Accepting that we can reshape our
world only little by little, we, as tragic lovers, have to know where to concentrate
our efforts. We have to know what is important in the myriad events and
problems in the world around us. What are the challenges of our time?
I
take one list typical for the period after Limits to Growth, showing probable
international crises for the coming decades:
1.
Monetary crisis;
2.
Scarcity of raw materials and energy;
3.
Food shortages;
4.
Degradation of the natural environment;
5.
Inadequate distribution of wealth;
6.
Nuclear war.
Many such lists have already been
made. In identifying the most important challenges, I have applied to global
challenges the business technique of strategic issue analysis. Important
clues are to look for developments that:
1.
Snowball, having consequences that worsen the problem;
2.
Have almost irreversible consequences;
3.
Affect the problem-solving capability itself.
As
an illustration of these three dynamics, I cite some examples from the criminal
justice system. Use of hard drugs leads to drug dealers. Drug dealers have an
interest in selling more. Drug addicts have an interest in becoming drug
dealers. So there is a feed-forward loop, or a snowballing. Prisons do deter
crime, but they also make many convicts more criminal. Lack of prison capacity
increases the chance that petty criminals will meet hardened criminals. The
more that prisons stimulate crime, the more fed up with the subject are the
public and politics, and the less they tend to increase capacity. When drug
dealers or other criminals have reached a certain critical mass in organization
and finance, they will be much harder to convict. Eventually they will buy
their way into the police and the justice system. Corruption of police and the
justice system is the classic example of a problem eating into the problemsolving
capability itself. Many forms of corruption and demoralization fall into this
category.
A
natural environment such as a freshwater lake may become so polluted that its
capacity for self-recuperation breaks down. Deforestation leads in many places
to immediate topsoil loss, making reforestation almost impossible. The spread
of a desert is a similar process that is practically irreversible, as is
depletion of oil resources. We may find ways to address the problem, but we
cannot find ways to create new oil reserves in the time it has taken to deplete
them.
After
some study and much thought I have come to a list of ten major challenges to
the development of a sane, humane, civilized planet. Maybe ten is the limit of
my imagination, and maybe it is the limit of the complexity I can handle. Maybe
unconscious or aesthetic principles are at work. Maybe ten is the magic number
for social challenges, but ten it is. Anyway, the more challenges, the fuzzier
the picture; the fewer challenges, the poorer the picture. So here is my
balance between mental fuzziness and mental poverty:
1.
Cruelty, torture and terror;
2.
Lack of control and loss of control;
3.
Depletion and pollution of nature;
4.
Transition to the post-industrial society;
5.
The ailments of democracy;
6.
Social injustice;
7.
Nationalism and international tensions;
8.
The probability of another great war;
9.
Global emergency planning;
10. Nihilism.
The
next ten chapters will deal with these ten challenges. So, I am taking the road
of the evolutionary strategies. In each chapter I will sketch the key problem
as I see it. I will give a historical brief, analyze the dynamics behind the
problem, try to project the future consequences if we do not meet the
challenge, and suggest our most promising avenues for responding to the
challenge.
To
provide a general picture, I will give short descriptions of the challenges
here. They are the ten dragons to slay, the ten sphinxes to confront.
1. Cruelty, Torture and Terror
Terror is the oldest challenge. ‘A
tyranny is worse than a devouring tiger’. Terror brings with it the world of
cruelty, of torture, of atrocities, of wanton slaughter. Civilization begins
where terror is stopped. Civilization ends where terror starts. Terror is the
prime challenge, the basic inhumanity, the first and most terrible sphinx. It
raises the deepest doubt; it generates the deepest despair about the possibility
of real civilization. Cruelty, torture and beastly slaughter are the worst
nightmares in broad daylight. They are, in a sense, the ultimate reality.
Real
is what makes a difference. Fear, despair and excruciating pain make all the
difference in the world. The bestial or demoniacal or mechanical infliction of
pain by other people is an experience so intense that no serenity of armchair
thinking can make up for it. In the body of civilization, terror is the most
malignant, open festering sore.
Joan
Grant in one of her novels about old Egypt describes a resistance network. This
network is called The Eyes of Horus, because its participants should be able to
see with one eye the rising sun, and with the other eye the worms in the belly
of the crocodile. That is what this challenge is about, facing this sphinx
steadfastly with one open eye. Our other eye should be free, so that we do not
succumb to the sickening power of this horror. As long as terror exists, it
will always be the first challenge.
2. Lack of Control and Loss of Control
The second challenge is that many
developments we once started seem to get out of hand. Whatever we do seems to
worsen the problem. This is the problem of the vicious circles, spirals that
accelerate or jam. This challenge is about those snowballing developments and
accelerations that appear to be the hallmark of our time. Everything seems to
increase and go faster.
In 1944 more bombs were dropped than
in all years before 1944. During one year in Vietnam more bombs were dropped
than during the entire Second World War.
Today
there are more scientists alive than there have ever been in all the years of
the past. The best IBM personal computer of 1987 cost 12, 000 dollars and had
the same capacity as a huge computer that twelve years earlier had cost half a
million dollars. A PC of 1, 000 dollars today will do better.
Many
processes enter a loop after their takeoff stage. Machines produce other
machines that are better and faster, computers produce other computers that are
better and faster, and software produces software that is better and faster. In
the population explosion, more people produce ever more people (though not
better or faster).
Loops
are processes that have feed-forward -- consequences that intensify the process
itself. This process is one of snowballing or spiraling out. It is similar to
inflation that may ‘spiral out of control.’ Other processes do the same when
two parties react to each other in a way that intensifies their current
reactions. We call this process escalation. The arms race is an infamous
example of such spiraling.
Inward
spirals also exist and lead to jamming. Bureaucracy leads to more bureaucracy,
legislation leads to more legislation, more lawyers lead to more complicated
justice and so to more lawyers. Some of these loops lead to desirable results,
such as economic takeoff and ever-decreasing prices. More often, loops spiral
out of control, as in the classic story of the sorcerer’s apprentice.
This
sphinx is one that is hysterical, with a contorted, twisted face like a
whirlpool. It is not a basic challenge to our humanity, as was the first
sphinx. This sphinx is the basic challenge to our capability to respond.
3. Depletion and Pollution of Nature
The next challenge is the depletion,
pollution and destruction of our natural environment. In the first place, this
depletion and destruction is a result of the population explosion. In the
second place it is a result of the scale and nature of new industrial
processes. In the third place we have a throwaway and who-cares attitude that
has decreased more slowly than the two first factors have grown.
The
best-known aspect of this challenge is the pollution of air, water and soil. In
the end, however, the degradation and destruction of nature beyond recuperation
may be this challenge’s most important aspect. Destruction includes erosion,
deforestation, desertification. One other effect, even more extensive, might be
a global climate change.
This
sphinx shows an ugly, barren, polluted wasteland.
4. Transition to the Post-Industrial Society
The fourth challenge is the massive
change of our economies and consequently our social life, because of the advance
of technology. Just as the Agricultural Revolution ten thousand years ago
sparked a wave of changes in how people lived, so did the Industrial
Revolution. A further wave of massive changes is occurring right now with the
latest phase of the Industrial Revolution, that of microelectronics, computers
and telecommunications.
In
the industrialized world this change means a transition to the post-industrial
society described by Bell, Toffler and Naisbitt. This post-industrial
society requires different products, different work, less work, and above all,
a vastly different life.
This
sphinx has a puzzled look, anxious and alienated.
5. The Ailments of Democracy
The fifth challenge is to continue
to run societies in a way that prevents both anarchy and repression. Since the
second half of the sixties there has appeared what Herbert Simon calls a ‘loss
of nerve’ in our democracies. The most important challenge of modern
democracies is to prevent their degradation into oligarchies, or worse, into
totalitarianism.
In
a democracy we cannot easily blame others for social imperfections. Nothing
prevents any one of us from becoming prime minister or president. The feeling
of impotence that an individual citizen may easily harbor in any political
state becomes more paradoxical in a democracy.
The
face of this sphinx is our own unimportant face, the face of one lost among
many.
6. Social Injustice
The sixth challenge is injustice -
institutionalized injustice, social injustice. The first level of injustice is
that of people becoming victims of violence: the social violence of gangs, the
political violence of paramilitary groups and terrorists, and the commercial
violence of organized crime. To live in a neighborhood that is under control of
the Mob is near to living under the threat of the first challenge, which is
that of torture, cruelty and terror.
The second aspect of social injustice is
grinding poverty, the poverty that breeds despair, demoralization, indifference,
and loss of human dignity.
The
third aspect of social injustice is discrimination based on background: race,
religion, language, sex. Race and sex discrimination are probably the most
vicious, because race and sex are conspicuous and impossible to change.
The
fourth aspect of social injustice is the arrogance of power of official
institutions over individual citizens, in the machinery of government,
especially of the law enforcement agencies themselves. This is an old challenge
indeed.
The
face of this sphinx is one of unfeeling arrogance.
7. Nationalism and International Tensions
The seventh challenge is the
challenge of nationalism and of its resulting international tensions. Since
nations have armies, international tensions may cause or aggravate armed
conflicts. With the present global economy and access to global transport and
information, all of us are interdependent. Policy decisions are made within
national boundaries, and many of these boundaries are hardening. Think of
growing protectionism. Political states are considered to be machines to
stimulate wealth and dispense welfare. Each state wants economic growth. Thus
fierce competition, distrust and outright envy are present, but so is mutual
dependence. The GNP race that has followed the old colonial race has many runners.
All of them are struggling to get to the top, but they are interconnected with
strings of trade, of finance, of knowledge, and of people.
After
any revolution of rising expectations, disappointment in progress becomes
widespread, and much scapegoating appears. McCarthyism was just one example of
the universal tendency to look abroad for causes of domestic problems and
frustrations. Behind each problem are the commies, or the CIA, or the
multinationals or the heathens. However, as Daniel Boorstin reminds us: ‘All
social ills are indigenous, especially in our time, in which each nation
asserts its divine right to go to hell in its own particular way.’
8. The Probability of another Great War
This leads us to the eighth
challenge: the chance of new global wars, possibly nuclear, ultimately with the
potential of destroying our civilization. By its nature, this challenge is the
biggest.
The
face of this sphinx is as awful as that of the first one, but this sphinx is
incomparably larger. This monster rises sky-high, with a metal face and a
slumbering volcano inside. It is like a lethal spirit in the bottle, but on a
planetary scale. This sphinx is tied to a viciously spiraling arms race, which
enlarges both the spirit and the bottle that holds it. We are long past the
stage of trading off the opening of a limited bottle now for the chance of
having a bigger one opened later. More specifically, the challenge is to make
the outbreak of a new world war less probable, and to decrease the extent and
intensity of such a war.
9. Global Emergency Planning
The ninth challenge is global
emergency planning, to prepare for relief and reconstruction after a global war
or any other global disaster. This challenge is partially a problem of means of
medicine, transport, industry, agriculture, and most basically, of knowledge.
It also is a problem of ends. The survivors of such a disaster may be
miserable, confused, demoralized people, lacking spirit and guts to battle the
odds.
This
sphinx is a collection of shifting shadows at the horizon.
10. Nihilism
This brings us to the last challenge
- nihilism. Why bother? Is there any meaning in all this struggle for a better
world? All of these earthly problems may just be part of an educational
experience or an experimental laboratory. Or maybe they are a chance happening
in a chance universe, in which some creatures have the strange fate to be
self-conscious and doomed to choice. This is the sphinx with the empty eyes,
black holes that stare from nothingness into nothingness.
Of
course, there are many doctrines, mostly religious, which offer escape from
this sphinx. But if we do not want to escape it, if we want to confront it,
then nihilism is the ultimate challenge that separates the men from the boys,
as well as the women from the girls. I will explore those modern developments
that seem to bring this presumably unsolvable issue at least into focus, and
that appear to offer new material.
From: The Ten Global Challenges: How People Make the World. An Essay on Politics, Civilization and Humanity. Ordering the book
