet, then it's worth having one, or better yet a couple. And also think about what other profession you would like to get. Today it is probably the best investment in your future. Approximately this conclusion leads to the reading of the UN report on population aging, published in December last year.

The topic of rapid population aging is not new, a special UN unit has been monitoring it since 1995. However, the new report on aging came out at a time when, due to the crisis that has broken out, many are trying to rethink the reasons for economic growth and the very nature of progress (is it really there and is it as inevitable as it used to seem). In this context, the new figures and conclusions of the study are perceived at the level of revelations.

The most significant fact is the information that in the next 30 years the population (for the first time in the history of mankind!) it will stop growing and stabilize at around 9 billion . This will happen because by 2020, the global fertility level will drop for the first time to the level necessary for a simple replacement of the Earth's population, and the next 30 years the population will grow only by inertia. The alarmists who promised us 18 billion people by the end of the century and predicted an ecological catastrophe from overpopulation and lack of resources are shamed. But is this a reason to rejoice?

Stopping population growth for many is associated with the inevitable cessation of economic development and progress as such. After all, it was with the beginning of Modern times that the world's population began to increase rapidly, and many still think that economic growth and development are impossible without an increase in labor resources.

Someone is shocked by something else – the universality and irreversibility of the aging of the Earth's population. Not only Japan, but also China, Brazil, and India are aging (this process is still at an earlier stage there, but it is gaining momentum as inevitably as in the West: the fertility rate in Asia has dramatically decreased).

The stabilization of the Earth's population is due to an increase in the life span of a person and at the same time a reduction in the number of children. "In developed countries, the number of old people exceeded the number of children back in 1998, and at the global level this will happen in 2045. The number of people over sixty is growing at a rate of 2.6% per year, and by 2050 there will be two billion of them" – a quote from the UN report. It is curious at the same time that the majority of people over 60 are women, mostly single.

According to researchers, the aging process of the Earth's population has already passed the point of no return. Even if, for some reason, the birth rate rises sharply in the future, this will no longer be able to reverse the established trend, since the percentage of women of childbearing age will be too small compared to the army of old ladies-centenarians.

There will be no pensionThe aging of the population has so far been assessed as an unambiguously negative process, it is almost impossible to predict all the consequences of which.

The most obvious of them are an increase in the number of pensioners and a reduction in the relative size of the workforce. In this regard, the system of payment of pensions from the money of working taxpayers has long been recognized as an unbearable burden for the state, and the accumulative scheme (private, state or combined) has been taken as a basis. But the financial crisis that broke out debunked the viability of accumulative pension funds as a problem-free way of maintaining a growing army of pensioners.

By the way, many believe that just with the advent of giant private pension funds, a machine of financial speculation was launched, which, in fact, ended with the current collapse. Their temporary high profitability was provided by inflating a speculative bubble, and not by real economic growth. And the very idea that an accumulated pension is better than a redistributed one is doubtful – as a result, someone should still work for a retired investor.

As for state pensions, in the near future in most developed countries they will not cover the subsistence minimum, not to mention some excesses such as travel or expensive hobbies. There is no need to talk about countries like China or Brazil at all, there was no mass pension provision there and, probably, it is no longer expected.

In other words, for those who are 30-40 today, the forecast sounds like this: there will be no pension. Or it will be so insignificant that it is hardly worth counting on it seriously.

Legislatively, this is likely to be formalized in the form of raising the retirement age to 70-75 years (discussions on this topic are already underway in European countries, including Russia). But it is obvious that only a few will be able to occupy the same career positions at the age of 75 as at 50. This means that a lot of elderly people will either join the class of unemployed, or will look for some less qualified positions (let's remember today's old ladies-cloakroom attendants and shift attendants). The situation is seriously complicated by the fact that due to the ever-increasing variability and information update of life, it is already difficult to work for four decades in one profession. Then, probably, the average person needs to be prepared for repeated retraining, but with age, the average person loses flexibility of thinking and the ability to learn, and the loss of status is painfully perceived. It is difficult to become a teacher of an extended day group or a cleaner if you have been a school principal for twenty years.

There remains the sphere of personal savings for old age. But there are difficulties here too. Firstly, such an option is available to the more affluent part of the population and is unlikely to exceed 50% of the total population of the country. Secondly, money has become such a volatile substance that in 40 years either the bank will go bankrupt, or the money will depreciate, or some kind of social cataclysm will occur (the history of the twentieth century is replete with similar events, it is better not to remember earlier periods). In other words, only someone who has a tangible surplus of money can seriously save money in such a situation. And it is unlikely that the majority will deny themselves everything at 30, hoping to shove at 75.

Another serious detail should be mentioned – healthcare. The growing army of old men who need to keep themselves in working shape for as long as possible requires significant medical care costs, because most hereditary and acquired diseases develop with age. Medicine offers more and more advanced ways to get rid of a variety of ailments (complex operations, new generation medicines), but their price is becoming too high for the state budget, even in such convinced countries of free medicine as the UK. Who will pay for them? The state budget clearly cannot withstand such spending, while the introduction of private health insurance will lead to the appearance of a huge number of elderly people who do not have any health insurance.

For developed countries, the prospect of turning into societies half consisting of people over sixty is not far off. If their standard of living turns out to be too unsatisfactory, then this is fraught with social tension. There is a high probability that in such traditionally humanistic societies as European countries, states will have to spend a fair amount of money to support a huge aging segment of citizens, which will automatically reduce allocations for programs aimed at development and education.

According to many, given the economic vagueness of our common future, the best insurance from now on is not abstract taxpayers, but our own children. It is better to invest both funds and forces in your own and their education and development. In fact, if we look at this issue from a historical perspective, then universal and decent social guarantees of the state for old age existed only for a tiny period of time in the twentieth century. At all other times, the only insurance for old age was one's own entrepreneurship and good children.

From quantity to qualityIn contrast to the aging of the population, the cessation of its population growth is not such an unambiguous event.

Obviously, this is a relative value, tightly tied to the essence of economic and social processes taking place in a particular place and at a particular time. This can be both a boon and a disaster.

To understand how the population size today is related to the direction of development of individual countries and humanity as a whole, let us turn to the analysis of demographic processes of the past, for example, made by the outstanding French historian Fernand Braudel. And he came to the conclusion that the size of the population and the nature of its change is an extremely important factor in the development of human civilization. And the most important thing is not the exact numbers, but the dynamics and ratios. One of the surprising conclusions that Braudel comes to (he never found an explanation for this phenomenon) is the unity of demographic processes taking place in the world. Already in the XIV century, the increase or decrease in the number of individual countries or regions occurs in the same direction and in almost the same proportion. Surprisingly, the correlation between population fluctuations in Europe and China is most obvious.

In particular, comparing various data, Braudel shows that from the XIII to the XVII century, the world population fluctuates, almost without increasing, at the level of approximately 400 million people. Significant growth begins only from the XVII century. In 1750, there were already about 700 million of us, and in 1850 − a little more than a billion. In 1900 − one and a half billion, in 1950 – two and a half. Today there are almost seven billion.

Following Braudel's reasoning, it can be concluded that before the advent of Modern Times, the population in Europe was self-regulated approximately in the same way as the number of animals in the ecosphere is self-regulated. The relative abundance of food was followed by a sharp demographic surge, which was then balanced by high mortality from regularly recurring epidemics.

"From the time when man got rid of his primary animal essence, from the moment when he began to dominate over other living beings, he shows the macroparasitism of a predator in relation to the latter. But at the same time, being subject to attacks by infinitely small organisms – microbes, bacilli and viruses – he himself is a victim of microparasitism," writes German philosopher Erich Fromm. – In people's lives, an endless struggle continues on at least two fronts: against scarcity and lack of nutrition and against the insidious and multifaceted disease that lies in wait for him. And in both planes, the man of the era of the Old Order is constantly in an unstable position."

With the advent of Modern times, humanity has entered a new paradigm of existence, in which its numbers began to be controlled to a greater extent not by the laws of the ecosystem, but by the needs of a particular development project.

In other words, civilizations began to create increasingly complex socio-economic projects, the implementation of which required an increasing number of people. It was the dramatic complication of societies and farms, called the division of labor, as well as the desire for improved consumption, which is spreading to an increasing number of people, that led to an unprecedented increase in their number from the XVII century to the present.

A very curious aspect of this process is the non–necessity of complication. In other words, not all societies have an equal desire for complication (Europe became the absolute champion here in the historical perspective, which then transferred this quality to the USA). Many societies did not follow the path of complication (take Africa, for example, whose population dramatically increased in the second half of the twentieth century and which continues to exist on the food doping of aid sent by the West) and still exist within the framework of the regulation of the animal ecosystem of the "old" time.

In this regard, the most important question arises: does the cessation of the growth of the human population mean a halt in the complexity of societies and farms and stagnation of world development?

Here we will pay attention to another curious demographic ratio found by Braudel. The size of the population, of course, is of great importance for the viability and viability of the state, but an excessive increase in the number and excess of population suppress the ability of society to complicate. Something similar happened with Asian countries, in particular with China. The peculiarities of rice cultivation as the main food product have formed a vicious circle of the need for an excessive population in Asia. That is why draft pets were not used en masse there, and subsequently technologies designed to replace and optimize the use of human power (absolutely ineffective even when compared with a horse) did not develop.

In other words, in too many civilizations, man has been used for too long as a source of purely physical – animal – energy. In Europe, the direction of development went first from replacing human physical strength with animal strength, and then to technology and the use of natural energy.

Thus, the uniqueness of the Western trend of human development consisted in the fact that over time, not only the number of project performers grew there, but also the quality of human material increased. In other words, the proportion of "human matter" per unit of population in Europe was significantly higher than in Asia, regardless of the gross population (it is important to note that such a discrepancy was due solely to cultural and civilizational factors).

An evolving manSuch observations push us to the idea that the world that has stopped growing may not stop developing, but will enter a different development paradigm.

Within the framework of this model, humanity will be forced to grow not quantitatively, but qualitatively. As Sergey Kapitsa wrote, predicting a halt in population growth at the level of 12 billion, "when the limit of compression of historical time is reached, an entire era of growth is completed and, as a result, a change in the development paradigm. After the demographic transition, humanity will enter a new era of its development with a new time structure and zero or small numerical growth. At the same time, development will no longer be associated with population growth."

It can be assumed that we are observing the process of human evolution, when its animal component (about which it is said "be fruitful and multiply") decreases, and the actual human (creative and creative) increases.

"Human evolution is based on the fact that he has lost his original home – nature – and that he will never be able to return to it, will never be able to become an animal," writes Erich Fromm. "There is only one way for him: to completely leave his natural home, to find a new home – the one he creates, humanizing the world and becoming a real person himself."

This encouraging conclusion allows us to consider the total aging of the population in a more optimistic light. Our future immeasurably long old age pushes a person to the need to prolong the cycle of development, not to allow his brain to become covered with a crust, but to remain active and flexible as long as possible. At the same time, a person needs to consciously take care of his health, since a careless attitude to his own body often leads not to an earlier death, but to prolonged vegetating in old age instead of active activity.

The fact that we are getting smaller, but we are starting to live longer, takes a person out of the traditional physiological cycle, according to which the development of the average individual continues today until the age of 25-28. Then, for another 10-15 years, he uses his physical excess of strength and realizes the created potential. Then it gradually becomes stagnant by the age of forty, losing interest in everything new, losing the flexibility of the mind and the desire for further development. And – happily retires at sixty. (In the past, the average person's active cycle was even shorter and even closer to the animal cycle.)

According to Fromm, "the birth of a human being" becomes a very difficult task for each individual to solve. Here, the very fact of physical birth is just the start of a long cycle of a lifetime. According to Fromm, "we are probably born definitively only at the moment of death, although the tragic fate of most people is to die before they are born."

Our long old age is good news: now, apparently, there will be more time to become human.

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru19.01.2010