Peering into the Future   
An article by Palden Jenkins
for The BangladeshToday
Late December 2007
  


The 20th Century didn’t reallystart until World War One broke out in 1914. The century was characterised by‘developed world’ domination, the successor to 19th Century colonialism. We sawmotor cars, planes, plastics, electronics, gizmos, radio, TV and film. Therewas a struggle between capitalism, fascism and socialism which fascism lost andcapitalism eventually won – though it didn’t look like this at first. We sawglobalisation, transnational corporations, vast population growth, over-consumptionby some and overwork by most. Engines, rotors, pipes, wires and transmitterswent everywhere. Vast wars and crises arose, killing people in millions. Mega-citiesspread like fungus.

All of these tendencies developed fromthe 1880s onwards, but it took until the Great War for people to see what washappening. The Great War represented an enormous failure to accept the future:aristocratic ruling classes strove to hold power in the face of a rising tideof socialism, populism, mass culture, democracy and the new upstarts, America and Russia. The oldorder lost. Its time was done. A new, industrialised, totalitarian worldreplaced it, driven by a nomenklaturaof bosses, politicians, shareholders, executives and experts, all dressed insuits.

Why this lecture in recent history?Well, we’re at it again. Some historians call the period 1914-1989 ‘the Short20th Century’, recognising that a new agenda was starting in the 1990s. Onehistorian even prematurely named 1989 ‘the end of history’, but he got it wrong.This was partially ideological and partially because, when standing on the edgeof a threshold, it is difficult to visualise what comes next. Here we are,entering 2008 – in the Western dating system, at least – yet we haven’t enteredthe 21st Century. Really entered it.We’re still looking at life in past terms. If truth be known, we’re scared tolook squarely at the future. It’s big.

We’re aware something else is kickingin, and we all know most of the issues, but we haven’t put them together into aBig Picture – what we could call a 21st Century Agenda. A century ago, we had anew Big Idea on the table, called socialism. But that was an ideology, conceivedby a small number of individuals. Today, there are bazillions of ideas flying around,but the Big Picture hasn’t crystallised. But it is now revealing itself, thanksmainly to pretty tough ‘facts on the ground’. What the world is faced withtoday is not a Big Idea but a Big Dilemma.

Here we are, living out our lives,running a movie based in the past, as if rapid economic growth of the currentkind had no consequences. The West is trying, at all costs, to maintain thestatus quo and keep its own best interests at the top of the world agenda. Enforcedeither by ‘shock and awe’, background manoeuvring or incentive, the rest of theworld has tended thus far to fall into line, but this is disintegrating andwe’re entering new territory.

The idea of a ‘developing world’,created by ‘developed’ nations, implies that development means following intheir footsteps. Yes, buy our chainsaws, jeeps, tanks and burgers, and you toocan be developed – and fat and unhappy, just like us! Few mention that, for oneperson to get rich, a hundred have to get poor. Besides, the idea that everyonecan get rich and ‘developed’ is a recipe for planetary disaster.

Besides, it’s not the developingworld – it’s the Majority World. The former third world is now increasinglysetting the agenda. After colonialism and client-status, having adopted manyaspects of the West’s provenance, something new is brewing. It’s not just a matterof copying and adoption, but one of getting to grips with issues the West cannotface, and which to a large extent, the West set in motion. The West is terriblystuck in its ways and feeling insecure.
The core difference between themajority world and the developed world is one of motivation. For the majorityworld the agenda is, “Things just have to get better, and we’re going to makeit so, whatever it takes”. For the developed world it is, “Things are fine asthey are (with just a few problems), and change is welcome as long as nothingactually changes”. The first motivates action and progress, and the secondlooks backward and leads nowhere. The West has lost the plot – it isvision-less. It had an opportunity to change fundamentally in the 1960s-70s,and missed it.

This isn’t a simple transfer ofpower and wealth from one part of the world to another, or a re-balancing ofglobal inequities. We stand at a juncture much bigger than this. Globalisationis digging deeper, and the Big Dilemma the world faces is global in extent.This changes sovereign states into interdependent world provinces, whether welike it or legislate for it, or not. The big issue is the internationalcommunity, planetary ecosystems and climate, global intercultural relations,the living conditions of the world’s people, and a host of other related issueswe all know of by now.

Resolving our planetary dilemmaisn’t just a matter of tweaking, funding, regulating, developing and rearrangingexisting things, or even wind-farms and solar panels. It involves a completelynew world-view anchored in the future. We need to visualise the far future andcount back from there. Arguably, one hidden meaning of today’s major events isthat the future is asserting an increasing influence on the present. We’redealing with the consequences of the past, and the damage done to nature andhumanity, but it concerns our future survival. If we don’t face this, lifeeverywhere will become ever more unpleasant and intolerable in coming decades.Everyone is involved, without exception – especially the rich.

This planetary situation is verycomplex, and each country has its own version of it, with its own versions ofthe internal tensions and crises it brings up. The nub of the matter is globaland can be resolved only through effective international decisions, action andmobilisation. All nations now have a more dramatic need for change than theyacknowledge. No nation wishes to change first, and all nations must do ittogether. This is at least talked about but still not done – the recent Bali conference on climate change was woefully inadequatein outcome when compared with the scale of the problem and the lateness of theday.

Economic growth and activity as wedo it today is incompatible with eco-sustainability, human welfare and survival.This hasn’t been accepted yet, but it’s coming. There are no Big Ideas to whichall the world can agree, to sort us out. Even the dominant superpower andcreative leader of the last fifty years, America, is itself lost, foundering,floundering and devoid of truly valuable strategies. We’re left with two mainpossibilities: the international community, such as it is, and the world’speople.

The international community isgoing through an anxious community-building process. This involves facinguncomfortable issues and dealing with new situations, while constrained by oldinstitutions and mechanisms. Driven by necessity, the community-buildingprocess is approaching a critical point in which all nations must give up someof their independence. It’s not just a matter of shouting at America and theWest, or them shouting back. It’s a matter of joining together to resolvedifferences and problems in utterly new ways. It requires entirely newthinking: not so much a new Big Idea as a new method for facing facts andresolving crises.

Scientists can crunch vastquantities of data to create climate models, but simple farmers in Uzbekistan and Boliviaunderstand a lot too. They see what is happening in some respects more clearly.Especially when it washes away your village and kills your family. One of theworld’s big problems is that its governments and institutions have lost touch withreal life quite significantly, and their legitimacy is in question. One of thebig problems for ordinary people is that we are not practised in mass actionwithout due leadership. But our leaderships are not really up to the task: whenthe USSRwent through perestroika, theleaderships had created the problem and were part of it, not of the solution.Governments come to power to protect countries and their elites, pump economiesand keep people’s narrower aims satisfied, not to save the planet or give powerto foreigners.

What is shaping up is an enormousgetting-real process. Globally, in a hundred years, we need to have resolvedthe 21st Century’s agenda points. We have to. What is this agenda? It is not anend in itself, but a means by which a new kind of planetary civilisation mightcome about. Sounds like sci-fi, this, but stay with it, for this is the way weare going. Here’s the agenda, roughly speaking, as far as I can describe it.

- By the end of the century our societiesneed to be significantly happier, safer, friendlier, more supportive andinclusive.

- We need to have createdecologically sustainable societies which not only avoid harming and depletingnature, but also engage in its enhancement and the building up of the world’snatural capital and resources.

- World ecosystems and climate needto achieve a new equilibrium under a proportioned human management which workson the basis of humans as guests, not owners.

- The world’s cultures, social andethnic groups need to appreciate and enhance their distinctions while acting ona basis of partnership and commonality – we’re all in the same boat.

- The global economy needs to besufficiently equitable and sustainable, regarding both human conditions andnatural resources, to eliminate dire need, excesses of poverty and wealth and togive all people a fair chance.

- Our civilisation – our cities,technologies and life-means – needs much rebuilding, to accommodate and reflectthe other priorities outlined here.

- Governance and socialdecision-making systems need to reflect not vested interests but the generaland planetary good.

- Country and city need to coexistwithout urban needs and priorities overwhelming country ways, since simpler,rural societies are the keepers of secrets and life-ways important to all ofus.

- Population-growth anddemographics need at least to have stabilised.

- An emotional clearing- andhealing-process of historic hurts, social guilt, dissonance and degenerationneeds to be in progress – addressing the spirits and psychology of society.

- A process of spiritual, creativeand cultural health needs to pervade our societies anew.

This list gives an idea of whatwe’re looking at. Before you say, “Well, fine, but I can’t see it happening”,just remember that, a century ago, computers, supermarkets and jumbo-jetsweren’t imaginable either. In those days, folk from my country, Britain, ruled yourcountry, Bangla Desh, then part of the Raj. Now, three generations of folk fromyour country have lived in mine, most counting themselves as Brits and manyserving in our great national institutions. Things change more than we canforesee. And necessity is the mother of invention.

Today we’re faced with a Big One,and the above-stated objectives are no longer wishful thinking or ideological.They are simply the likely results of what we will have gone through duringthis century, by necessity, since our welfare and survival are at stake. Thishits everyone, rich and poor alike, with levelling implications. There aresufficient wealth and resources in the world, but they are badly distributed,wasted, utilised, exhausted and ruined.

At present, the critical factorseems to be climate change, bringing weather extremes, ecological and social changes.Other criticals hide behind this. The consequences and side-effects of our currentway of life are enormous. Surmounting them is a bigger challenge than we preferto acknowledge. It requires a social and economic mobilisation and quantumshift. In earlier times we have done this during wars. Yet such a mobilisation,this time, could render wars obsolete because, to win this battle, we need towork with, not against, each other. Besides,any victor in a 21st Century war is a loser anyway, because the problem isplanetary.

In Britain, in 1940-42, our societyand economy were transformed in just two years, from a capitalist to a commandeconomy in which women and old people took over agriculture and production, childrenwere shipped out of cities, men went abroad, everyone depended on each other,fairness of distribution of food and resources was paramount, people worked andplayed hard, and it worked. Today’s Brits look back on this time as one ofnational breakthrough and social triumph. Precedents such as this exist for usto refer to. But it required a big national decision, made at the top and thebottom of society, to pull through together. There was resistance at first. Butwhen people saw the price of notdoing it, things changed fast.

In our time, we approach a similarsituation, but bigger. The price of not changing is overtaking the price ofchanging. It could be easier if we were faced with an alien invasion, becausewe’re used to facing external threats. But this threat comes from inside, fromus, and only we can address it, through a radical change of behaviour in allareas of life everywhere.

And this is a strange Gift of God.Our Big Dilemma forces changes we needed to make anyway. We have failed to doit through wisdom and choice, so we’re now facing shock and awe of a kind that makesthe American version look weak. Humans get activated and mobilised by crisis.We might have six billion mouths to feed, but we’ve got the same number ofpairs of hands to do it with.

This is a taste of the 21st Centuryagenda. Our great-grandchildren will know the outcome, but the crunch period isin the next half-century. In a century from now, we could have a new,planet-wide civilisation of which none of us can conceive at present – thoughits principles are visible. To get there, we’ll need to prioritise the futureover the past.

 

The gift lies in the fact that we have no alternative but towork together and to face things we have needed to face for a long time. In amanner of speaking, this is the achievement of a new kind of umma or human community, yet far beyondthe confines of the Muslim world, and for entirely practical reasons. Thebiggest challenge in the 21st Century is not ecological: it is for everyone tobecome friends – and this way, we’ll sort out the rest. That’s a quantum shift.