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.

[Graph on page 3]

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THE PAST 2 PERCENT OF RECORDED HISTORY HAS SEEN 75 PERCENT OF THE POPULATION INCREASE

6,000 Years of Recorded History

1850–1974

Billions of People

​—4

​—3

​—2

​—1

[Picture on page 4]

DEMANDS OF RAPIDLY GROWING POPULATION

WORLD’S SCIENTISTS

How the Difference Is Shaking the World

“THE ground on which we stand is shaking. The familiar landmarks have gone,” complained West German government official Walter Scheel at the U.N. special session. Formerly, individual nations seemed able to manage their own problems. “But that is no longer the case,” declared U.S. Secretary of State Kissinger in a recent address to the U.N. General Assembly.

A world that now operates at the very limit of its capacity has resulted in new and fragile balances among the nations. Economic and political thrusts that used to affect the world about as much as a flea does an elephant now seem to strike with the force of a lion on a mouse.

“If we do not get a recognition of our interdependence,” warns Kissinger, “the Western Civilization that we know is almost certain to disintegrate” as a result of selfish nationalistic rivalries. “We are delicately poised” between “joint progress and common disaster,” he cautions.

Why? A few specifics will illustrate how fundamental differences in the way our world now functions serve to intensify problems into seemingly insoluble crises. Let us start with . . .

Resources

Suddenly quadrupled oil prices, more than any other single thing, shook the world into recognition of its newly precarious condition. The London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies pronounced the price increases to be “the greatest shock, the most potent sense of a new era, of any event in recent years.” The chain reaction in the industrial world’s economic structure from this act alone threatens to shatter it, as world leaders have clearly said.

But oil is only one symptom of the underlying difference in the world market for natural resources. What was once a “buyers’ market,” before the turning point, has suddenly become a “sellers’ market” in which suppliers of raw materials can charge almost anything they wish.

Since much of these nations’ prosperity has been built on having plenty of cheap raw materials from certain underdeveloped nations, this change alone threatens their entire way of life. “The Europe we have to build now is a Europe of penury [extreme poverty],” sorrows French President Giscard d’Estaing.

Economics

Closely related to the resource crisis is the economic one. The worst worldwide inflation in history suddenly affects us all. You feel the effects every time you go shopping. Inflation among industrial nations as a whole recently jumped to a pace about four times that of the 1960’s! At the same time those nations have just “gone through the most exceptional deceleration of [economic] growth ever experienced,” observes a recent report from the international Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

The struggle just to keep pace with rapidly accelerating prices and demands has suddenly thrust many nations deeply into debt. “We banks are up to our limits for financing Italy, France, Britain and others,” warns former managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Pierre-Paul Schweitzer.

The U.S. economy is not immune. Total U.S. public and private debt is now over six times as much as it was at the end of World War II, “and the sharpest gains have come since 1960,” notes Business Week.

The world economy functions so differently now that most economists readily admit that their much-vaunted formulas for “fine-tuning” national economies are suddenly obsolete. Thus Business Week predicts that even if the world escapes economic “disaster, . . . there is no way it can escape change.” What kind of “change”?

For the first time, many respected authorities are predicting that collapsing “free world” economies will invite dictatorial or Communist solutions, and the loss of personal freedoms.

Food

Also interrelated with exploding resource and economic problems is the food crisis. “History records more acute [food] shortages in individual countries,” says a report prepared for the U.N.’s World Food Conference, “but it is doubtful whether such a critical food situation has ever been so worldwide.” And U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) economist Don Paarlberg asserts that “it is obvious that we are at some kind of hinge point” for agriculture. Why now?

Different agricultural methods. Modern farming depends on energy​—for fertilizer, tractors, water pumps, pesticides, transportation, and so forth. A ton of fertilizer can mean as much as ten tons of grain in many areas. Sudden energy shortages and skyrocketing prices have struck hardest where these methods are needed most and farmers can least afford them. Recent massive crop losses in northern India, for example, could have been reduced had there been a steady supply of power for irrigation pumps.

Different grain reserve level. Sudden disappearance. of formerly huge reserves has already driven farm prices to several times their former levels. Now the USDA’s world grain forecast is for reductions in world output that will “likely result in a further lowering of world wheat stock levels” in 1975. Many experts believe that there is just not enough margin for error. “For the first time in 50 years, there is no one country in the world with sufficient food to save the starving hordes,” should drought strike, worries a U.S. cabinet official. And there are at least two billion more mouths to feed now, twice as many as there were fifty years ago!

Different weather prospects. Climatic reverses have been a key cause of recently declining food reserves. What hope is there for a return to more agriculturally favorable weather? “It must be remembered that crop-production weather during the 15 years or so preceding 1972 was the best it’s been in the past century and a half,” reminds weather expert Reid A. Bryson. “The chances of its recurring are about one in 10,000.”

After considering the foregoing, the question arises: How can a world that has had thousands of years to feed and care for its population and failed​—except for a privileged few—​ever hope to do so when, according to its own estimates, it has only thirty-five years to provide for double its present number?

Even now authorities are considering a chilling answer for the first time​—national triage—​the policy of giving aid first to nations with the best chance for survival. Thus if a world famine should strike, whole nations would be ‘cast adrift’ by food suppliers in favor of those deemed better able to survive. Many experts warn that producing nations may face this harsh moral decision within a year.

World Leaders React

These crises, together with unprecedented poverty, pollution and others, are shaking most national leaders into recognition of the fact that they are facing something different from what they did just a few short years ago. Their reaction itself is the most striking evidence of the change. For the first time, national heads are making unparalleled moves toward international cooperation in a desperate attempt to save themselves.

Emphasizing this point, U.S. President Ford recently told the U.N. General Assembly that the “nations are forced to choose between conflict and cooperation” and that now, “more than at any time in the history of man, nations . . . must turn to international cooperation” to manage their resources.

But are these moves motivated by any new love the nations have for one another? No. It is only “the very seriousness of the situation,” answers U.N. Secretary-General Waldheim, that “may bring about those developments in international relations which all appeals to reason and goodwill have so far been unable to achieve.”

Admittedly, then, any unified action among the nations is erected on a shaky foundation of self-interest and self-preservation, not genuine interest in one’s fellowman and righteous principles. Will efforts founded on such a basis succeed?

How the Difference Affects Our Future

THE world situation that we just reviewed was forecast with startling accuracy in the Bible. It predicted that in a period of just one “generation” mankind would see developments that would cause “on the earth anguish of nations, not knowing the way out” and that men would “become faint out of fear and expectation of the things coming upon the inhabited earth.” (Luke 21:25, 26, 32; see also Matthew 24:3-8.) In an effort to cope with these new global challenges, the nations confer increasing authority on the United Nations.

Accurately foreseeing this development, Bible prophecy reveals this international organization to be “an eighth king” that springs from the seven preceding “kings” or world powers that successively dominated Bible history. (Rev. 17:10, 11, Berkeley Version; NW) The Bible often uses animals or their “horns” to represent governments. (Dan. 7:17, 23, 24; 8:20-22) Thus this composite political power is here represented by a “beast,” this one having “seven heads,” to represent the seven previous world-dominating “kings” from which it has sprung. But it also has “ten horns.” (Rev. 17:3, 7) What they represent and what they do are very significant.

The “ten horns,” continues the prophecy, “are ten kings, who have not as yet received a kingdom [in the prophet’s time]; but for one hour they will receive royal authority along with the beast.” (Rev. 17:12, Berkeley; NW) The prophetically complete number of “ten kings” represents the totality of political governments today that are ruling for a short time along with the U.N.

During this short period, like “one hour” compared to past history, conditions would be such that, for the first time, though disagreeing on almost everything else, they would finally come to “have one purpose; they give over power and authority to the beast [the U.N.]” in a human scheme for establishing global peace and security.​—Rev. 17:13, Berkeley; NW.

Recognizing that they face crises different from any that have gone before, the nations finally band together in an all-out attempt to save their national sovereignties. They desperately hope that such united action will rescue the crumbling “civilization” upon which those sovereignties are founded. Admits Secretary Kissinger:

“As a historian, you have to be conscious of the fact that every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed. . . . one has to live with a sense of the inevitability of tragedy. As a statesman, one has to act on the assumption that problems must be solved.”

Will they? Bible prophecy does indicate that the nations will apply a temporary, superficial patch to their decaying “civilization,” just sufficient to provoke the cry “Peace and security!” But at that point, says the Bible, “sudden destruction is to be instantly upon them just as the pang of distress upon a pregnant woman.” (1 Thess. 5:3) Why? For two reasons:

First, nothing fundamental has really changed. Can any number of agreements among nations restore human society’s foundations that are already rotted through with greed, crime, violence, immorality, family breakdown, racial and religious hatreds? The situation is much like what the famed Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl said about the recent U.N. Conference on the Law of the Sea:

“I have the feeling that the delegates . . . are discussing how to divide and make the best use of an apple which is on the way to rot, and they leave it rotting while they try to find a way to divide it.”

Second, in giving over their “power and authority to the beast [the U.N.]” in an abortive attempt to save their own earthly sovereignties, the nations are rejecting God’s way to bring true peace and security. They are spurning His promised kingdom, founded on lasting, righteous principles. (Dan. 2:44; 7:13, 14; Matt. 6:10) That is why, after the “ten kings” give “power and authority” to the U.N., the prophecy says: “They will war against the Lamb [the Kingdom ruler, Jesus Christ], and the Lamb will conquer them.”​—Rev. 17:14, Berkeley; NW.

Thus the stage is set. Those who believe that human diplomatic and technological efforts will solve the multiplying crises of the world are due for a rude awakening. “They willfully ignore the fact that long ago,” warns the Bible, “the then existing world was destroyed” in Noah’s day by forces at God’s command. Today’s crises provide abundant proof that “the heavens and earth are by the same word stored up for . . . the destruction of godless people.”​—2 Pet. 3:3-7, Berkeley.

If the escalating differences so obvious in today’s crises do not convince such persons, then they will soon be shaken awake to what is happening. Their short-lived cry of “Peace and security!” will be suddenly interrupted by a “great tribulation such as has not occurred since the world’s beginning until now, no, nor will occur again.” (1 Thess. 5:2, 3; Matt. 24:21) That is certainly not the time for us to face up to the fact that today’s crises are different.

Rather, those who appreciatively accept this fact as proof of the nearness of God’s promised righteous Kingdom rule are in a position to act wisely now. Since the present world system is going to be destroyed, the Bible urges, “what sort of persons ought you to be in holy acts of conduct and deeds of godly devotion, awaiting and keeping close in mind the presence of the day of Jehovah.” That “day” will be followed by God’s foretold “new heavens and a new earth” in which “righteousness is to dwell.” What a worthwhile reward for those willing to learn the meaning behind today’s different crises and act accordingly!​—2 Pet. 3:11-13.