The Foundations of Civilization Have Changed
And we are beginning to realize how different a world can be our future.
From time to time it is helpful to step back from the normal chaos of 21st century global life—the sound and fury, the chatter and drift, the innumerable drawn and redrawn patterns—and look for what may be fundamental.
I want to call attention to what may increasingly define our political landscape for the next fifty years or more. Involved, as we are in day-to-day concerns, it doesn’t cross our minds. In fact, we may hold opposite views about social reality.
A little background. Much of what we know about how people have lived in the past comes from the studies of
ancient records, current populations that have been isolated from outside contact for long periods of time, and the artifacts of past societies that archeologists have unearthed.
From their evidence, the story of human societies seems to be an alteration between small egalitarian bands of people successfully adjusted to specific ecological niches and larger complex social communities of settled populations that generally involves some form of authoritarian rule based on wealth and force. Such “empires” or “kingdoms” often exist at, or past, the carrying capacity of their environment, i.e. the extent to which local natural resources, given the existing technology, will support a population of a given size. In such societies a few create for themselves a higher standard of living by taking from the many any surplus product of their labor above that necessary for their survival, and where all are subject to survival threats, i.e. natural disasters, climate variation, disease plagues, and destructive wars.
It is the scribes of these larger civilizations that write the histories we rely on to understand their lives. As near as I can tell they are histories of hope and despair and a resigned adjustment to the perils of survival itself.
Humans can conceive of better futures. They can imagine alternative worlds. They wisely, though, do not stray far from the narrow cultural norms that define acceptable survival choices.
When a people live within constraining adjustments to environmental limitations, innovation is a risk and may lead to disaster. The leaders of such societies, benefiting from a stable status-quo, are well aware of the folly of speculating on what “should be,” and the population as a whole may see such forms of thinking as counter to the will of supernatural or secular authority.
I realize that this is a very general and brief account of history, but I see it as a central thread that runs through many human settlements across time and space. My point is that the “practical” way of thinking, and the only way that was sure to keep your head on your shoulders, was to concentrate on what can be rather than on what should be.
Such good advice did not completely eclipse the ability of some to imagine a better world. A few imagined how the world might be, knowing all too well that these were utopias, visions of what should be, the Shangri-La’s of an unreachable earthly paradise. These were fictions for entertainment, or bitter musing about the sufferings of humankind.
Now, in this century, for the first time it seems in human history, we have the technological capacity to make what should be, what can be. We have emerged from tens of thousands of years of scarcity into a time of potential plenty. What could only be imagined in utopian formulations is now technologically achievable.
Obviously, not overnight. Obviously not unless we are able to reshape our thinking and restructure our actions. But no longer can scarcity be the excuse for our tolerance of war, and disease and poverty and hunger and suffering in every society in the world today.
What happens now? When does the moral price we pay for our inaction rise too high?
I am saying that “tectonic plates” of human possibility have moved and we live in a new world. That is a reality we are only slowly realizing. But it will change everything. The rest of this century will see history pivot and achieve or destroy a now possible future.