11 posts tagged “h”
In four respects Today stands in contrast to Yesterday (about 1750 – Today). First, the future has regained some of the inscrutability it possessed during the Distant Past (up to about 1750). Second, the marriage of science and technology has revealed dangerous and dehumanizing consequences that were only intuitively glimpsed, not yet experienced, by our forbears of Yesterday. Third, the new socioeconomic order proved to be less trustworthy than when it appeared during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. And last, the political spirit of liberation and self-determination has gradually lost its inspirational innocence. Hence the anxiety that is so palpable an aspect of Today, is sharp in contrast with both the resignation of the Distant Past and the optimism of Yesterday.
------
During this long, slow, and often errant march I think we can gain strength by reflecting on the Distant Past. For countless millennia humanity found courage to persist, the inspiration to produce extraordinary works of art, the will to create remarkable civilizations, the strength to endure miseries, and the appetite to savor triumphs, all without the support of the vision of a living future that would be superior to the past. There is no reason why the same resilience should not support humankind if it now sets its sights on the Distant Tomorrow of our imagination.
It is enough that we can see the future as containing such imaginable possibilities. Openness and potential, without assurance of outcomes, are substitutes for Yesterday’s bright hope for Progress and our consolations for Today’s more knowing anxieties. These words may reflect easily trivialized sentiments, but I put them forward at the conclusion of this very short, extremely long survey of how the future has appeared and now appears, as a salutation to my fellow voyagers who wonder, along with myself, what humankind can accomplish.
Robert Heilbroner in Visons of The Future, 1995
All this has a moral for our tale and provides a proper ending to it. In much of the West, and especially in our country, government is today much criticized and denounced. There is often good reason for the antipathy: governments can be – and perhaps always are – bureaucratic, slow-moving, inefficient, and irritating. They are not repositories of unsullied virtue, exemplary foresight, stirring vision.
What they are however, is the only means by which a body of people can provide itself with what it cannot obtain elsewhere: foreign policy and defense, law and order, the provision of public capital, and – crucial for our purpose – a counterforce against the unwanted effects that emerge from the private sector. That counterforce may not always be effective – there are plenty of unsolved problems in capitalism – but it is the only such capacity that exists.
In a word, no complex society can exist without government. That is why the public sector is as much a part of a capitalist order as is the private sector, which could not longer exist if government were somewhere to disappear. We should not forget, moreover, that he functions of government under capitalism are not only to provide defense and public capital and law and justice, but also to act as a kind of gyroscope or a steering mechanism when the nation needs a balancing counterweight or a hand on the steering wheel. (Where is the Invisible Hand of Adam Smith? Ed. comments) There will assuredly be such situations in the years ahead, as globalization and then global warming become even more insistent problems that require powerful guiding and containing forces.
Here, as so often, economic analysis goes just so far. In the end, large-scale changes require not just an adaptive revolutionary capitalism, but the elusive contribution of things that lie outside that framework, such as collective temper of peoples and the wisdom or folly of their leaders. Hence it seems proper to end this book with the admonition that we must come to understand our subject, not to achieve a Good Society, but to prepare ourselves for the really difficult problems that we will still face after economics is understood.
Robert Heilbroner and Lester Thurow in Economics Explained, 1982/1998
Thus I come again to the only prediction I have allowed myself to make, and that I must now iterate one last time. The twenty-first century capitalism will be dominated by a spectrum of capitalisms, some successful, some not. The crucial question for Americans, and perhaps for the world as a whole, is where our own nation will be located along that spectrum. I have preciously spoken of “slightly imaginary Sweden” as one end of a range of capitalist societies. I now add that it is equally possible to speak of not-so-imaginary America as another. In the context of twentieth-century realities, Sweden proved to be unworkable. In the context of twenty-first century realities, America may prove to be the same, unless it changes mightily.
A last word seems necessary. I am not so foolhardy as to believe that a framework of uncertain analysis and personal vision will enable us to circumvent Kliuchevsky’s admonition (“History teaches nothing, but only punishes for not learning its lessons.”) Perhaps history’s punishments are its lessons. Nonetheless, it is my hope that some grasp of what the twenty-first century holds in store for capitalism may enable us to avoid at least some of the punishment we will otherwise have to endure.
Robert Heilbroner in 21st Century Capitalism, 1993
We can conclude, then, by saying that over-population is quite clearly one of the gravest problems which confront us, and the choice before us is either to let the problem be solved by nature in the most horrifying possible way or else to find some intelligent and human method of solving it, simultaneously increasing production and balancing the birth rate and the death rate, and in some way or other forming an agreed international policy on the subject. To my mind, the most important prerequisites to such a solution are first of all an awareness of the problem, and then a realization that it is a profoundly religious problem, a problem of human destiny. Our hope, as always, it to be realistically idealistic.
Aldous Huxley in The Human Situation, 1977 (Chapter IV)
Man is manifestly not the measure of all things. This universe is shot through with mystery. The very fact of its being, and of our own, is a mystery absolute, and the only miracle worthy of the name. The consciousness that animates us is itself central to this mystery and the ground for any experience we might wish to call “spiritual”. No myths need be embraced for us to commune with the profundity of our circumstance. No personal God need be worshiped for us to live in awe at the beauty and immensity of creation. No tribal fiction need be rehearsed for us to realize, one fine day, that we do, in fact, love our neighbors, that our happiness is inextricable from their own, and that our interdependence demands that people everywhere be given opportunity to flourish. The days of our religious identities are clearly numbered. Whether the days of civilization itself are numbered would seem to depend, rather too much, on how soon we realize this.
Sam Harris: The End of Faith, 2004
There will be more attempts to attack the symbol of wealth and power in our rich societies – attacks by aggrieved people with newly acquired knowledge about the technologies of violence. Because our governments are acutely aware of this danger, very few will succeed. But as the head of the Central Bank of told me, the terrorist only has to be successful once, while we have got to be alert all the time. And the potential costs of a successful attack could be much higher than we realize: an acquaintance of mine who have closely studied the risks of bio-terrorism argues that a single large-scale strike on a major Western city – say an attack in New York, Washington, London, or Paris that killed 50,000 people – could send urban property values plummeting in cities around the world, as people suddenly realized how vulnerable they are in dense urban cores. An impossible apocalyptic scenario, surely – until we remember that one such group, Aum Shinrikyo in Tokyo, tried to launch exactly this kind of attack. Our intertwined global economy and financial systems are resilient enough to absorb a wide range of shocks, but a worldwide collapse of urban property values is most certainly not one of them.
---
Thomas Homer-Dixon: The Ingenuity Gap – How we can solve the problems of the future?, 2002
A coldly rational individualist can deny that he has any obligation to make sacrifices for the future. By contrast, those who, for whatever reason, regard the resources at their disposal as an inheritance from the past that they feel obliged to pass on to their descendants, have a better chance of producing future generations prosperous enough to be able to continue to wrestle with the problems of increasing the quality of life.
Continuity is at the heart of conservatism; ecology serves that heart.
It is difficult to see how the law can respond to the mathematical and logical implications of tribalism in a world that is increasingly overfilled with people. When there was a low-density frontier to absorb the surplus and unplanned population increase, logically incompatible value assumptions could be safely to left unchallenged. But the frontier has disappeared now, and the exhilarating population explosion of the past three hundred years has now become a painful implosion. Social and political science must strip the taboo from the area where population control and welfare ideals intersect and respond creatively to the logical and human challenges if we are to find a way make the coexistence of social variety and domestic peace possible.
Garrett Hardin: Stalking the Wild Taboo, 1973 (Sect. 22, From J. of Urban Law 48 1971)
Taken together, Climate Change and Peak Oil make a nearly air-tight
argument. We should reduce our dependency on fossil fuels for the sake
of future generations and the rest of the biosphere; but even if we
choose not to do so because of the costs involved, the most important of
those fossil fuels will soon become more scarce and expensive anyway, so
complacency is simply not an option.
What would cooperation between the two groups (oil depletionists and
climate activists) look like? It would help, first of all, for activists
on one issue to spend more time studying the literature of the other,
and for both groups to arrange meetings and conferences where the
intersections of the two issues can be further explored.
Both groups could work together more explicitly to promote proactive,
policy-driven reductions in fossil fuel consumption.
Climate activists could start using depletion arguments and data in
tandem with their ongoing discussions of ice cores and melting glaciers,
but to do so they would need to stop taking unrealistically robust
resource estimates at face value.
For their part, depletionists - if they are to take advantage of
increased collaboration with emissions activists-must better familiarize
themselves with climate science, so that their Peak Oil mitigation
proposals are ones that lead to a reduction rather than an increase of
carbon emissions into the atmosphere.
Perhaps, for both groups, with a stronger potential for motivating the
public will come the courage to tell a truth that few policy makers want
to hear: energy efficiency and curtailment will almost certainly have to
be the world's dominant responses to both issues.
As we enter what is likely to be the most difficult of time, we must
make deliberate efforts to preserve our highest human values and ideal.
When the ratio of human population to available resources becomes less
favourable, human life may begin to appear cheap and superfluous, and
fear and hate seems justified. Sadly, we are indeed beginning to see an
increase in these attitudes. In especially, hate has been
palpably on the rise for the past dozen years or so. It is not unusual
to hear "schock jocks" on talk radio advocate "head shots" when speaking
of certain politicians, or the equivalent of ethnic cleansing or
religious war, when discussing people of descent. The shrill
voices of these disturbingly popular commentators appeal to the ugliest
aspects of the human character, and the media moguls have unfortunately
discovered that hate sells.
We learned from the Nazi experiment of the 1930s that, in a modern
industrial society, hate - if supported by governmental authority and the
use of modern communications media - can become a kind of mental virus
that can afflict nearly an entire population. We learned that hate can
kill, and that, when it infects an entire society, it can kill in huge
numbers.
Intense stress sometimes brings out the worst in people - and sometimes
the best. There is no path ahead that does not entail extraordinary
cultural stress, and we must choose how to deal with it. May we choose
not only with eyes that are open, but with hears that are strong and
open.
Richard Heinberg: Powerdown, 2004
