EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED - AND URGENT - A BROADSHEET MANIFESTO FOR 2023
Navigating the planet and ourselves through our existential crisis.
Five years ago I wrote “One Little Book” - fifty cents’ worth of thoughts on the survival of humanity.
It was an attempt to unpick some of the complexities of our great environmental crisis and the reasons why we were still acting so slowly and dangerously against our own interests with the threats in plain sight.
When I was born in a time of world war enveloping the nations of mankind, the natural world, according to David Attenborough, was a "paradise": the great thinning had barely started. Three quarters of a century later we are deep into the thinning, and the mass extinction is gathering pace. If we survive, this great catastrophe will be what is remembered most in future centuries. It is of course quite possible to imagine the world without us, but here I am not concerned to try to.
This broadsheet addresses the multiple nature of the crisis, how humanity might face it more effectively, what a shared vision of the future on Earth might look like and how we might change individually and organize ourselves to achieve it. Elaborated argument and the planning involved has to be addressed in detail elsewhere. I am also inviting contributions of ideas on practical matters via the website “All Hands On Deck.”
Here in 2023 the sands are trickling fast through our fingers.
ANALYZING THE CRISIS
For us, the challenge includes human survival. Unfortunately, this involves our taking on responsibility for the rest of the ecosystem of the planet, a task to which we are arguably not ready and possibly essentially unsuited. Our own survival may not make much difference to the planet over the long term: we should remember that of all the species that have ever been on this Earth, well over 90% are now extinct. If we disappear this world would keep trundling along, in the Goldilocks zone, as it has for billions of years.
Meanwhile we are running our present global environment ragged. This is now obvious in many ways, but also in others that are less obvious to us in our daily lives. We do not have one big evil dragon to slay: that would appeal more to our heroic sense of drama, and we'd be much better at dealing with it.
The crisis is multi-layered: everything is connected.
- We are trashing the world, depleting basic
resources and heating up the planet's surface,
with multiple consequences;
- Through these actions, we are creating the circumstances for a mass
extinction of species;
- We are diminishing the richness of the world for ourselves. This is already having damaging psychological and physical health
effects on us, many, such as the loss of biodiversity, barely
understood or not even identified.
- We are diminishing our innate human capacities and
powers by relying more and more on technology to which we are imperfectly adapted;
- Our social organization and mores are changing significantly but too slowly to keep up with existential challenges;
- We have not shared a powerfully motivating vision of the future to guide our efforts to
save ourselves.
These challenges constantly interact: we cannot deal with any
of them in isolation. The layers pile up and form an opaque
blanket of oppression. We become depressed or take refuge in fantasies or anger and become easy to manipulate. Under this darkening cloud, earnest warning reports gather dust on the shelves. And everything is connected. Much of what I suggest here depends on simultaneous actions concatenating together.
It is difficult for citizens leading normal lives to multitask on rolling and immediate crises, to concentrate on several topics at a time. We prioritize the most pressing, and return to the longer-term or more
slowly developing challenges when we can. We need to
understand and be kind to ourselves about this inadequacy,
which is embedded in our nature - but not to tolerate it. Overload is
paralyzing us: recognizing the problem is the first step.
Addressing political and business cycles is the next step, and
the dominance of short-term issues is perhaps the most
serious failure of our systems: the focus and decision-
making processes are in the hands of people like us. If nobody really worries beyond the next five years or less, we will keep sliding down the slope. It is highly significant that the end of the world is often identified as the “End of Time” or the “End Time”.
The challenges of the short-term must be met: at the same time we have to be undertaking long-term social planning of many types, including how to help the majority of our species who now live largely separated from the world of “Nature”, which we should not be thinking of as an entity distinct from us and our human, urban world.
THE STATE OF HUMANITY
We need to understand the making of our behavior: for most
of our history Nature has been the enemy as well as the all-enveloping mother, to be survived and conquered: often we took what we could and moved on.
We are short-term fight- or flighters, evolved for
feast or famine. Greed made perfect sense when the
next meal was uncertain. How could we know that feast or famine would turn into non-stop feasting for many, at least for a while?
So now we are kings of the castle, and the dirty
rascals too - and we thought it was one or the other.
Meanwhile we continue to fight for our own perceived self-interest
and our genes, tooth and nail for us and our kin.
Hardly surprising in the light of our human experience in this world
that we're racist, xenophobic and tend to paranoia,
and that it may take more generations than we have available
to rid ourselves of the toxic effects of these sides of our characters..
We are dangerously violent – that goes without saying. Violence is our default.
We search for comfort – we would kill for that too, and do.
Our sense of justice turns quickly into self-centered ideas of what's our due, and the raw deal we perceive we have, and how our fears are justified.
Yet we need to cut ourselves some slack - some of what is wrong now were good survival tactics in the past.We triumphed then because we are still here.We have survived the extremes of this planet,
climate change, starvation,disease, war, genocide and despair.
There are still points of light in this current darkness. We all want to be heroes, remembered as the generation who faced the rising waters as they climbed past the flood mark on the stick, and the apocalyptic fires, and we rescued everyone in the very nick of time. We hope for the company of saints, brothers and sisters of the spirit, good blossoming from the fervor of our souls, humans the chosen and the best of our gods' creatures here to nurture and to save the world.
Our fervor reveals our capacity for ecstasy, a standing outside ourselves, our reach for the transcendent. From our visionary capacities, where dreams and realities meet in the crucible, who knows what might be created?
New spiritual movements inside and outside the formal religions will arise and sweep the world as the crisis deepens. However, I do not place my hopes on that path, on an overwhelming wave of saints. History has too many examples of the failures of such movements.
Yet it feels new to say that we all breathe the same air and drink the same water, fight for space in the same cage, argue about rubbish dumps and the plastic in the ocean, the melting ice running quietly from the glaciers into the sea in locations far away from most of us. There really is a new sense of a small planet where everything is interconnected.
Of course we should have seen it coming: we are trying to face it when it is already a few seconds to midnight. And even now it's hard to see anything remotely adequate bedding done..
But now, if we can see the brink ? That might at last be reality.
As we face the need for urgent collective action, it would help us to remember that all politics is about who gets what, and the less there is to go round the nastier it becomes.
And all politics is local, they say, but that now means global, for now there is but one locality.
Meanwhile, can we be tamed? Freud called this process becomingof civilized. We are not fully civilized, yet we have managed to create the beginnings of Civilization in ideas and through laws.
We are also in thrall to capitalism, a major hurdle to surmount which is part of our curse on the world , especially in the democracies.
But whether we live in democracies or autocracies, we are dominated by tiny elites who depend on our obedience and keep us to a greater or lesser extent in controlled realities.
Only the power of the people can overcome this oppression, if it is clear-eyed, brave, determined and coordinated !
But first we have to see through the fog.
A VISION OF THE FUTURE
It is difficult to imagine that all humanity can share a positive vision of the future in any detail. But allow me to ask, what would your Paradise of the future be ?
The Tibetans have a vision of very special places accessible to the faithful only in times of great crisis and disaster, “Beyuls”. We don't have the possibility of creating such places unless they are on the moon or Mars – in every way a long shot. So far, here is here.
Any vision of Paradise has to be about here.
“Xanadus for all” could be a starting place for a
vision: “stately pleasure domes” - it's worth looking
at what the rich, powerful and privileged of history have carved
out for themselves, even if that seems hard to translate
into a world of billions of people clawing their way.
For the good life I suggest we need air, water, food,
shelter, space, nature, quiet, solitude, work,
individual self-expression,the freedom to be honest,
the freedom to be responsibly free until we impinge
on the freedom of others, freedom under just laws,
freedom of dissent. I would add two further needs that
might require a little more unpacking – beauty and awe.
This paradise could easily be this Earth. I personally would
like a hundred years of healthy life – to ask for a longer lifespan seems greedy and selfish for an unenhanced human with
no implants or brain extensions or built-in links I h larger entities.
I really don't think we deserve any longer – it takes new
generations to adapt in some of the more profound existential changes, and the old have their limits. I'd like clean air and
water, and I'd like us all to cope with our waste, including the
horrible legacy of the careless past. Non-polluting
energy, of course, and why not keep the CO2 levels
down to those of 100 years ago? Practical and
enjoyable living space – but that is hard to set rules
for. I'd settle for more and bigger parks rather than
“wilderness”, mostly gone for ever. I’d settle for protected areas
I can get to reasonably easily and find Nature, quiet, solitude
and dark nights.
When the Roman Cicero wrote of a library and a
garden being all he needed, he was probably
thinking of a rather grander estate than the one I'd
hope for for everyone, and I'm not sure about a phone
and a window box being quite enough. Finding,
nurturing and harvesting food, animal and
vegetable, should be experience every human
should have, at least in childhood. Similarly, self-
expression, “Art” in its many iterations, should be
assumed to be a part of everyone's life. These
activities can be part of the work that we all need,
productive dimensions that contribute importantly
to human life and happiness.
In this paradise politics would have to be a universal
participation, as natural for everyone as breathing.
Perhaps we need to endure a rough transition
from representative democracy to ultimate
decision by plebiscite, starting from the present uneasy
mess in the countries with antiquated democracies. It will
probably take a very long time to rid ourselves of
personality politics and traditional parties, but we need to
keep up the pressure.
Population size is a question most of us would
prefer not to face. Almost every aspect of my
paradise would be far easier to achieve if there were a
billion people on this Earth rather than the ten
billion we shall in all likelihood shortly become. I cannot
wish for a plague, famine or war to decimate our numbers.
In the decade or two we have to turn back from disaster,
we can hope for no more than the beginning of a
controlled decline in population numbers, but there are
already signs that Mother Nature will find her own ways
of securing an adjustment. I would hope that a declining
population would increase the preciousness of every
individual life, and not make us feel that we were
losing the feisty vitality of our species. A billion of
us could all live like kings and queens of the Earth,
without any new science or technology. Ten billion is a stretch.
The restlessness and often risky nature of human
aspirations remain, even in the “Paradise” I have
imagined. Ruthless, power-hungry and wealth-
seeking elites and individuals exist in affluent
societies as much as in poor ones. Humans don't stand
primitive communism for long unless absolutely forced,
and it has never worked for long anyway
outside ascetic religious communities. If we could
but begin with one of our core freedoms being
freedom from oppression and exploitation, it would
be a long fight hardly begun and needed for ever.
A decent minimum income for all and realistic graduated taxation
for the general good are the basic ingredients of a fair distribution of wealth and income which should not wait for systemic changes.
PRACTICAL STEPS (1) - APPROACHES TO THINKING CONSTRUCTIVELY; INFORMATION, FACTS AND TRUTH
We need to develop womb to tomb thinking about all our resources – to follow processes all the way from beginning to end and back into rebirth, to create a fully cyclic economy.
We need to improve our process analysis, and pay
attention to the detail of what actually happens from a broad perspective. Many areas of activity can no longer be left to specialists,
who are often trained not to think holistically
We need to extend some timescales for action and
sustainability, but some need to begin immediately.
We need to question our basic assumptions every
time we try to think. This is good practice in the world of
science which needs to be emphasized in the world at large.
We need to learn to acquire and study knowledge across
disciplines and traditional categories, and to treat
specialisms as stepping stones, not self-sufficient islands.
Holistic thinking seems easy to imagine, but it is a
major challenge. We need to think laterally, around
problems as well as meeting them head on.
We need to be honest ! Can we be scrupulously honest
as we sit in the Gravy Train? This is a prime human problem.
It's hard to stay morally upright when the grounds for hope
wobble, but harder still to be scrupulous - people talk about
a moral compass but not so much about the little pair of scales.
We need to be tireless finding out the true facts of
our situation, to a high standard of “fact.” Facts are sacred.
It is so dangerous that the currency has been debased. The bad drives out the good. If the facts don't ring true, we're lost.
If we don't know whether we're lost, we're lost.
After the facts, the truth. We always construct the truth in our own image. But much of the truth we forge must be as close to objective reality as possible: we do not have the space for devious manoeuvres and we owe ourselves a rigorous testing. We know that the reality we act on is a working hypothesis, our best at the time. Scientific method is a good approach, , the best we have in the material world.
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Then, be valiant for truth ! Constructing and then telling the truth is often inconvenient and embarrassing and sometimes dangerous.
But it can get to be a habit. and feel surprisingly joyful. Imagine that every day you've stood up and promised to tell the whole and nothing but that elusive truth.
In this age of compromised systems of government and public discourse, human hierarchies are ultimately unsustainable.
A polity of citizens sharing equal rights and responsibilities,
democracy and social justice are not ideal luxuries but basic necessities. Everything is connected.
THE INFORMATION FLOW, FACTS AND TRUTH
Over the last thirty years, a blink of an eye, there has been
an astounding proliferation and democratization of
information, together with a dizzying growth of worldwide
communication. The unwitting have been swept up in
massive tides sweeping over the web. Undoubtedly there
have been positive results – people on the margins of society
have found their voices, discovered kindred spirits and have
been able to organize politically in new, innovative ways.
But inevitably the darker side of human nature has
blossomed spectacularly as well, and the fantasists, the
paranoid and the deluded have found a welcoming playing
field. From hostile nation states to lone conspiracy
theorists, from those who wish to bend reality to keep their own followers to those who deny or subvert scientific facts, the floodgates have opened. Only very recently have the portals began to close up for some of the most egregious transgressors.
This is a major contributor to the crisis: false information floods the internet, from the simply mistaken and incorrect to the slanted and skewed to the deliberately misleading and outright lies. Millions have divided into tribes and see and hear only prejudice that accords with their own.
Because the whole question of fact is toxically bound up
with the complex moral and legal questions of free speech,
democratic societies have been hard put to establish
principles and guidelines. The obvious model for
evaluating facts is the scientific one, but it is not
universally applicable. Where fact and opinion border
each other, or where facts can not be definitively verified,
the ground becomes very unstable.
Just as in the old saying that there are lies, damn lies and
statistics, we need on the positive side to create a
hierarchy of facts, leading from the tenuous to the
universally accepted. Is it possible to create such a system
of evaluation without control of information or outright
censorship? This is a field of activity which needs to be expanded
and to have far more attention paid to it, and where alliances
between government agencies, academia, public and private companies and the general citizenry must be nurtured.
A “fact” such as the suggestion that an election was rigged or
“stolen” would have to start as an unverified suggestion and pass through several universally recognized stages of approval before becoming incontrovertible - perhaps moving up levels of truth from
D,C,B, to A. There will always be people who would reject any such classification as a conspiracy of the oppressors, but they should diminish with time and eventually join the lunatic fringe. The verification symbol would always demand judicious interpretation.
I would not expect “Dark Matter” and “Dark Energy”
to attract an A! I'd give a spherical Earth an A, and a
flat one a D or E, but since the latter is still believed in by some, it has to be rated. To respond to the vagaries of the collective human brain which has evolved with all its foibles and contradictions, a vetting
system is essential for mental health. Religious beliefs,
which are often held to be above such scrutiny, would
need an additional classification, but not exemption from
criteria of fact.
A classification system is an essential prerequisite for new mass planning mechanisms, but it would have to be of high quality.
Verifying facts is 90% hard work, whereas creating Truth requires
art.
PRACTICAL STEPS (2) - GOVERNMENT AND PLANNING THROUGH DIRECT DEMOCRACY
If we are to meet our long crisis adequately, what is
required is above all sustained, plodding courage -
that of the foot soldier holding the center, not the
flashing saber and the white charger . This will not generally
be a fight that excites us. It gets “exciting” only as
we reach the edge of the cliff.
To save the Earth we must either be in love with it or
know that we are protecting our loved ones under immediate,
serious threat. We will not save the world unless we love it in
all its understood beauty.
A sober assessment of our predicament followed by long-term
rational action cannot ultimately work with our current
decision-making and governmental systems.
If we stay in crisis-response mode we shall run from
one emergency to another, and we are going to fail.
It will be impossible to respond methodically and simultaneously
on a broad enough front.
We need to move on from representative to direct democracy. This is currently widely regarded as a step too far. But we can end the age of representative elections, thanks to modern technology. Voting can take place on more than one level - in addition to the times when the whole population votes electronically but adheres to the old principle of one person one vote, there can be other issues where voters can self-appoint themselves to the executive or even have to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of an issue before proceeding to vote on it. We have the technology to ensure the legitimacy of each individual’s presence in virtual systems of decision-making.
We need the ten-year planning committee, the fifty year
committee, the five hundred year committee, the truly
long-term human survival committee, the deep time
committee, all in permanent session, with tasks allocated,
monitored, reported and reallocated every year. These
committees need to be at the heart of things, not peripheral
think tanks. Some of the tasks will need urgent priority, to be addressed immediately,simultaneously.
We have inadequate instruments to take on these tasks in government, business or finance at present.
Simultaneously, we need to leapfrog the national
level, and make these permanent features of a truly
empowered successor to the United Nations. Global institutions must be strengthened to the point where they appropriate national sovereignty. I write this with a heavy heart, because of all the suggestions in the broadsheet, this is probably the one most
difficult to implement.
As we confront the planetary crisis, we have to act in the
light of the best truth we can achieve, built on the most
comprehensive, deepest knowledge we can assemble. As
emotional creatures, we need to be charged by love –
reason is a poorer second, but in emergency may have to
do. Our heads have to be cool and hot simultaneously, but
that is typically human. Embedded in and beyond the
moment we have to have a vision to strive for - what
future world we can collectively envisage. It is no use
hoping to bring back the world as it was, even if we slow
the build-up of carbon dioxide or halt or slow down the
extinction rate. The world has always been changing – as
the poet Spenser said “Nought endures but mutabilitie”.
The true wildernesses of the world are in tatters, but we
already have parks and protected enclosures of many
different sizes on land and sea. These can grow and become
interconnected. We also know that forests can be nurtured
in deserts, and land can be restored to health. The
building blocks of our Brave New World are the ones we
have inherited – there is no time, and no point, in
inventing new ones.
We also already know that some goals cannot be achieved
without programs that cover the entire planet. In our multi-state world it often seems impossible to arrive at consensus. Without systemic change, a grand plan for our environment will never be achieved, however much we already have the means to realize one.
At present, the iconic beasts and landscapes that speak to us
most powerfully will not survive in pristine environments. The
idea of polar bears roaming the entire arctic region is already a fantasy. There could be a polar reserve for bears and perhaps preserving such an iconic species in zoos is the best we can do.
We need the icons – they are the landmarks by which we can try to steer.
To expand this new paradigm to a global scale, we need a new
way to create and work toward a vision. This approach needs to
accommodate the widest spread possible of political and
economic interests and opinions, as well as a crucial range
of flexibility, to compromise without losing too much. We shall
have to wrestle with the question few politicians relish:
"What and how much are you prepared to give up
in the short term for the long term good?” We are by
nature singularly ill-equipped to answer that question
creatively unless death is knocking at the door. The sacrifices
required of us are mounting, and are becoming progressively harder to shoulder voluntarily.
Mass planning demands the development of the double reverse fractal model. Fractal growth is ramification, with smaller and smaller copies of original acts of creation branching endlessly into new spaces. The original shapes may appear to be chaotic in origin, but they govern subsequent development. Reverse fractal planning
imagines ideas which can start small and produce larger
and larger copies of themselves. Double reverse fractal
planning would resemble those picture of trees and their
root systems being mirror images of themselves. The
effects of this would be to have a process of planning and
the execution of ideas developing from the very small to
larger iterations. As the chaotic growth increases in scale and complexity, the entire spectrum of human activity would adapt.
If it is adopted as a conscious strategy, work to save and improve our environment can be coordinated and Implemented with constant monitoring, modification and fine tuning. There should be no dividing lines between citizen, professional and government initiatives. Human intuition and gut feeling would join with expertise at the beating heart of the process. Such collaborative vision has to marry the thoughts and wishes of each Individual with those of the majority.
At the base of the fractal tree there has to be a set of starting
precepts “everyone” can endorse. The starting set of principles has to be simple, and universally approved. We might agree on the benefits of a world of clean air and clean water, of biological diversity
and an environment that allows for the continuance of
most of the existing life-forms. Perhaps it goes without
saying that this is a world of adequate nutrition and living
space for all and a world where the United Nations
Declaration of Human Rights provides pillars of life. This
declaration of 1948 could be the basis of all subsequent
agreed human rights, but we need to have a similar list for
the “rights” of our planetary environment, the conditions
under which it can thrive.
Could we employ this process to make sense of billions of individual
visions ? Artificial intelligence is capable of combing through them and drawing out dominant elements and principles at a speed we cannot match. We need that speed in our diminishing window of time. I believe that sometimes our ingenuity creates new resources at the very moment we need them, without our being consciously
aware of their creation.
PRACTICAL STEPS (3) - CLEANING UP OUR SOCIAL ACT
In a time of looming catastrophe it may seem that starting with how the individual person is nurtured and valued in society is a luxury we do not have time for. But the dangers of ignoring and succumbing to the numbing and alienating effects of dealing with people impersonally and callously in the mass are real and important. If we do not treat
every member of society justly and with attention, as circumstances deteriorate a tide of anger and destruction sweeping the ignored and neglected could sweep us away.
We need to start with childhood. Children require respect, attention and celebration of the landmarks in their lives to thrive. It takes inspired amateurs to raise children – a village - professionals can be
important assistants, not taking on prime responsibility.
Each person's education should be an individual
matter. Schools are changing slowly, but retain many
nineteenth century mass-population characteristics:
an apparatus of grades and credits and some old-fashioned
discipline is still applied to keep the lid on. Replacing
paper with screens or rearranging the chairs or the
jargon are merely bandaids. Teachers and the
communities they serve have to adapt far more
quickly than they so far have to the demands and
opportunities of a changing world.
Most young people should be ready by age 16 to
take at least partial charge of their own learning,
and assume many social responsibilities they are
denied at present. All young people should be employed on community service of many types for at least a year
before being released into the general adult working world.
It does not matter whether or not this is designated “school”.
In the adult world the existing terms and conditions
of employment need to be changed. A person
without a job should be regarded as an underused
asset to the community, not a burden on society. All
individuals deserve a basic income. If all the
different conditions which prevent a person from
working can be put together in a continuum, the
stigma of unemployment can be reduced: conditions
such as youth and age, ill health, physical and
mental handicap or family caring responsibilities
can attract exemptions from work with benefits
from low percentages to 100%.
At the other end of the wealth scale, the balance of taxation
rather than the unregulated vague pressures of philanthropy
should be used as a prime means of maintaining
social stability. At present we have lost the concept
of fair distribution of wealth in the public arena
because taxes are associated with “Big Government”
rather than fair, nurturing government. Winston Churchill said
that a society should be judged on how it treated its
poorest and most disadvantaged citizens. Few
cultures currently score highly by that measure.
Reforms are continuing to be partially blocked by
vested professional and economic interests – all
professions should be strict meritocracies, with
transparent standards and regulation of their
powers by their wider communities. The universal
tendency of professions and businesses based on
exclusive areas of expertise to hold their clients to
ransom should be checked by universal oversight
and government regulation.
CAPITALISM
The tentacular mechanisms of capitalism are too
ingrained in the global economy to be drastically modified
within our critical time frame. The only power now greater than capitalism and its elites and their hold on national government is the collective power of the people.
Therefore we need to look again at how capitalism can be better
regulated. This is a key area where nation states are visibly failing, and we must leapfrog over them.
At present government taxation is supposed to compensate for
the inequalities of wealth. With strong regulation and a fair tax system,
universal services can be created to satisfy the needs of
society. This is the generally accepted theoretical model.
In the cyclic economy, Capitalism requires adaptation and modification. In classical economics capital consists of created assets that can enhance one's power to perform economically useful work.. Capital therefore does not currently include durable goods such as homes and personal automobiles not used in production. The natural environment is not included either.
In the current model, wealth and resources are therefore created by “sweat equity”.This is no longer adequate – we need to be conscious of the totality of the wealth we have, the entire system of which
we are a part. We cannot account for our lives and our
greater home unless we embrace the totality – our wealth
is what we have made, but it is also the ores we extract
from the ground, the ores we leave there in the ground, the
water and the air enveloping the planet and the astounding
diversity of life that inhabits the same space we do. The seas and the land and all that therein is, all the creatures that remain from snow leopard to bacterium and the plants from sequoia to trefoil and from fungus to algae, all is Wealth! All is Capital, but not the easy wealth at our command, when we began to rule the World - we too are Capital, we can be expended for the greater good, or even go forth in the
greater paradigm while the moose and the treefrog and the
other millions of forms of life multiply within a severe economic balance of this Earth that can mutate for millennia to come.
Our human capital thus becomes a contribution to the
greater whole, to include ideas, passions and emotions,
religious experiences and a unique recording and
foreshadowing of life to come. Our consciousness and intellect is wealth too, a capital resource whose capacity has been accumulated over thousands of generations.
Economic and financial accounting therefore needs radical
overhaul. A machine's life needs to be planned
from resources used in its production to recycling and
disposal into another stream, to resurrection and reuse.
These extra steps could turn out to be almost as important
as clean energy is to the healthy survival of the planet.
The reorganization of the framework of ideas underpinning
Capitalism will ease the transition into new models of organizing
the mechanisms of resource extraction and production. Some of the existing models of cooperatives and community enterprises will be helpful here, but the scale of change will need to be vastly greater.
SOCIAL JUSTICE
There was probably a time when the gathering-hunting
bands of our ancestors were egalitarian – when everyone
had one of two gender-based roles which often overlapped.
I suspect that there were major variations in human
societies from very early times, but when agriculture
arose, the evidence seems to confirm one's worst
suspicions about humanity. With rising, denser
populations came pyramidal social structures, kings and
pharaohs, elites of priests and warriors, aristocrats and
overseers, the whole apparatus of oppression. Most labor
was manual, and the exploitation of other human beings
the only way to rise above drudgery. The vast majority of
people throughout later history have belonged to the
lower orders, peasants, slaves, working classes,
proletariats, cannon fodder, indentured servants, convicts,
lay brothers and sisters, the “inferior races”, foreigners
and members of other faiths, unprotected children and the
biggest minority of all, women.
Traditional world views and religions underpinned this “natural
order” of things. In the last few centuries these theories
and prejudices have come under attack. Names have been given: to racism, sexism, nationalism, Social Darwinism, imperialism, classes and castes, elites, division by education and training on top of the accident of birth. Suffrage became universal only in the last century,
mostly in manipulated, imperfect democracies. But nonetheless
there was significant progress in many parts of the world –
in most of Europe in 1800CE women and children were in effect property in all but name, and that cannot be said of their status in 1900CE.
The advent of the age of labor-saving devices, cheap
energy and mechanization is still continuing with robots
and AI. So far it has not eliminated drudgery for toiling millions.
There remain in particular two atavistic characteristics of our species – our attachment to our “kin” and hostility towards the other, the stranger. Combined with continued systemic injustice, they continue to dominate all societies although the severity and exact constituents of this mixture vary.
Both these ingredients of human life are partly positive survival mechanisms. We identify by family, village or neighbourhood,
nation, religion, race, class, occupation, education, sports teams, circles of friends, working colleagues, age...the list is almost endless and can embrace every “circle” from early childhood friends to powerful elite groups to the deviant associations on the edge,
gangs and terrorist groups of many complexions. As we are intensely
social beings, those members of our tribe who exhibit less
need or who are more isolated, are sociologically correctly
thought of as unfortunate, unhappy, deviant or abnormal.
I need to emphasize the importance of achieving Social Justice
as an integral part of our striving to move forward into a viable and sustainable future for the world. I write on a subject of which my only experience is of a member of the race, class and gender responsible
for most of the oppression and injustice of recent centuries. Empathy has to be my private business in this case – not to be flaunted.
Many people would say that large scale environmental
projects are most effectively undertaken by autocratic
dictators and disciplined societies with limited individual
freedom – usually with very little social justice. In the longer
term, as one considers how humanity can thrive in a finite
world, I believe that there must be greater social justice in
all societies if humans are to survive in a limited planetary system.
The justification for social justice ranges from the short-
term – hundreds of millions of people fleeing from coastal
cities and hostile climates creating an impossibly large
number of desperate and underprivileged refugees, to posing the question how can an individual in a world of democratic decision-
making be justifiably excluded from playing a full role in assuming responsibility ? The dangers of unrest and
terrorism are stark and clear, with millions of young
people disempowered and therefore lacking a true sense of
belonging. We cannot afford to create an underclass on
this scale. Beyond those dangers there are less obvious
ones – for example the fact that poor, underprivileged
communities are far more likely to burn plastic trash or
send untreated sewage into the ocean than richer ones,
even if they are not already disadvantaged by limited
education.
If this picture looks like a cruder, harsh substitute for idealism, it is.
Until now it has been possible for the rich to find or create a relatively
unspoiled environment – an exclusive Caribbean island,
a Scottish estate, an idyllic dacha, or to live a cosseted life
in a big-city penthouse in a smart and protected part of town,
These options are becoming increasingly under siege, and
when the threats spread to universal air and water quality,
we truly begin to belong to the same planet. The colony in space
or on a nearby moon or planet may be the ultimate gated community, but not yet, even for the super-rich. Air filters and purifiers don't
achieve quite the same level of superiority. Social injustice is such
an ingrained aspect of human behavior that it probably will take our
staring into the jaws of disaster to push us into significant
action.
There have been times and places – parts of medieval Spain, Alexandria before the fanatics murderously destroyed it,
some great European cities at their apogee of power, even with all their faults and the worst of humanity scheming in the shadows, when institutions of learning, pathetically few brave small communities
often religiously based, not hounded to fearful xenophobia, exceptional families and individuals offering a welcoming embrace to all and sundry, saints, madmen and women, crazy artists and commune-dwellers, have thrived - when a magic circle of warmth and acceptance held out against the harsh winds, at least for a time. It was so easy for these fragile bastions of hope and tolerance to be invaded and swept away, to seem counterintuitive as the armies of
the night gathered and swept across the lands. A few
centuries ago in many parts of the world arriving strangers
were routinely killed, alien groups were preyed upon for
loot and slavery, and few had much to lose but their chains.
Conventional behavior can express scarcely concealed
prejudice, or be unapologetically flagrant in expressing it.
Laws should promote desirable social norms and regulate
our negative behavior, but they can take us only so far.
If the police are in the habit of oppressing people of color,
routine negativity and violence are institutionalized.
When good laws are flouted, we are in trouble.
When they are actively undermined or suppressed by
those in power, the trouble is even worse.
How then promote social justice ? In public activity, daylight,
body cameras and social media certainly make a difference.
However, there is a wider recognition that has
to be shared. What is right and decent and proper and
should be internalized requires a number of essential
steps, but in certain ways goes against our survival
instincts. We need to go deeper, in a spirit of
compassionate understanding. The sight of a stranger or
person of another race often carries signals interpreted as
alien, culturally distinct, possibly hostile, resentful of
authority, tainted by criminality and unpredictably violent.
That this is a literally appalling caricature carries no
weight in the private culturally instilled drama of the
individual mind. We may on reflection understand that
even if largely true, much of this stereotype results from
the historic acts of dominant groups over the long term,
but the fear/hostility towards strangers reflex kicks in, and
the back-up in any situation of real uncertainty or danger
is the aggressive response. Brutality and cynical belief in
the idea that one can get away with criminal violent
actions are human failings most of us are capable of,
irrespective of race or culture. These toxic
reactions will not go away until either we are freed from
generalized insecurity and stress in our lives for a long
time, or general social conditions radically improve, or
some of the separation between our groups withers away
through miscegenation and social homogenization. If we
do not want to have to wait for these lengthy processes to
work through to fruition, we have to start with a major
effort in education, which includes promoting the
recognition that mutual tolerance and nurturing is to the
advantage of both sides, the oppressed and the oppressors.
Meanwhile, for the oppressed, one obvious answer might
be to make life so difficult and uncomfortable for their
oppressors that they are listened to, with consequent
mutual respect. This is not a guaranteed scenario, since it
demands a magnanimity from the oppressors they are
unlikely to develop in the midst of threat, imminent chaos
and fear. Dignified non-violent protest is far more likely to
produce a measured response, but on its own it will not rid
the oppressors of their tribal habits and aggressive
instincts. It is far too much to expect the oppressed to have
much sympathy with the prejudiced oppressors, but it is
absolutely necessary for the oppressors to understand
history and eventually forgive themselves, understanding
the magnitude of what there is to forgive. There needs to
be the initial recognition that life and property are safer in
a happier world without armed police and gated
communities. Fellow-feeling for all humanity might have
to wait and come more slowly. That has to involve our
recognition that we are the oppressors, and always have
been, when we have had the chance. As Thomas Paine
said, “Time makes more converts than reason.” This is a
stony road, and there are no shortcuts.
We are already seeing strident demands for more
true democracy. Only with fundamental changes
can we address the toxic nature of our polarized
and corrupt politics, and to get rid of the obsession
with personalities, poisoned by money and crude
psychological manipulation. We must not be
demoralized by the growth of populist dictatorships
across the world – they represent a totally
understandable reaction to imperfectly understood
crises with populations open to exploitation. Such
dictatorships always make remaining in power their absolute
priority, and are therefore difficult to overthrow.
New organizations to effect change may be only part
of the immediate answer. Existing institutions and
groups are sometimes better to work with than
having to go through the hassles of starting afresh.
This applies particularly to the old political parties
in democracies. That's often a tough calculation to
make, a choice between working from within or
breaking away. Some of the scales of effective organizations
and communities keep changing with new
circumstances and technology; some never change.
Local communities should make most important
decisions based on face-to-face meetings as far as possible,
Without alienating intermediate levels. What is “local”
will be subject to continuing debate, change and conflict.
However, many of the considerations concerning the
appropriate scale of community decision-making do
not apply to communities of interest, which can now
be world-wide through the internet and social
Media.
Nation states are obsolete. The only way they are likely to be
replaced quickly is in the aftermath of catastrophe.
In the current crisis the best hopes lie in international agreements
and the growth of the scope pf international law, including a stable world currency.
It may well be objected that in the case of, say, China,
it is impossible to imagine that that enormously important player
will progress quickly enough beyond its present nationalistic phase, but under sufficient pressure, fundamental upheavals in populations
can produce astonishing results with amazing speed.
THE WAY TO HELL
We know what we are doing we said
As we readied the chainsaws
We know the risks we said
As we picked all the apples from the tree of
knowledge
Packed them up and trucked them to the city
Our eyes are wide open we said
As we hunted down the beasts infesting the plain
We'll open a park we announced
Where the survivors can live in peace for ever
It's good for business we said
Thinking through cycles ahead, years, decades,
It's all a matter of time we said
Not thinking ages, centuries, millennia -
Brute survival might have to do
At least it’s a step up from death
But it would be nice to have some dignity
Even some dare I say it glory
The kind we award ourselves
As the flag goes down with the sun
And we adjourn for drinks and bright lights
In the concrete hall by the feedlot
As the darkness rises and the stars fall.
PARADISE
It passes like a dream, like happiness,
Discovered when disappearing -
Was that it, or was it we who were the dream ?
And now we glimpse it shining far ahead
Shimmering in the desert heat
When we yearn for the waters' murmur
The scent of moist earth in the shadows
The mist rising in the morning sun
The air caressed by flowers.
But there's a fragment of ancestral memory
Between our thoughtless meditation in the womb
And the thoughtless stillness of the grave
When we paused on the threshold
Happy with expectation
Waiting for the beckoning from angels with swords.
And if they do not beckon
Can we one arid, empty dawn
Rise and pull down the walls
Stone by stone
Mad for love of wounded Gaia,
Scatter the seeds across the wastes
Water Her with tears of joy
Walk the beauty-haunted land
Seek the sacred treasures once again
Kindle fire in ancient hearths
And dance the songs of Paradise ?
But now we stand before the angels,
And hold our breath, and wait.
THE GREAT TRANSITION
The transition from representative democracy to participatory democracy is a major paradigm shift, requiring a new social contract, no less. The existing ideals of the countries regarding themselves as democracies have for the most part been quite poorly implemented over the past few rocky centuries. I include the United States in that assertion, but there are many other examples.
In recent years an impressive series of technological advances have without planning placed the tools of PD in our hands.To create the conditions for fully-functioning PD all citizens must be securely connected, their privacy safeguarded, they must have maximum access to reliable information, and the system they sign into must have similar impeccable safeguards. In 2023 we are living in a world where many of these requirements are not yet fulfilled: the information and opinion environment is frequently toxic,unreliable and open to manipulation; while measures of control of their citizens have already reached a high level of sophistication and power to oppress in China.
However, the technology to control and operate the systems for good and reliable outcomes already exists if it is applied rigorously enough. A considerable investment is required at all levels of government, but in view of the importance of gold star systems, it should and can be afforded. The current (February 2023) active debate about the responsibility of the platforms - of Meta, Twitter etc. - for their content demonstrates how far we still have to go.
Does this scenario ask too much of us? No, we can and should grow into the new era of universally shared public responsibility. This is a key example of a way in which we have to surpass our own expectations.
The World of Information
Sometimes the world seems to be the giant brain of humanity, the world of virtual reality and the Matrix. The current excitement concerning AI depends partly on the disconnect between us and the true nature of our reality, otherwise we couldn’t entertain for a moment any idea that mechanical thinking, even tied into “realistic” robots, could be closely similar, still less identical to our own.
However, the computer and the means of using it to communicate - the media, social and otherwise - are an enormously powerful set of tools which have landed us in profound trouble. To rely on these tools as the main instruments of democracy would seem to many to be unrealistic, even foolish. Virgil said two thousand years ago that rumor flies, and it has recently been shown that lies tend to fly more swiftly on the Internet that does the truth.The liars have several motivations - the most dominant being the drive to acquire and maintain power. Manipulating people’s fear, hatred, suspicion and envy through lies, which can be blatant, has become a form of art applying some basic but effective psychological science. In the USA today approximately one half of the Republican party is led by the nose through such manipulation.
In the face of this onslaught, robust counter-argument and the exposure of lies is only partly effective. Few consumers of the lies consult fact-checkers. A much more complex, drastic and comprehensive approach is essential in any case.
We need a far more nuanced series of categories of settled facts and partially processed “facts” as well as suspect categories to use, using some of the procedures employed by scientists including a rigorous peer-review.
The Different Stages of Certifying Facts and Truth, starting with the highest approval rating:
Fact-checked and verified
In process of verification
Speculation
Put forward as opinion
Directly manipulative, Incitement (these last two crimes)
The verification process needs to be undertaken by approved/certified agents/organizations. This is the necessary cost of electronic communication. “Amateur” checking resulting in challenge of fact would need to be regarded as an accepted form of appeal, tov be further investigated.
REQUIREMENTS FOR FUNCTIONING PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY :
Every citizen must have a dependable and adequate device for access to information and active participation in government;
The information flow to the general population has to be cleaned up, magnified and not become too academically oriented to the elite;
The security of the electronic vote has to be enhanced to the point where it is accepted as impeccable;
The decision-making processes at many different levels have to be made near-universally acceptable, some needing a threshold of knowledge/participation before direct entry into the decision-making process, other simply requiring a one-person-one-vote procedure such measures will need to evolve over time;
The monitors and guardians of the new system, from fact-checkers to new servants of the state taking on responsibilities for the proper order and conduct of the new system of government have to become in effect members of new professions with their own qualifications, certifications and regulatory boards;
Appeal processes have to be redesigned, for existing and possibly new courts;
A whole new legislative machine has to be created to replace the current congress of representatives;
It is vital that under this new system the government controls capitalism through its powers of regulation and taxation. In most cases these powers already exist, but the engines and lobbies of capitalism defeat their implementation in the present political system.
EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED !
It should be clear that the technologies required to effect the changes outlined here already exist or can rapidly be effected. However, without all the measures being seen through and working in concert, any new system will fail.That is the main argument for revolution rather than gradual reform.
Inevitably, this process has to start at the local and national levels. For final success, it has to spread to world-wide institutions.
EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED !
