When the Dust Clears

In my previous article, I demonstrated man's seemingly limitless capacity to produce more with less, but unfortunately never quite enough to sustain the population booms that followed, which inevitably brought on cycles of war and misery, which in turn retarded the development of man's conscious capabilities.

But sometimes the opposite would occur. For instance, once the dust cleared from the Napoleonic wars and England's harsh treatment of its poor, Europe began to settle into an industrialized democracy of sorts. Indeed, by the early 1900s it was headed into a golden century when World War I intervened. One unintended byproduct of that war was the fall of four empires, but its more enduring legacy was worldwide economic depression, the rise of totalitarian dictatorships, and a retreat from internationalism and a global economy to isolationism and destructive nationalistic self-interest.

World War II, which was the direct outcome of the previous war's legacy, had the opposite effect. The creation of a large middle class, mind-boggling technological gains, the drive for racial equality, the end of colonialism, the emergence of trans-national alliances, and other changes probably never would have happened without the cataclysmic events that took place beforehand - events driven, ironically enough, by totalitarian government, creeds of racial superiority, and the quest for new territory.

In theory, we could go on this way forever - progressing and evolving in painful fits and starts with occasional backslides into a dark ages - but a number of factors suggest it's truth or dare time, such as:

A world population of 6 billion going on 10 billion.

Serious ecological damage to large parts of the biosphere.

The proliferation of nuclear and biological and chemical weapons.

Spectacular advances in various technologies outstripping our capacity to come up with ethical guidelines.

An aging boom in the US and other western countries, where an ever-larger non-productive sector will be making greater demands on those who produce.

But there is nothing like an impending crisis to concentrate man's ability to think. Nevertheless, if history is anything to go by, we may have to contend with widescale global disaster first. Then and only then will some of the assumptions we take for gospel truth today seem ridiculous and absurd.

One of these is work and the work ethic. I am not opposed to either. I do balk, however, at our feudal system of labor relations where democracy stops outside the factory gate and the office lobby. I also believe that a society that has demonstrated a practically limitless capacity to produce more and more with increasingly less and less hardly needs to engage one hundred percent of its adult population in jobs they by and large can't stand. I also believe that as our conscious capabilities progress we will find new ways to organize our free time and find new ways to be productive, ones that will advance our species in ways we cannot yet imagine.

As our work ethic undergoes change, we should better be able to organize ourselves around the equivalent of free or low cost services and premium services. In many ways much of this is already in place: a Pinto society and a Cadillac society and all the in-betweens. We simply have to do it much better and remove the stigma from those who opt for the former.

Before concluding, a brief word on globalization: The trend toward world markets has tended to disguise the fact that most manufacturing companies now engage in sweatshop labor practices, largely in out-of-sight out-of-mind parts of the third world. We may gloat about how free markets have triumphed over communism, but it is a strong indictment on both our morals and economics if, after all these years, we can only make a simple pair of sneakers by making life miserable for those who make them.

At present, our global economy is a largely lawless one. That will have to change, with global laws and global enforcement. Companies who exploit their labor forces - wherever they may be - will have to be closed down, and speculators who make their livings off the ebbs and flows of world markets will have to be controlled - but we're not ready for all this just yet.

Perhaps, sometime later in the millennium, when the dust has settled from the equivalent of a Napoleonic War or World War II or - heaven forbid - peaceful change, and we have managed to create a reasonable semblance of heaven on earth, perhaps then we will be ready to face our greatest challenge. But that is the subject of my next and final article.

Sept 11 Thoughts

September 11 changed us forever, though 13 months later it is still too soon to say exactly how. Our witnessing of good people doing good things continues to inspire us, and a new emphasis on spirituality, family, and community has not entirely left us. On the other hand, the sense of old wounds healing from the days of the Vietnam War has given way to an Iraqi peace from hell, which threatens to divide us yet again.

The hint that Americans would be once again willing to tackle big problems and big issues, a mission abandoned since Reagan and effectively ridiculed through the Clinton Administration, has turned into a crude America-first foreign policy that has alienated the rest of the world.

A short list of big problem issues might have included a new war on domestic poverty, forgiveness of third-world debt, Palestinian statehood, a concerted worldwide effort to save the environment, and a means to ease the social inequities of the global economy. September 11 might have jolted America into this new mindset. So far, the exact opposite has occurred.

Updated Oct 22, 2003

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Ironically, this man's evils resulted in long-term changes for the better.