Abundance doesn’t end

Speaking to his ministers at the Élysée Palace last Thursday, the très sérieux Emmanuel Macron called for unity and sacrifice as he announced the end of the age of abundance because of a parade of horrors, including global warming, war in Ukraine and the ongoing supply problems.

‘What we are currently living through is a kind of major tipping point or a great upheaval,’ said Macron. ‘We are living through the end of what could have seemed an era of abundance…the end of the abundance of products, of technologies that seemed always available…the end of the abundance of land and materials including water.’

What is abundance, though? It is the product of modernity – a singular episode in the 300,000-year history of our species that gradually lifted humanity from starvation, disease, early death, ignorance, and permanent war toward historically unprecedented plentitude of food, trebling of life expectancy, management or complete eradication of a plethora of diseases, close to universal literacy and numeracy, and ‘merely’ episodic outbreaks of war.