The Infuriating Inferno

Brown's Angels and Demons was of special interest to me as it began at CERN in Switzerland; our next door neighbor at the time was a physics professor at Georgia Tech and had studied at CERN. "No way," she assured me, could "anti-matter" react as Brown had described. Then, in The Lost Symbol, Brown runs the reader all around Washington D.C. hunting Masonic symbols. There's always some mysterious group of well-armed militants shooting at Langdon, and indirectly at the reader, in these fantasy tales. At the bottom of them all, however, is some element of truth.

An Insurance Catastrophe

The fly-leaf in Inferno states that the book "is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental." Oh, yeah? Three pages later Brown tells us, "All artwork, literature, science and historical references in this novel are real. 'The Consortium' [that strange paramilitary espionage agency that plays the role of villain in the story] is a private organization with offices in seven countries. Its name has been changed for consideration of security and privacy." Of course, his references to Dante and The Divine Comedy—which I've never read and hope never to have to read—are deemed quite authentic, undoubtedly including the one quote repeated throughout the novel: "The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis."

So what is this "moral crisis" that is the infuriating focus of Inferno? Although Brown declares that organizations and events are all fictional, two clearly are not. One is the World Health Organization (WHO), the medical arm of the United Nations, and the other is the Vatican, Brown's favorite target in his novels. The event is the attempt to control the world's bulging population. The WHO distributes birth control training and condoms to the masses living in poverty in the Third World, and the Church marches in right behind them and tells the faithful that they will go to hell if they use them. According to Brown (another probably accurate fact), unopened condoms are creating an environmental disaster in some Third World areas.

The charts that Brown uses in the novel are also probably very accurate. One shows that from 7,000 B.C. until around 1900 the world's population remained steady below 1 billion people, with a slight bulge in the 14th century that was reduced dramatically by the Black Death—the plague brought to Venice by ships full of rats from China—and after the population was reduced we had the Renaissance. Knowledge, trade and prosperity brought with it better medicine and higher birth rates, hence by 1901 the world's population climbed to about two billion, and has kept growing since then. Now, some 112 years later, it has passed seven billion, according to the WHO, and by 2050 it will be perhaps half that again.

The other chart is a combination of factors that have changed since 1750, basically the beginning of the Industrial Age. Again everything remained stable until around 1900, and then, well, the lines on the chart dramatically swing upwards. Factors on the chart include surface temperature, population, CO² concentration, gross domestic Product (as opposed to Gross National Product, the things we make, while GDP includes services such as funerals and body shops and lawsuit awards), loss of tropical rain forests and woodland, species extinctions, motor vehicles, water use, paper consumption, exploited fisheries, ozone depletion and foreign investment.

No Novel Thinking

This, of course, is not new thinking. Earth is slowly—well, maybe not slowly, but certainly steadily—killing itself and everyone inhabiting it. There are too many of us, and millions starve to death each year. Infant mortality, even in the U.S., is climbing because the birth rate is climbing. (Surprisingly, in certain European nations and Russia it is declining—do they know something Congress isn't telling Americans?) Many nations can't feed themselves, and millions, especially in Africa and the Middle East, are unemployed. What do these people want? Do they seek food, or perhaps birth control? Nope. They want weapons. What do the rest of us think they are going to do with them? Dan Brown only hints at the answer to that one, and you don't want to know. Dante's Inferno is where we are headed if we don't do something soon.

What is the impact of all this on the insurance industry? Start with the auto insurance industry, and take a look at your nearest Interstate highway. There are arguably more cars and trucks. This means there is slower movement at rush hours, in turn producing more pollutants. This also means there are far more accidents and traffic-related deaths. One could talk all day on a cell phone on some backwoods country road and be perfectly safe, but that can't be done on an urban freeway.

What about property insurance? We never heard of derechos or hoboos (sand storms) before 2012; now they are common events, along with forest fires that are burning down mansions built in the woods of California, New Mexico and Colorado as this is being written. What is that going to do to your homeowners' premium? It certainly will be a job provider for catastrophe adjusters. When the F-5 tornado tore Moore, Oklahoma, apart this spring one news network showed a series of aerial photographs of Oklahoma City and its suburbs beginning around 1950 and moving to 2013. Back then, the city was surrounded by farmland. Steadily urbanization encroached on the city and new super highways appeared. By 2013 it was solid city. This is the case with every metropolitan area. U.S. population has tripled in my lifetime, but I'm now an old geezer. I'm thankful for that. I hate to think of what awaits my young nieces and nephews.

One of the scenes in Inferno takes place in a sunken palace, a place once above ground and now under water. Sea level rise is another of those "end of life" scenarios that will plague us in the coming decades. Entire island nations may disappear. Coastal cities will look like Venice does today, and Venice itself will be a good place to catch fish.

We all want the best medical care, but we're not sure how we should pay for it. Currently around half of our medical dollars are spent on people in the last three months of their lives, and that number is going to be growing. We debate whether aluminum is the cause of Alzheimer's, but even the WHO isn't positive about it, nor is the CDC. Yet more than 50 percent of us think the Affordable Care Act is treasonous. Government is intruding in our lives, according to more than 50 percent of us supposedly. The overwhelming sentiment is that we don't want government to …. do what exactly? To tell us we have problems? The media can surely do that. Of course Dan Brown will tell you, too.

A 'Libertarian' Idea

E. J. Dionne's column in The Washington Post June 10, 2013, says that we once tried a libertarian state in the U.S. It didn't work very well. The idea is that government should not get involved in anything except basic defense. No welfare state. No grand plans to see that medical care is available to all. No standard education. Each state and each person is responsible for him or herself. Thus, says Dionne, "when the Great Depression engulfed us, government was helpless, largely handcuffed by this anti-government ideology until Franklin D. Roosevelt came along."

He cites Michael Lind, a political science scholar, as noting that "most countries we typically see as 'free' and prosperous have governments that consume around 40 percent of their GDP." Lind continues, "Libertarians seem to have persuaded themselves that there is no significant trade-off between less government and more national insecurity, more crime, more illiteracy and more infant and maternal mortality." Dionne adds, "This matters to our current politics because too many politicians are making decisions on the basis of a grand utopian theory that they never can—or will—put into practice."

In Inferno Brown has matched the WHO against a brilliant (or mad) scientist who genetically creates a virus that solves the over-population problem. I won't give away the plot, but though it be fiction, Brown has taken a very real problem, that of the bulging world full of hungry people, and brings it boldly to our attention through the eyes of the 14th century poet, Dante, and his vision of Hell.

Dante scared the hell out of the people who read it back then, sending them rushing back to the Church for salvation. Inferno may not scare the modern reader into taking action against the world we have created, but it did serve to infuriate this writer into being angry at those "who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis."