ALL OF NATURE

Unattainable: the paradise of legend

This summer one of our last surviving American uncles visited my family in The Netherlands in a short European trip. He is ninety years of age and was born in 1919, the year of the Treaty of Versailles. The treaty was discredited by many at the time and thereafter for its shortsightedness and its focus on retribution and revenge rather than on the true needs of the future.


Versailles 1919: not the wisdom of these men could make the world a better place

As a teenager I had a correspondence friendship with my uncle for a time. Invariably he and I exchanged our views and experiences of the main events in the 1960s. And very much in the same spirit we spent a late afternoon, upon his visit to my place, discussing the events and challenges of our present time. In many respects, I observed, our present time very much resembles the fin de siècle – the period preceding the Great War. Our world leadership may not be as misguided as the ruling class in those days, especially in Europe, but so far it has failed to set the path to effectively face our present-day world wide challenges. “They are unprecedented!” my uncle exclaimed. “We are taking a massive responsibility for many future generations – in terms of our natural environment, resources, our (nuclear) waste, overpopulation and so on – but we have no true solution for any of these.”

My uncle has visited The Netherlands in various successive stages of his life; as a teenager in the 1930s, as an American Army officer immediately after the liberation in 1945 and at regular visits in the years thereafter. For most of this period my grandparents’ residence in Amsterdam served as his prime landing place. My uncle’s mother and my grandmother were sisters, born and bred in New England. “Your grandparents were true mentors to me,” my uncle said. “Now my dog is my mentor, “ he added with a smile.

Old age has gradually slowed him down physically but his mental abilities are undiminished. The dog is symbolic for the essence of his belief, not in any God or in biblical tales but in “All of Nature”.

It seems a sobering perspective in the last stage of long life. Humanity is facing great peril, more massive and inescapable than at any time in history. We may wish to reach the closing years of our life in a spirit of optimism and confidence in human kind. Yet I didn’t observe any particular disappointment or sorrow in my uncle’s expression. It rather came to me as the personal evaluation of a realist who is well aware that at one point in our lives it is truth that counts, not merely our hopes and wishes, and that we have to let go in a spirit of restful abandonment.


Judgment day for Planet Earth

Is it true, then, that God can offer us no better prospect than the mere forces of our primal instincts? In my own life too, I have little need to answer this question. God is the product of our very own human fallibility. It can not transcend it, however much we might pray for it. Even reptiles are capable of better wisdom. Thus, if I had a dog, like my uncle, I would sit down and look him in the eyes as deep as I can.

WILL PRESIDENT OBAMA BE AMERICA’S NEXT JIMMY CARTER?

One defining issue: the Middle-East (President Obama and Palestine Autority President Abbas)


President Obama is making every effort to help America get out of the present-day economic slump and to contribute to the broader stability of our world. Thus far much criticism accompanies his administration. It is not my competence to judge his performance nor is this my intention in addressing above question. However, it occurred to me that Obama’s presidency and the reputation it has gained to date have much in common with the days of Jimmy Carter.

I was reminded of this when just recently the newspaper reported Washington’s demand to President Abbas of the Palestine authority that he should visibly move towards new talks with Israel. If not, the item stated, the US would be less than forthcoming in continuing its current relations with the Palestine authority. It is the kind of diplomacy that most people who are familiar with the history of US Middle-East policies will find all too familiar. What must be said, has to be said.

President Jimmy Carter achieved some notable results during his presidency, especially between Egypt and Israel, but otherwise got hopelessly stuck in the broader process in the Middle-East after the gross misjudgment in his time of the revolutionary events in Iran and of the forcefulness of Muslim retaliation after decades of dictatorial, US sponsored, rule of that country. It caught him by the tail and this – directly and indirectly – added to his reputation as an ineffective president.

But my point is not the similarity of the pressures which Obama has to face in comparison with those that faced Carter. They are numerous nonetheless, both in terms of international politics and economy. One could say that Obama faces them in even more forceful terms and that, like Carter, he has to do so against much political “Washington adversity.”

I am rather looking at the potential – further – similarities ahead. As time progresses, the pressure is mounting towards Obama’s campaign for a second term. It will be by virtue of a second term that his presidency can rise in stature and remembrance. No doubt many stalemates by which his administration is being pestered today will only be resolved in the event of Obama’s re-election.

Jimmy Carter stumbled over much bad luck, whatever his good intentions or efforts. One of them was the advent of an impressive, ultimately successful competitor by the name of Ronald Reagan. A caliber of similar weight will be needed to topple Obama, I am quite sure. There is no indication as yet whether the Republicans will bring out such a caliber – it is too early days – but it is a serious possibility nonetheless.

Obama’s predecessor Jimmy Carter gained his ultimate stature most of all through his post-presidential initiatives, up to the present day. His presidency may linger in the shadows of history but the person does not. He his highly regarded for his stance in humanitarian affairs and for his role in international dispute settlement. This is by no means irrelevant, for any individual.


Jimmy Carter, a highly effective former US President

Thus, however his presidency may work out, Obama – in principle – will still have an entire life after it. It would not surprise me if his greatest contribution to America’s welfare and to the stability of our world will only be made in his post-presidential years, reaching both beyond Carter’s and Bill Clinton’s, whose status may well have dwindled under pressure of merely being the husband of Obama’s Secretary of State.

Having said this, I would see Obama’s strategy for becoming a respected and influential ex-President being of no less importance than every strategy he designs to win a second term.

THE 21ST CENTURY AS YET REMAINS UNDEFINED

A defining moment in history - 1789


In every age there is a turning point
A new way of seeing the coherence of the world
(Jacob Bronovski, 1973, in “The Ascent of Man”)


When in the history of mankind have there be true instances of a fundamental paradigm shift reaching across society? One such instance immediately comes to mind. In many ways it is the one on which our world today is largely based. It didn’t take place in one sweep but in stages, near the end of the 18th century, and in three dimensions: industrial, social and political. It is interesting to note that it also had three distinct yet related trigger centers: the new United States, Britain and France. And even though in Europe, after the Napoleonic wars, a severe restoration was enforced of the old order, the revolutionary processes still constituted a road on which there was no return.

Yet however much we can identify these different stages in their various aspects, it is difficult to assign one single turning point in a history that took at least a number of decades to unfold. Along the way there was – and is at any time – continuity too, in people’s minds, their habits and in their broader culture.


A new challenge: catering for an aging population

But perhaps we should look at the evolution of our human societies from a more distant perspective. Over past two thousand years there may have been just two or three substantive shifts which constituted a profound redefinition of our world and of our existence and outlook in life, including the key arrangements of our political and social institutions. The advent of Christianity and its broad embrace in mind and spirit of the people’s of Europe most certainly was one of them. It was the single defining factor in our history for some thousand years. By the same token one could say that Christianity’s loss of its social and political predominance was the next main watershed. And perhaps there have been no other. Science, free thought, liberation on all fronts, the institution of democracy in our western world – all have been its consequence. The people of our age are still the offspring of this broad history. We have made no fundamental turn in any of these dimensions over the past two hundred years. History, with all its upheavals in the mean time, progressed along the precepts of the Enlightenment.



How will our young people move?

Today we live in anticipation of a new defining moment. It is key theme of this blog. Our world is challenged at its root assumptions. It has been debated that – our – history will soon end. But can we really expect – or even desire - a turn any time soon? If anything, most of our energies, whether effective or not, are driven towards continuity rather than to revolution and our younger generations do not appear to be motivated otherwise in any respect. We still herald the main accomplishments of our forebears in material and in spiritual terms. If anything the way to overcome the threat of global scarcity – in energy, raw materials, fresh water – is to counter this through accelerated advancement and throw all our trust in our capability to mobilize our technologies and political institutions to that end. This is what we firmly believe or at least desperately wish to believe.


Not the future, hopefully

In the mean time we are faced too with a militant and determined countervailing force – largely coming out of the Middle East – which many in our world view as nothing less than an attempt to throw us back into a new age of religious absolutism and deliberate global attrition. Again, historic antagonisms stare us in the face and it is far from certain that we can overcome this by the same force of reason and enlightenment that guided our history over the past centuries. But we also need to provide a satisfactory answer to the downsides of a rational world which leaves many people living in a spiritual void and encaged by extreme consumerism. We herald individualism and human liberties but they have not made us happier as human beings in our larger communities.



Thus, both from within and from outside, the ingredients of a substantive upheaval in our prevailing conventions seem abundant. But we can not say that we are truly standing at any historic doorstep. At no time this can be foreseen with any degree of certainty. History is written by hindsight. For that matter the next decades could well be an ongoing muddle, one way and the other, without a substantial breakthrough in any dimension.

Yet, breakthroughs are in great need. Clean, infinite energy; political resolutions, food for all… it can hardly be just a shortlist. If our younger generations do not wish for a revolution, then at least let them groom the leadership with a vision that can make this century the most memorable of all – preferably in the most positive light.

UNSPEAKABLE FUTURES

It is difficult to escape the notion that our in our present time we experience a new threshold of history. Much can go wrong, much can still go well. And many interests worldwide are at stake. Today’s financial muddle is just a symptom of a more profound and substantive historic agony. It extends beyond mere economic stagnation or ‘climate’. Our world – our planet – is on the verge of a burst. We have arrived at a stage where every inspiration, every ideology, every invention and – most specifically – every resource has reached its near exhaustion. In baffling speed we have broken down the traditional fabric of our communities to the point where either we secure the continuity of our advanced, high tech and interdependent global society or we fall back to the greatest disarray that humanity has ever experienced. In both scenarios we pay a considerable price.

Continuity implies great adjustment. This includes a sizeable investment in new technologies to sustain the level of material comfort to which we have become accustomed – and in which most people living today were born. Previous generations lived through adversities – both in material and in humanitarian terms – which we consider unthinkable. All we – should – know is that there is nothing romantic about a world falling into collapse, with everything that is bound to follow.

But a future of sustained welfare and ongoing advancement is far from certain. We truly have come the end of a history that is crying for another rebirth. Before we know it our world of privilege – particularly our Western World.- will find itself in the same position that some hundred years ago the elite of kings, emperors and their entourage found themselves in: abundant, ignorant of the true needs of their people, consuming wealth they did not really earn. At a global scale, we are now that elite, potentially oblivious of the needs of the rest of our world, its huge population, its dying wildlife and its barren fields. Are we going to defend our privileges at all cost, our access to the last remaining oil wells, the last gallons of fresh water, our last kilos of beef and tons of steel to just continue as we are?



I am not in the habit of being a doomsayer. It is merely a contemplation of possible futures that occupies me. My understanding of history – at every stage – in the past thousands of years is that it very much derives its character from discontinuity, manifold perils – not limited to the perils of war and conflict – which caused humanity to readjust, not necessarily for the better at every instant. It can be a gradual, creeping process that suddenly hits, or it is an unexpected great disaster. The Roman Empire took decades if not a hundred years to finally collapse, both from within and outside. The old European world of Kings and Emperors required one irreversible shot to trigger its demise, however much it was a world at its end anyway.




Hotspots of our present world

One could also look for examples in history where progress was achieved beyond prevailing paradigms without any cataclysm. Can societies arise above stagnation by the force of their own energies? Some civilizations did manage to do so, at least to some extent, but never without great sacrifices amongst themselves, such as the Chinese. But we can also think of the Renaissance of Europe, in the 14th and 15th centuries. Battlefields and disease did accompany it, but it was a substantive transition.

Paradigm shifts are called for, in many fields, whether or not technology will help us to overcome the emerging material scarcity. We should ask the question whether indeed we can allow the pressure to mount, populations to grow, resources to remain exploited in the way we do now. We actually know that we can not.

Among the futures that we face are those which we better do our utmost to escape. We are world filled talent and youth to achieve this. At the same time we tend to waste it and we allow our consumer habits to rule our interests as human beings living on a lonely but highly precious planet. We accommodate sizeable migrations, there seems very little choice, but we fail to invest sufficiently in blending newcomers into the rhythm of our societies.

Vulgarization, alienation and complacency may threaten us more – from within - than any present day conflict or natural crisis may do from outside. To sustain what we have and what we are is not enough. Stagnation means disintegration. Strong, forward looking ambitions should guide our world to a new horizon. It will demand every leadership and inventiveness available.





My sincere wish is that such leadership will also take us away from the antagonisms that plague our present world and articulate new, inspiring missions for humanity. Traditionally we look at the Western World – the US or Europe – to mobilize the critical mass to this end. But this another great question mark. It is not because such leadership may be absent, but because we have become too self-interested to understand its necessity.

The world in 2050 will be vastly different from the world we know. By reasonable reckoning I will not live to see it. I am nonetheless as much concerned about that world as anyone belonging to our younger generations. We have to be. Most of the decisions – and hopefully: breakthroughs – of the next couple of years will determine the parameters for the longer term. We either strike out the potential for disaster, or we will have to embrace it.

WHY NOT TAKE THE DEEP DIVE TO PROTECT LIFE ON OUR PLANET NOW?

A new age of invention


Looking beyond the current crisis

Our world is bogged down by a financial crisis at a time when forward looking investments are most needed. We need to move towards a clean global economy as rapidly as we can. The sooner we reach it, the least disaster we risk and the better quality of life we achieve.

My question would be whether the crisis should not be a trigger instead to make us take such a move with even more pressure. Investments in sustainable wealth will make us prosper beyond imagination – if we succeed. This is a certainty.

I just read the announcement of a new car made in China: it is a car powered by electricity. The article suggests that China may be pushing harder – harder than we do – towards a green economy. Most likely, if this were the case, the country will be stronger in our world because of it.

Life preservation is wealth. This should be our economic axiom. We should create richness for every natural habitat we preserve and for every new habitat we create. If need be, we pay for clean air. Let’s make clean air an element on the DOW Jones Index, but in reverse. The lower its share value, the cleaner we have become.



The 21st century should become known for its ability to advance on the merits of the 20th but also for cleaning up its downsides. We should pass a clean, sustainable world to the 22nd.

This, in my view, is the kind of inspiration too that can in fact drag us out of the current financial problems and the stagnation this has caused. Financial institutions, industry and commerce have a large role to play in reducing waste, increasing product relevance, in enhancing the entire habitat of life, and in making it a joy for all humanity on this planet.


What's in the bag?

But is an effort too which can not succeed without our own contribution. Humanity has gone haywire in its use of the markets. We are being led by many needless, wasteful things. Just look at what goes out, week after week, with the garbage collector. We can be more pro-active, as a consumer, in dictating the market and not allow us to be simply exploited by it. In a sense, as I have indicated in my previous blog, consumers should at least in part be producer too.

There is lots of talk about innovation and new invention. There should be. It is best achieved if we are imaginative in our needs too. How do we really want to run our lives. What are the thins – materially and otherwise – I really need and what should they be like? What can make my life most “nature friendly”? What, today, is the state of the art?

I do believe that if we let our imagination go wild over saving life on our planet, new economic growth will follow to the benefit of many

UNLEASH YOUR SHACKLES, SLAVES OUGHT TO BE FREE

In a truly democratic economy, we can take production in our own hands


I have been meaning to say this for a long time. It is one of my main intellectual preoccupations. Something I can not solve in my own mind, or just by myself.

As I see it, our present day consumer society is nothing different, but much more pleasant to live in, than the ancient society of Roman slaves. The instrument of our submission is our seduction by manifold commercials and attractive contracts of labor. The key force behind our slavery is our very existence as a consumer.

Can we have it otherwise? I think we can.

For instance, I believe we do not need to stand passive when bankers and CEO’s of big companies cash in monetary benefits far beyond their actual added value. It is outrageous that we allow people to be paid huge sums for exercising powers that they should not have in the first place.

Secondly, on the other side of the fence, I think we are able to say no in all clarity to the massive waste that is produced at high cost every day in terms of useless products, superfluous advertisement, unnecessary packaging, meaningless diversity and senseless illusions, which we are expected to buy and to pay for.



Thirdly, it is my firm conviction that we have allowed our public interest and the interests of our markets to take a much too divergent course. We should re-assess what in our own minds, as citizens and as private individuals, is the true distinction between things which are relevant for us all and things in which we wish to retain our private choice.

But when I follow through my thoughts about these issues, I can almost not avoid – at least in my own mind – to end up in the construction of an utopia that would dwarf communism in most of its further implications.

What was so bad about communism? Essentially it was the arrogance of ‘state’. The gruesome inefficiency of centrally planned demand and supply; Its degeneration into murderous absolutism and its inability to rise effectively above collective poverty and mediocre industrial performance. The Trabant, the only car of fame built in the former East Germany, is the icon of the chronic lack of incentives to constantly improve as it persisted throughout the former East Block world.

Nothing of that we should wish for as an alternative to our present state of consumer slavery. Nobody would vouch for it, obviously. We rather cherish the illusion of our happiness than undermine it by the force of a terrorizing war against superfluity.



Secondly the weakness of my utopia is its assumption that humanity is basically ‘good’: economic, loving, social, cultivating the spiritual rather than the material, and so on. My utopia in other words is too naive to be realistic – as a rule of thumb - from the start.

So here you see my problem. Unless there is no such thing as scarcity (which is a fundamental underlying reality in every ‘model’). we can never be really free. But does this mean we should continue to accept corporate imperialism as it gradually undermines our sovereignty as citizens? Perhaps we should now recognize – at least – that ‘markets’ in our time are not the places of real choice as they used to be. And it follows that as consumers the only way to really counter this, is to become producers ourselves, each of us individually, if we were to restore true market freedom. Our technology in fact could help us along this way. It allows us to tell companies, just by pushing ‘enter’ on our laptop, to produce only as we order, in all dimensions, and give instructions for design as well. If we want to stand tall in the face of corporate power, then let us take the power of supply out of their hands.



The reality is, we can. We only need to put our minds to it. We are able to unleash our own shackles and share every bonus among each other.

In a world in which consumers are the producers at the same time, corporations are – nothing more and – nothing less than arbiters of resources, technology and distribution as we direct them according to our true needs. This seems to me a workable market. It would also mean that consumers push suppliers to be as mean and lean – and only as powerful – as we need them to be to supply us with the necessary goods in the most efficient, sustainable way.

But have I neutralized all my possible objections to the utopia that I have described above? It all boils down of course, however we look at, to our own behavior, the rigid application of our own sense of economy – of our needs and of the means in which we wish to satisfy them – and to our understanding of the bigger picture of the markets in which we wish to be active. This will take time, I have no doubt. But in fact we are already actively testing this in many different corners, however primitively as yet, such as news, clothes, books, photo albums etcetera.

The next implication is a political one. It requires governments to rethink markets and their own role in them just as much. We are on a long road, but I am convinced that in ten years time we will find ourselves much further on this road than most of us would now think feasible.

But perhaps, if we realize that this is about our freedom in all dimensions in the first place, we might feel we have many more incentives ready at hand to make all of this happen soonest.

CAN HUMANITY STILL IMPROVE ITS WAYS?

Homo egoisticus – 4.000.000 B.D.


Many, many years from now, those who will be our descendants might look back at us the way we look at the Neanderthals. They will recognize our advancements and capabilities but they will also see the flaws which after many eons the successors of human kind will have overcome.

Is this a likely scenario? We will never know, of course. But we can speculate.

In essence human kind as it is today is capable of almost everything that it wasn’t made for. This is the beauty and it is our potential tragedy.

It is first of all a recognition of everything that Darwin told us. The clockmaker who brought us to life, was blind and he will always be. Mutations which some 200.000 years ago enabled us to become more skilled hunters, also led us to send a man to the Moon. It is accidental. No intelligent being with a sound mind would ever have concocted the modern human being and let it loose on the planet Earth on purpose to do its work, unbalanced and unfinished as we are.

For instance, why would an intelligent designer think of a life form which is actually a regression from the norm that prevails in the rest of the animal kingdom, which is the natural inclination to preserve life’s balance? Every animal – every predatory animal especially – knows this by instinct. So why not the humans?

Why do humans not have an absolute resistance – and I mean: absolute – against killing off its own kind? One could say, of course: but this is the prerogative of the dominant animal in every other species too. Lions kill the offspring of competitors. Baboons do it too. If you want to have strong genes, needed to maintain the versatility of the species, well, in fact humans are much too kind. So here perhaps is a point in favor too, and not necessarily against ‘us’.

Third: why would an intelligent designer create so much variety, even within a narrow band of genes, in terms of intellect, quality and level of talents, reason, emotion, etcetera? The first answer could be: it isn’t a failure of design, it is a failure of behavior. Humans have cancelled the mechanism of selection on those qualities themselves! They go for stupid things like looks and form. Stupid men prefer stupid blondes. But then, this is the very failure of our design, or it is the handicap that proves the fact that actually there was no designer at all.

I am going for the latter, as people may well understand from my earlier postings in this blog. It is out of pure curiosity, out of my private speculative interest in the future of mankind that I raise this issue. The first issue, of course, is whether in actual fact man is such an imperfect animal in the first place, and whether my alleged weaknesses are not, by further analysis, the inevitable corollaries of our uniqueness – or to put in another way: our very perfection.

We should not get ourselves blindfolded by our own humanity in judging who we are. This is the conundrum. The very qualities which the blind watchmaker, accidentally, ignited in us – indeed: our humanity, our intelligence, our intellect, our variety and so on - in the end both help us to survive and they challenge us, constantly, in our very sustainability. We are destructive and we are kind. One is very necessary to foster the other. Our intellect, which provides us with new ideas, inventions, solutions etcetera, is at the same time our greatest threat. But of course. How can it be otherwise?


We can't just do away with the money wolves, or should we?

Still, the question remains: can we improve? Can we consciously foster the benefits of our qualities and downplay our weaknesses, not just in an individual, but at larger scale, for a longer period, to benefit us all? The dilemma may be whether we can enhance humanity’s beauty – in its widest sense – and relinquish our selfishness at the same time.


Selfless love to the extreme

I am coming back to my first thesis: we are capable of things for which we haven’t been ‘made’. This in fact is a potential of which we haven’t yet seen the absolute limits. We can not say today: this is as far humanity gets; over to some other species. We will never say it.


Is it possible that one day she will walk the Earth?

We can’t look into a million years future. So many things along the way can happen, out of ourselves or just by nature, including out of space. But we do have the capability to critically asses our potential as a species. This is what makes us unique anyway. So why not look at ourselves more critically, in the context that we can reasonably foresee. We can do this in an ambitious way. We can make a treaty to save our planet, as I have been promoting in this blog. But we can also create an agreement, among all human beings, about ourselves. Why wait for another Mozes to lay down some new commandments if we are intelligent enough to make them for ourselves and agree to nourish our strengths and reduce the impact of our imperfection?