Quo Vadis

By Melvin Maddocks

AN INQUIRY INTO THE HUMAN PROSPECT by ROBERT L. HEILBRONER 150 pages. Norton. $5.95.

This short, urgent essay on the world's chances for survival has all the cheerfulness of a medical warning de livered to a middle-aged man after a bad checkup. "Slow down," Doc Heilbroner in effect says to the human race. "You're not the kid you once were. You can't burn the candle at both ends any more -- maybe not even at one end, the way your energy resources are going. And you'll have to trim down that population bulge. Keep on doing what you're doing, boy, and you'll kill yourself."

The scolding is surely familiar these days, coming not only from economists --Heilbroner is chairman of the department of economics at the New School for Social Research -- but from politicians and editorial writers, to say noth ing of gasoline-station attendants. By now the poor patient knows Doc Heilbroner's gloomy figures practically by heart. Every ten years mankind's ener gy demands double. And even if they are met by extractions from granite or sea water or God knows what, thermal pollution will increase by 100% in the next couple of centuries, driving atmo spheric temperatures up an intolerable 50 degrees Centigrade. The population will be doubling in Latin America every 24 years, in Africa every 27 years, in Southeast Asia every 30 years.

As if this is not standard bad news enough, Heilbroner has a few private premonitions to share. For instance, when the underdeveloped nations get nuclear weapons ("within the next few decades and perhaps much sooner"), he anticipates that they will blackmail the developed nations into "a massive transfer of wealth" -- or else.

Human Nature. But what takes Heilbroner beyond 1974's gloom-as-usu-al is his rediscovery of and pessimism about human nature. Old-style progressives, if they accepted the concept of human nature at all, used to regard it as either essentially good or infinitely correctible. But Heilbroner now doubts that mankind can be brought to care enough about the future to do what is necessary to save the present -- especially as regards self-denial. Can 20th century civilization give up the "ethos of 'science' " (not to mention the work ethic) and for sake the now monstrous ideal of growth for the ideal of stability? Heilbroner sees little reason to expect that either of the two main socioeconomic systems will manage such self-abnegation. Both capitalism and socialism, he argues, share the values of technology -- production and efficiency -- with small regard for the pillage of nature.

What can save homo not-so-sapiens from himself? Not calls for "moral awakening" and "social action." Perhaps, just perhaps, the aggressive competitive instincts of modern man can be transferred from products to services, to education, to health care, to the arts. But Heilbroner cannot imagine these things being done voluntarily or without the "payment of a fearful price," particularly in freedom. Democracy, he suspects, is not up to the job, only " 'iron' governments" that are "capable of rallying obedience." Does this mean that an authoritarian state, the worst alternative only a few years ago, has become the best alternative today?

The spectacle that Heilbroner's thesis represents is almost as distressing as his prospect for the race. Here is no Spengler taking a sardonic pleasure in declines and falls. Here is a man of practical intelligence and good will, a man equipped by temperament and upbringing to hope. Yet his book is an epitaph on liberalism written with conspicuous pain by an author who includes himself in the epitaph. Heilbroner fits his own description of Promethean man, full of "driving energy," "nervous will": a problem solver. Now, he grimly concludes, that gift of fire may burn up the world. For the sake of the race Prometheus must go. To be replaced by whom? Atlas, Heilbroner proposes, the burden bearer rather than the problem solver: the man who plays life not to win but to survive. Before a reader is carried away by this bleak neomythology, he should ask: Just what are Heilbroner's deep apprehensions based upon? A few data (mostly projected) and a lot of intuition. Futurology, as Heilbroner is the first to admit, is a game that takes place in its own outer space.

What Heilbroner may express most clearly in this essay is the present fatigued mood of a generation of intellectuals who began, like good Americans, by believing that they had nearly all the answers and have come to despair that they have any. In the absence of proof, a reader can only hope that Heilbroner and his fellow sentries, as he calls them, are now as wrong about sighting the end-of-practically-everything as they were in their youth when, with Marxist or "managerial" revolutions in their heads, a lot of them thought they saw quite another kind Of future.

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