Baseline Creep

It occurred to me while listening to people argue about climate change that the basic assumptions accepted by people can change over time.

Everyone has heard the phrase "standing on the shoulders of giants." I always understood it to mean that our scientists can make great discoveries because they build on the discoveries of the scientists that come before them.

In thinking about politics, societal rules, infrastructure, culture, and science recently, it occurred to me that this baseline of knowledge, rules, and expectations is not fixed, but moves with time. You could call it baseline creep.

When I was a kid, the air and water were so polluted that people finally got fed up with it and started cleaning it up and limiting what you could dump into nature. I remember the foamy streams, littered roadsides, and smokey skies. I remember the tailpipes and the smokestacks belching out smoke, the acrid smell, and the constant warnings not to swim in lakes and streams and certainly not to eat the fish caught there. In those days, it was expected that you could pollute without cost or penalties. Now, the expectation is that you can do whatever you want as long as you don't cause pollution.

Leadership and power have a same way of creeping. Look at the U.S. Congress and the corrupting power of lobbyists. This is something that slowly became institutionalized because politicians that accepted the donations of large interests had the money to get re-elected and those that refused them did not. Now it's entrenched.

This baseline creep is not always a moving of standards, but sometimes a moving of conditions. Take population, for example. When I was born, there were around 3 billion people on the planet. Now there is over 6 billion. There were large tracts of land just outside of the city that were fields and pastures, possibly farmed or grazed, but otherwise sparsely inhabited. Today, land is seen as a commodity to be divided up and built on. The thought of leaving some of it in agriculture or unused doesn't seem to occur to anyone anymore.

The amount of energy an individual uses is a baseline that has quickly crept into an unsustainable region. We cannot expect that the burgoining population will be able to waste energy at the same rate, this is reaching the point where that is no longer sustainable.

It begs the question of what happens when the baseline has moved too far. If you're born with the baseline in a certain place, you don't expect to retreat from that point. It's very difficult to tell people that they have to lower their standard of living and use less energy in the future.

Some baselines creep in the wrong direction. Look at species extinction. The rate of extinction is so high right now that they are calling it the 6th great extinction. The other extinctions happened because of catastrophic events like meteor impacts, supervolcano eruptions, or massive climate changes. We're managing to make this one happen just from the way we go about our normal lives. The baseline has definitely shifted out from under us, and it was shifted by us. It's as if we climbed out on a limb and turned around and started sawing away at it.

I've always wondered how many generations of modern men, taken at birth and put on a desert island without any knowledge of the outside world, would it take to get language or writing or any kind of a society.

Many of the fundamental changes in human development took centuries. Now these changes take months. As we work diligently to change the baseline of the world we live in, it would do us well to question why that baseline is where it is and where it really should be.

Only then do we have any hope of stabilizing the situation and controlling what direction our baseline creeps. Hopefully, we can take control and point ourselves toward progress rather than self-annihilation.