Soylent Green

Soylent Green, based on a Harry Harrison novel [1], was released in 1973 and set in the distant future of 2022! This dystopian future is one ruined by overpopulation and ecological destruction.[2] The plot revolves around a murder investigation that leads to the discovery of a corporate report, “Soylent Oceanographic Survey Report, 2015–2019” that concludes the oceans are dying. Dead oceans cannot produce plankton, so how is the only remaining food source for an over-crowded world, Soylent Green, produced?

“Soylent Green is people,” the culminating scene in the movie, with Charlton Heston delivering the line.[3]

Dated as it is, I still recommend the movie. Charlton Heston’s mentor, Sol (played by an aged Edward G. Robinson)[4], who first learns the truth of Soylent Green is driven to assisted suicide (Oregon) and that scene is powerful.

Telling that the best quality scene posted on YouTube scene is by a French speaker: “I would like to die like this”

Sol has volunteered for assisted suicide and the incentive is to experience an immersive video of the beauty of an Earth that no longer exists – a “natural” world untainted by mankind. The beauty is stunning for Frank Thorn (Heston) who is too young to have ever experienced the raw power of an unspoiled world. He is emotionally overwhelmed as he watches his friend die. For Sol, it is a return to the idealized past of his youth; a means to reward and comfort his passing. Virtual reality alleviating the anxiety of death.

My thoughts jumped to Soylent Green today because I read the synopsis of “The Effect of Reminiscence Therapy Using Virtual Reality on Apathy in Residential Aged Care: Multisite Nonrandomized Controlled Trial.” The 2021 paper, like many academic studies, was relatively dull and inconclusive, but it does indicate that people prefer VR immersive over flat screen technology and that there (may) be therapeutic uses for augmented reminiscence – a return to our favored past.

À la recherche du temps perdu, Proust [5] writes evocatively on reminiscence and help to answer the singular question: what does a life consist of?

I do not plan to do any deep dive into the literature, but I see that the VR platform is being used (and monetized) by professionals already (Amelia), despite that the benefits are not rigorously demonstrated.

Whatever the provable benefits, the technology is advancing rapidly and most actively by the military (as Mayor’s thesis predicts).

American drone pilots have been operating in a virtual environment to inflict real damage in remote areas for decades. The psychological impacts are telling, with drone pilots are at greater risk for adverse effects. Visualization is powerful, there are certain things once seen cannot be forgotten, and humans remember negative experiences more than positive ones.

One can only hope that eventually an immersive VR experience will be used to enhance our experiences as positively and as effectively as the holodeck in Star Trek.

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[1] Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison (1966) was set in 1999 and does not have the cannibalistic twist (in the book Soylent = “Soy + Len(tils)”) and thus is less dramatic and less compelling than the movie. Harrison’s concern was more simply focused on the growing population problem. Ah, we were all good Malthusians in the late 60s and 70s! Now it is purely ecological destruction we focus upon.

The Netflix series Altered Carbon is a brilliant amalgam of themes, a future where cloning and consciousness-uploading has allowed the ultra rich virtual immortality and plays with the themes of VR hotels, AI autonomy, all within the plot device of a detective story.

[2] Fortunately over population does not appear to be a significant concern (see Demography is Destiny) but the ecological future may be problematical. Another great movie that contends with overpopulation and alludes to plankton (Box!) as a primary food source is Logan’s Run (1976), with the amazing Jenny Agutter.

[3] “An Evolutionary Case for Cannibalism,” Slate Dec., 2010, is a great read.

[4] That death-scene was Robinson’s denouement, he died the year the film was released.

[5] How Proust Can Change Your Life, the 2000 made for TV movie based upon Alain de Bottom’s (1998) book of the same name.

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UPDATE – The Economist was late to the story

Released 50 years ago, “Soylent Green” is an eerie prophecy

It features Charlton Heston as a sweaty cop in the New York of 2022

B7TY4E Soylent Green Year: 1973 USA Charlton Heston Director: Richard Fleischer. Image shot 2002. Exact date unknown. — image: alamy

Feb 2nd 2023

In his later years, Charlton Heston was known as the Reaganite president of the National Rifle Association. But as a younger actor he was a Democrat and a civil-rights activist. He starred in three dystopian science-fiction films, the messages of which are positively left-wing. They all warn of the catastrophic damage that humans can do to the environment.Listen to this story.

The first and best of these was “Planet of the Apes” (1968), which ended (spoiler alert) with the revelation that civilisation had been destroyed in a nuclear war. In “The Omega Man” (1971), civilisation had been wiped out again, this time by biological warfare. In “Soylent Green”—released 50 years ago, in 1973—civilisation is hanging on, but the situation is precarious.

Pollution and overpopulation have ravaged the natural world, resources are scarce and climate change has brought on “a heatwave all year long”. The unnerving part is that the story is set in 2022. It is impossible to watch the film today without weighing up how accurate its predictions turned out to be.

Loosely based on “Make Room! Make Room!”, a novel of 1966 by Harry Harrison, “Soylent Green” is a melancholy conspiracy thriller written by Stanley Greenberg and directed by Richard Fleischer. Heston stars as Robert Thorn, a hard-bitten police detective in New York who shares a cluttered flat with his sweet old assistant, played by Edward G. Robinson in his final role (he died before the film was released).

A murder investigation takes Thorn to a plutocrat’s spacious apartment in a fortress-like complex, where he encounters items that, in the world of the movie, are luxuries: soap, fresh apples and, most excitingly of all, air conditioning. “We’ll make it cold like winter used to be,” coos the apartment’s live-in courtesan (Leigh Taylor-Young). The inquiry also takes Thorn towards the truth about Soylent Green, a tasteless foodstuff. It is supposedly made from plankton, but, given that the oceans have been despoiled, it is not.

Considering it was set five decades in the future, “Soylent Green” is remarkably unfuturistic. There are no spaceships or laser guns, just miserable figures shuffling around a dingy brown metropolis. For most people around the world, city life in 2022 was nicer than it is in the film-makers’ imagination, the pandemic notwithstanding. But some elements are too close to reality for comfort: the enmeshing of politics and big business, the separation of rich and poor, and the clashes between the masses and the heavily armed riot police. The relentless, sticky heat may be familiar to modern viewers, too.

The film’s most daringly cynical touch is that New York’s citizens are resigned to the way things are. Nobody thinks that nature might one day recover. Nobody rebels against the corrupt system. Indeed, Thorn himself is happy to be a part of it, as long as he can supplement his income by accepting a few bribes and pilfering a few treats from crime scenes. In its own way, the complacency of the populace in “Soylent Green” is scarier than the mutants in “The Omega Man” and the tyrannical gorillas in “Planet of the Apes”.

Financial Warfare Redux

I was unimpressed by Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Its conclusions were juvenile, a moralist’s wish to abolish the machinery that sustains civilization. Debt is not an aberration of justice; it is its ledger. The financial edifice may be flawed, but it is constructed and destroying it is not an option. Even sovereign adversaries, locked in open conflict, still meet their obligations.

In April 2022, as Russia shelled Ukrainian cities, it nonetheless tried to pay $649 million in dollar-denominated interest. The attempt failed because the payment was offered in rubles. Fortune summarized the absurdity:

Russia is moving closer to its first default on foreign debt in over a century, after a watchdog ruled that the country’s attempt to settle a $649 million dollar-denominated interest payment in rubles isn’t going to fly.
Fortune, April 21, 2022

Why was Moscow even bothering? Why not simply repudiate the debt?

Because even Putin knows that access to capital depends on reputation. To default deliberately is to exile oneself from the global market. In the bond world, trust is quantifiable; the penalty for its violation is exact. The current quibbling over whether payment in rubles counts as default is mere gamesmanship. The West froze Russia’s reserves and embargoed its exports; the gesture of payment was theater but telling theater.

As I argued in Economic Warfare, sanctions led by the United States are a denial-of-service attack on the Russian state. Credit agencies have withdrawn their ratings for Russian entities, effectively locking its firms out of capital markets. This is the power of the Iron Bank: access, or exile.

Watch the brinksmanship as it unfolds during the course of Russia’s war to see precisely how committed they are to escalating the conflict. If Putin repudiates all debt then beware, that is one step from hitting the launch button on the nukes.

The last major country to purposefully refuse to pay was Germany on the eve of WW2 despite years of negotiations to reduce the debt burden of the Treaty of Versailles (q.v. the 1924 Dawes Plan, the 1929 Young Plan, and the 1932 Lausanne).[1]

I suspect (and pray) that Russia’s finance ministry will continue to litigate and delay rather than repudiate. As long as Moscow is still “negotiating,” it implies rational actors remain inside the Kremlin. The oligarchs may be odious, but their instinct for solvency may restrain catastrophe. Even in its current isolation, Russia is unusually resilient: its debt-to-GDP ratio is among the lowest of any major economy.

The only countries with lower debt to GDP ratios are either massive oil exporters, or such poor credit risks that no one lends to them (buys their sovereign debt). But Russia has kept itself insulated, not isolated.

This fact undermines Graeber’s central conceit. He condemned debt as impersonal because it quantifies obligation, but that impersonality is precisely what makes it civilizing. Debt is the mathematical form of trust, the proof that promises can survive politics. On the international scale, it is not merely an instrument of finance but of peace.

I hope that the oligarchs and financiers in Russia have the outsized political influence they have in the West. I pray that the debt-games being played in real time are earnest efforts to negotiate, because that indicates rational actors remain in Russia. If Putin truly is the sole autocrat then my fears will continue to amplify as we watch the proxy war escalate. The Western war machine is proving its dominance: it is our weapon systems deployed by brave Ukrainians destroying Russia’s equipment and by all reasonable accounts, Russia’s capabilities already are severely degraded. This humiliating loss will further antagonize an irrational actor. If Putin is unchecked by his financiers, then we all need fear the consequences of him losing the war.

If the financiers have any real power in Russia, then we have a path to a negotiated settlement (of debt and territory), which, odious as it will be, is the only rational resolution to avoid the potential of overt war with a nuclear capable country.[2]

Coda:

Debt, at its root, is the discipline of trust extended beyond the tribe, the proof that memory and morality can be quantified. A handshake is sacred among men who remember their word; among nations, the treasury bond performs that same function.

When a state pays its debts, even to an enemy, it acknowledges a truth deeper than politics; that order itself depends on continuity, that promises survive ideology. When it repudiates them, it declares that might alone is law. Debt is the measure of the civilized.

Graeber mistook the impersonality of obligation for alienation, but impersonality is precisely what allows enemies to negotiate peace instead of vengeance. It is the abstraction that civilizes power. To erase it is to return to tribute, conquest, and plunder.

In war, debt becomes the final test of restraint. When nations still honor their accounts amid ruin, they confess that some things must endure: the arithmetic of trust, the habit of good faith, the fragile fiction that keeps nations from becoming beasts.

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UPDATES

5.13.22 Finland and Sweden to join NATO in response to Russia’s aggression, but Turkey is opposed (shocker!). The Russian economy will likely run a significant trade surplus despite sanctions.

5.7.22 Russia’s economy bounces back despite the direct attacks on its global financial capabilities – Russia also makes its foreign-debt payments.

6.16.22 Now Germany fails to meet its commitments? Et tu Scholz?

6.26.22 Germany – a good piece on why they are unreliable in the support of Ukraine.

6.27.22 Russia defaults on its debt – but the details are muddied and Russia contests its default. Despite the headline “historic” default, note that the Russians appear to be attempting to pay and have been hampered by international sanctions.

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[1] It is important to note that on the 20th anniversary of German reunification (Oct 2, 2010), it made the final payment on its reparation debt incurred during WW1 – a symbolic act as much as an honoring of political treaties.

[2] Finland appears to have learned well from the Winter War (1939-1940) when the Soviets invaded and planned appropriately as technology progressed: Helsinki has more than 5,500 bunkers, with space for 900,000 people. Finland as a whole has shelter spaces for 4.4 million, in more than 54,000 separate locations. Nuclear-resistant shelter for over 78% of their entire population. Well prepared indeed!

Rewind the Clock

Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History is a 12-volume monster. I have read only the two-volume abridgement (many years past), which preserves Toynbee’s central thesis that there is a pattern to history. Civilizations rise and fall primarily in response to specific challenges; whatever those challenges are will be defining, and they must also be of the right pressure. For Toynbee, the vitality of a civilization depends on whether its “creative minority” can respond creatively to those pressures: excessive challenges cause collapse, and insufficient ones lead to stagnation.

Toynbee is (I suspect) not read much because he also subscribes to a version of the “great man” theory, wherein growth (historical progress) is attributable to a select group of identifiable creative minorities—those elite individuals who inspire and lead the masses. (It is of course apostate to think that white men may have played a positive role in history, and worse to think of any of them as great.)

Nevertheless, Pyotr Alekséyevich is still known as “Peter the Great” because he began to modernize Russia—which meant to mimic Europe. He forced the nobles to shave their beards, adopt European dress, introduced Western education, and built St Petersburg on the Gulf of Finland to open Russia to Europe (Hosking, Russia and the Russians, 2001, pp. 166-175). He also reformed the military, founded a navy, restructured administration, and expelled Sweden from the Baltic coast to access ice-free waters (Massie, Peter the Great: His Life and World, 1980).

Under Empresses Elizabeth (1741-61) and Catherine the Great (1762-96), this centralization continued. They expanded the empire, taking territory from the Ottomans, Poland-Lithuania, and the Crimean Khanate (Riasanovsky & Steinberg, A History of Russia, 8th ed., 2011, pp. 243-258).

It wasn’t until Tsar Alexander I (1801-25) that Russia was challenged by Europe itself, specifically Napoleon’s ill-fated invasion. That trauma hardened a barrier mentality among the leadership of Russia. Alexander sought to create an international order to contain revolutionary contagion; his son, Tsar Nicholas I (1825-55) made stamping out revolution in Europe to protect Russia from corrupting foreign influences a mission.

Niall Ferguson reminded us in his January 2022 article (written just before the invasion of Ukraine) that Putin’s early demands were entirely consistent with this history: buffer zones, sacrosanct borders, deference to Russian “security needs.” A hundred days later, Russian armor rolled across those buffers. Putin was not innovating; he was reenacting. History, weaponized as ideology.

Orwell saw this coming:

Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present, controls the past… Past events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but survive only in written records and in human memories.
George Orwell, 1984

The problem with history as ideology is not just falsification but amnesia. Once the record becomes propaganda, moral agency disappears. Actions are no longer judged—they are explained away. For Putin, Finland is not a neighbor but a “modern construct,” and therefore fair game; Crimea “belongs” to Russia because the narrative requires it. That is the challenge of history as ideology: facts are de-contextualized and politicized, and become elusively arbitrary. Where does one start and stop the clock?

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/2400-years-of-european-history/

In 1939, Toynbee wrote,

The challenge of being called upon to create a political world-order, the framework for an economic world-order … now confronts our Modern Western society.
A Study of History, vol. 5, The Disintegrations of Civilizations (Oxford University Press, 1939)

World War II nearly met that challenge. The antagonists were destroyed, the British Empire exhausted, America ascendant. The Cold War that followed defined my youth: two empires, each claiming universal truth. But Russia’s might proved to be a Potemkin façade; a show of strength concealing demographic, industrial, and moral decay. Ukraine has made that decay visible again.

Enter Noam Chomsky. A good man, yes, but an idealist—and therefore a poor realist. His linguistics sought Platonic forms, deep structures beneath speech; his politics suffer the same blindness. Chomsky assumes that human nature can be reasoned into decency. Like Plato, he mistakes insight for control. Aristotle, observing rather than imagining, would have recognized the error.

Chomsky misjudges Putin’s war because he believes diplomacy, once articulated, retains normative force in the face of raw ambition. He treats James Baker’s supposed “no NATO expansion” remark as sacred covenant rather than diplomatic vapor (track his positions in truthout). Silly Chomsky. He fails to understand ambition as a moral category. Evil does not honor agreements; it exploits them. Chamberlain learned that lesson at Munich.

Chomsky’s logic is that a woman should not wear revealing clothing if she doesn’t want to be raped; Ukraine should not have courted NATO if it didn’t want to be invaded. It is the language of blame disguised as reason.

He argues further that “the West is fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian,” a line that sounds profound only until you recall that Ukrainians are not proxies but participants. They are fighting for home and hearth; the Russians for a phantom empire sustained by propaganda and fear. Chomsky’s pacifism mistakes blood for failure, as though moral clarity were best achieved without cost. He forgets that some ideas can only be defeated with an explosive drone (Moyn, Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War, 2021, pp. 404-410).

Yes, this war will likely end in negotiation; wars always do. But moral agency lies in the terms of that negotiation. Ukraine cannot yield simply because others are tired of watching. Aggression by totalitarian regimes must be resisted precisely because it is moral to do so.

Toynbee would have recognized this moment. Civilizations do not fall when they are defeated; they fall when their creative minorities lose the courage to act. Chomsky’s paralysis is that of a civilization too comfortable to remember what courage feels like. He confuses commentary with contribution

Thus, he is perfectly comfortable moralizing a solution, a new world order predicated on the fantasy of perfect restitution. Whether it is Putin’s imperial nostalgia or America’s confessional politics of reparations, he imagines that justice can be managed into existence by reason itself. It cannot.

Why not? Because the clock of history has no neutral hand. When does one stop the historical clock of restitution? No surprise the answer depends upon whose goals are being prioritized.