Inevitability of nothing

Emerging Significance of Nothing (Part #3)

---

[Parts: First | Prev | Next | Last | All] [Links: To-K | From-K | From-Kx ]

---

In the midst of the eurozone crisis, a valuable insight into "nothing" is offered by the historian Andrew Roberts (Europe's 'proud empire' is entering a cul de sac of history, Financial Times, 17 February 2012):

Nothing is inevitable. It was the first truth I was taught as a Cambridge undergraduate in the 1980s, and it has been italicised and underlined for me by everything I have learnt since.... The whole of human history is testament to the fact that vast sections of mankind can seem to be progressing towards what looks like an established goal, only to get sidetracked into cul-de-sacs, sometimes for decades, occasionally for centuries. So why do we still assume that an eventual return to any significant economic growth in the European Union is inevitable?

For it was the leading thinkers of the... historical determinist school who infected mankind with the concept that we were "progressing" somewhere, moving towards a fixed, positive future point. In economics, that idea is encapsulated in the assumption of economic growth as a kind of manifest destiny, almost the birthright of the species. All too often we see growth as something to be taken for granted as a natural part of the human condition; the rule rather than the exception. [italics added]

Roberts' introductory sentence (inadvertently) offers an ambiguous interpretation. The promised consequences of growth are indeed not inevitable and other outcomes may well be foreseen. However, interpreted otherwise, it is the inevitability of "nothing" which merits reflection in that this is already evident to many in some measure -- with the possibility of its widespread manifestation as the availability of resources diminishes ever more rapidly. "Nothing" is then unavoidable -- like the "death and taxes" characteristic of current austerity programmes to rectify incompetent governance.