Hiranmay Karlekar It is more likely for water to be turned into wine than for soaring petrol and diesel prices, which threaten to hobble the world's economy, to plummet. The global food shortage may end, but not in a hurry. It may also continue, given the vagaries of climate change following failure to contain global warming. While welcoming the economic strength that India and China have acquired, US President George W Bush, who always has at least one foot close to his mouth, has ascribed the food crisis to the rise in purchasing power and demand in the two Asian giants. If things look grim, the reality may turn out to be even more so as the present unfolds into the future. With a steadily increasing number of people emerging out of poverty and demanding more food, better shelter and clothing, and personal mobility, and consuming more power and energy, the pressure on Earth's resources is going to mount. There are two kinds of optimists who believe that the challenge can be met, the shortages not only be overcome but poverty ended. In the first category are worshippers of the new god, technology; in the second, a section of economists. Technology has, no doubt, given much to the world. Though one can see primates like chimpanzees resorting to it when they use crude tools like sticks to scratch their backs and birds using it in building nests, it became a conscious instrument of modifying the environment with the coming of human beings. Even then, it was only in the post-Industrial Revolution period beginning from the last quarter of the 18th century, that the accumulated storehouse of technological innovations had reached a critical mass that transformed it into a self-augmenting process of systems and practices, evolving in an increasingly large measure according to its own logic dictated by fresh dependencies created by each new advance. In a considerable measure, the process is charting its own course and, what is critically important, is having a major impact on culture. Television, sound systems, video cameras, computers, the creation of virtual reality and so on are redefining entertainment and education, besides methods of production and distribution. The advertising industry, the cutting edge of consumer capitalism, is playing a near-decisive role in shaping the consumer and other preferences of a rapidly-growing section. Audiovisual advertising, which needs to have an arresting and/or entertainment component to attract attention, is more and more defining the ethos of television which is a technological phenomenon as hardware and which is turned into culture force by the software used. Not surprisingly Neil Postman states in his absorbing work, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, "Entertainment is the supra-ideology of all discourse on television." And television sets are becoming ubiquitous even in developing countries and their influence all pervasive. Postman is right when he says, "Television has become, so to speak, the background radiation of the social and intellectual universe, the all but imperceptible residue of the electronic big bang of a century past, so familiar and so thoroughly integrated with American culture that we no longer hear its faint hissing in the background or see the flickering grey light. This in turn means epistemology goes largely unnoticed. And the peek-a-boo world it has constructed around us no longer seems strange." Epistemology is the spawning ground of philosophy, which provides the intellectual and moral coordinates in terms of which civilisations perceive themselves and which guide the evolution of ideas and values. Also, epistemology, as the theory, method and matrix of knowledge, has been the progenitor of science of which technology is a derivative. With the desiccation of concern for epistemology, technology will lose its innovative edge and fail to cope with the challenges it is supposed to meet. With globalisation in its cultural dimension acting as the instrument of the universalisation of the television-driven culture of the American underclass, the decline of epistemology and its intellectual progenies will become worldwide. This leaves one with economists. Geoffrey D Sachs, who has ignited many controversies, is one of them and remains a seemingly incorrigible optimist despite his somewhat mixed record in bringing dead economies back to life. He writes in The End of Poverty: How We Can Make it in Our lifetime, "Today we can invoke the same logic (generically of the kind that John Maynard Keynes unfurled in Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren) to declare that extreme poverty can be ended not in the time of our grandchildren but in our time. The wealth of the rich world, the power of today's vast storehouses of knowledge, and the declining fraction of the world that needs help to escape from poverty all make the end of poverty a realistic possibility by the year 2025." How will it happen? Sachs writes, "Ending global poverty by 2025 will require concerted actions by the rich countries as well as the poor, beginning with a 'global compact' between the rich and the poor countries. The poor countries must take ending poverty seriously, and will have to devote a greater share of their national resources to cutting poverty rather than to war, corruption and political infighting. The rich countries will have to move beyond the platitudes of helping the poor, and follow through on their repeated promises to deliver more help. All this is possible." Many will doubtless point out that Sachs himself is being platitudinous here and banking on a possibility that is remote. They are perhaps right. But the fact also remains that however impressive and flawless a techno-economic model one may construct to ensure the resources of the world are optimally harnessed to continue meeting soaring demand, implementation will founder without political will. In the last analysis, the latter will require, in a rapidly globalising world, a broad, worldwide consensus. That will be increasingly difficult to come by in a peek-a-boo world, hooked on to perennial entertainment and perpetual titillation to notice the writing on the wall. Even if people see it, the change in lifestyles and social values and structures that will be required for a civilisational course correction, may be collectively beyond them. In that case, the world will end neither with a bang nor with a whimper but with a steady deadening of the mind.