ASSUMING
"RESPONSIBILITY FOR OUR ROSE"
Jim Dator
Department of Political
Science and
Hawaii Research Center for
Futures Studies
University of Hawaii
Honolulu, Hawaii 96822 USA
<www.futures.hawaii.edu>
<dator@hawaii.edu>
Presented at
"Reconceiving environmental values in a globalising world, " an
international workshop at Mansfield College, Oxford, July 11-12, 2002
Published in in Jouni Paavola and Ian Lowe, eds., Environmental
Values in a Globalising World: Nature, Justice and Governance. London: Routledge, 2004, Chapter 13.
Humans were once a tiny part
of nature, no more consequential than any of the other flora and fauna of Earth
and substantially less numerous or powerful than most. However, over the
millennia, and especially over the last several hundred years, and most
especially the last few decades, humans have become the dominant species on
Earth (Turner 1990, Willis 1998,
Smil 2002, Williams 2003). We have transformed what was once a
"natural" environment of which we were only a small part, into a
largely and increasingly "artificial" environment of our own
creation.
It is of utmost importance
that we understand this change in the human position, and our pressing and
novel responsibilities for the future which follow from it, whether we like it,
or are ready for it, or not. As
Walter Truett Anderson notes in his seminal book, To Govern Evolution, Antoine de
Saint-Exupery wrote in The Little Prince: "People have forgotten this
truth, but you must not forget it.
You become responsible forever for what you have tamed. You are responsible for your rose"
(Anderson 1987).
I am profoundly skeptical of
humanity's ability to change its trajectory away from catastrophic
environmental and social disasters. The evidence from paleontology,
anthropology, and history is that humans routinely over-exploit their
environment. We then 1) either move on to other environments we then
over-exploit; 2) or die off locally; 3) or create new technological solutions
that provide a temporary (though sometimes long-lasting) fix which then
inevitably starts the cycle of migration, death, or new technology all over
again. If there are any constants in humanity's record, this cycle seems to be
one (Diamond 1992, Tudge 1996, Flannery 1999, Stiner 1999, Murray 2003, Kerr 2003, Weiss and Bradley 2001, Jackson and eighteen others 2001).
Humanity is nearing the end
of a cycle of environmental challenge and technological response. But this time
the challenge may be too much for humanity since the cycle is global in scope
in many aspects while still local, if not purely individual, in others.
Environmental, economic, technological, health, and many other factors are
global, but our governance systems are still based, wholly inadequately, on the
nation-state, while our economic system ("free-market" capitalism)
and many national political systems (interest-group "democracy")
remain profoundly individualistic in input, though tragically socialistic in
output. In both economics and governance, we individualize gains and socialize
loses.
There are many potential or
imagined technological fixes for our current dilemma, but it is unclear whether
they will be brought online soon enough to prevent ecological collapse, or at
least to prevent major wrenching changes in the lifestyles and life-spans of
people in so-called "developed" countries. Many people hope that they
can be, some believe they will be, and some fewer still are struggling to make
it so (Gardner et al 2002, Goldemberg 2001, Deffeyes 2001, De Leo et al 2001, Hoffert et al 2002, Myers 2000, Rees 2003).
But much more importantly, it
is unclear, from an ethical point of view, whether humanity should be
encouraged to seek to solve our current problems by new technologies if that
enables humanity to continue our path towards perpetual consumption, global
environmental destruction, and unanticipated social transformation. This is
especially the case when we consider the high probability that some humans will
leave Earth by the late 21st Century, thus bringing our human propensities to
the inner solar system and thence potentially throughout the Cosmos.
If humans are, as it seems,
planet eaters, isn't one planet enough?
When I raise this question I
often ask people to supply the missing letters in the following sentence:
"What a piece of **** is
a man!"
Many, immediately recognizing
the line from Shakespeare, shout out, "work"!
What a piece of work is a
man!
How noble in reason! How
infinite in faculty!
In form and moving, how
express and admirable!
In action, how like an angel!
In apprehension how like a
god! The beauty of the world!
The paragon of animals!
And yet, to me, what is this
quintessence of dust?
From Shakespeare's Hamlet
Others, contemplating the
long and tragic destruction of our earthly environment by this
"quintessence of dust", supply another four letter word: We are a
piece of stinking shit; a cancer on our otherwise beautiful mother, Earth; a
cancer that should be removed, and will be, one way or another.
Grim conclusions, indeed!
Well supported by the facts.
And yet, where do these
ethical doubts come from except from the mind and spirit of humans? It is we
humans who worry about our unsavory history and our ambiguous futures. And so,
I conclude that we humans--technologically strong while ethically weak, as we
may be--are all we have to work with. Thus I put my efforts, as I believe we
all should, almost certainly in vain, towards enabling humanity to continue to
evolve by transforming Earth and ourselves into something quite different from
what either has been so far.
We may not be able to achieve
such a positive transformation. But I see no other alternative. It is far too
late, it seems to me, to stop, go back, and let "nature" resume
dominion over us, however alluring and comforting that thought might be. It is
far too late for that.
Therefore, I conclude that we
must learn to become
"responsible for our rose." We must acknowledge that
"nature" is gone. "Nature", in the sense of places and
processes uninfluenced by human actions, no longer exists, and those places
where the impact of human actions is still minimal will continue rapidly to
decrease in number and importance until all of Earth, as well as all of society
(of course), will be "artificial" and thus understood to require
continual human invention, creation, maintenance, and re-imagination; that the
task of ethics and governance from now on is as Walt Anderson said, "to
govern evolution".
The evidence that humanity
has already transformed the Earth into an entirely artificial creation seems
irrefutable. The evidence that humanity will take responsibility for having
caused this transformation, and will actually strive to govern evolution, is
slight, but not entirely nonexistent as I will try to demonstrate below.
Evidence for the increasing
dominance of the artificial over the natural can be considered under the
following categories:
1.
Biosphere One and a Half: Living in an artificial world
2.
Through a glass darkly: All reality is virtual reality
3.
Embracing our sibling artilects: Co-existing with artificial intelligence
4.
We are all cyborgs now: Genetic/prosthetic enhancement
5.
Do it yourself Genesis: New materials and molecular engineering
6.
Not with swords loud clashing: Space exploration and settlements
7.
Directing tsunamis: The pretense of "law making",
"governance", and
"futures studies" in a chaotic world
1.
Biosphere One and a Half: Living in an artificial world
Walter Truett Anderson put
the issue most clearly some time ago:
"Evolution no longer
follows the Darwinian rules that provided, for over a century, our best
understanding of it. It is no
longer an impersonal and mechanistic process obeying the remorseless logic of
natural selection. That vision is as obsolete as its first cousin, Newton's
clockwork cosmos. Today the
driving force in evolution is human intelligence. Species survive or perish because of what people do to them
and to their environments. The
land and air and water system are massively altered by humankind which has
become, as one scientist put it, ' a new geological force.' Even our own
genetic future is in our hands, guided not by Darwinian abstractions but by
science and medical technology and public policy. The world has changed; and
the human species, which has wrought the change, is now being required to
change in response to the conditions we have created" (Anderson 1987:2).
"I am not here to argue
that the human species ought to take responsibility for evolution on the
planet, and begin through public and private institutions to make collective
decisions about such matters. If
that were the question to be decided I would advocate that we put it off for a
few centuries or more--let things run themselves while we get accustomed to the
idea of evolutionary governance, develop the appropriate ethics and myths and
political structures, and perhaps mature a bit. However, that is not the question before us, since we are
already governing evolution. This
is the great paradox about the threshold: It is not out there ahead of us
somewhere, a line from which we might conceivably draw back. We are well across it. To say that we
are not ready for evolutionary governance is equivalent to saying that a
teenage child is not ready for puberty; the statement may be true, but it is
not much help" (Anderson 1987:3).
Relying primarily on work by
Paul Martin of the University of Arizona, Colin Tudge, devotes Chapter 8
(titled "What difference do we make?") of his book, The time
before history, to demonstrating that
"a huge number of creatures all over the world disappeared during the late
Pleistocene and continued to die out en masse well into modern times. [T]his
die-off coincided with the spread of human beings around the world".
"The charge is that the deaths of those animals was caused by the diaspora
of modern humans…" (Tudge 1996 :283).
After detailing the carnage
in some detail in the chapter, Tudge concludes:
"And now the pace of
extinction has increased. Now the world is so arranged, if 'arrangement' is the
word, that the existence of every other creature is to some extent in our
hands. The animals that serve us directly are overwhelmingly successful, if the
criterion of success is indeed the replication of their genes, for cattle and
chickens are far more numerous than they would ever have been in untamed
nature. By contrast, the species for which we have no use are pushed
aside--unless they discover some human niche, as aphids and rats have done, and
become 'pests.' So now we have the world at our feet--where do we go from
here?" (Tudge 1996:314).
Peter Vitousek opened and
then concluded an extensive survey by many different researchers of "Human
dominated ecosystems," published
in Science, with these words:
"All
organisms modify their environment, and humans are no exception. As the human population has grown and
the power of technology has expanded, the scope and nature of this modification
has changed drastically. Until
recently, the term, 'human-dominated ecosystems' would have elicited images of
agricultural fields, pastures, or urban landscapes; now it applies with greater
or lesser force to all of Earth. Many ecosystems are dominated directly by
humanity, and no ecosystem on Earth's surface is free of pervasive human
influence."
"The
global consequences of human activity are not something to face in the
future--they are with us now. All of these changes are ongoing, and in many
cases accelerating; many of them were entrained long before their importance
was recognized. Moreover, all of these seemingly disparate phenomena trace to a
single cause--the growing scale of human enterprise. The rates, scales, kinds,
and combinations of changes occurring now are fundamentally different from
those at any other time in history; we are changing Earth more rapidly than we
are understanding it. We live on a
human-dominated planet--and the momentum of human population growth, together
with the imperative of further economic development in most of the world,
ensures that our dominance will increase. ...."
"[H]umanity's
dominance of Earth means that we cannot escape responsibility for managing the
planet. ... There is no clearer
illustration of the extent of human dominance of Earth than the fact that
maintaining the diversity of 'wild' species and the functioning of 'wild'
ecosystems will require increasing human involvement...."
"In
a very real sense, the world is in our hands--and how we handle it will
determine its composition and dynamics, and our fate" (Vitousek 1997. See
also Ausubel 1997, Budiansky 1995, Palumbi 2001a, 2001b, Cronon 1995, Goodman and Redclift 1991, McMichael 2001,
Alley et al 2003, Tonn 2002).
2.
Through a glass darkly: All reality is virtual reality
Society is a social
invention, and not an objective entity that impresses itself the same way on
everyone. What we think we know about the world, we know almost entirely
because of the way it has been constructed for us by our culture--its myths and
beliefs, our language, our family, school, religion, and our own personal
experiences and memories (often false!) of them.
Whatever may be objectively
"real" "out there" will never be fully known to us except
by the devices and metaphors through which each human community constructs
it. All cultures tell stories,
make up dramas and plays, carve statues and form other visual images, sing
songs, beat drums, blow horns, invent rituals, give explanations for events,
and in many other ways embellish the bare "facts" of every simple
"real" sensory experience. And since the stories one culture tells
often differ markedly from the ones other cultures tell, people often live in
very different realities constructed by their language and culture.
However, we recently have
become even more extraordinary storytellers because of new technologies that
have made story telling even more vivid and multisensory than was possible in
the old days when we could only speak, sing, dance, carve, mold, or paint
(Goody 1977, Ong 1982, Havelock 1986, Goody 1986, Goody 2000,
Olson and Torrance 2001).
The printing press made the
"fiction" possible. Before that time, very few merely popular
"stories" were ever written down. Some were, but writing was
generally preserved for "serious" and "real" things like
laws, religious documents, economic accounting, and pornography (Goody 1997,especially
Chapter 6, 'Objections to the novel', Pesce 2000).
But with the invention and
then widespread use of the printing press over the 16th and 17th Centuries, for
the first time information and disinformation became relatively cheap and
abundant, so that not only serious fact and ennobling fiction but also
"trashy" novels began to flow forth, first as a trickle and then as a
flood. And with the subsequent invention of the public school system where
everyone was taught how to read or write, more and more people began to read
and write whatever they preferred. While that might be law, religious
documents, and scientific tomes for some, it was "frivolous" fiction
for most (McLuhan 1962, Eisenstein
1979, Katsh 1989).
And then, amazingly enough,
entire academic departments arose in colleges and schools devoted to the
teaching of fiction--of amusing and well-crafted falsehoods--requiring students
to deal seriously with worlds that were not "real". Thus, during the
18th and especially 19th Centuries, more and more people began to spend more
and more of their time in fictional places--in virtual realities--and not in
the "real" reality of their five senses.
And then in the 20th Century
came the radio, and movies, and television, and board games (like Monopoly),
and video games, and Sim City, and
MYST, and...eventually in the 21st
Century, "Virtual Reality" perhaps along the lines of the
three-dimensional "Holodec" of the American television series, Star
Trek (Rheingold 1991, Rucker et al 1992, Zizek 1997, Levy 1998, Fink 1999, Weimann 2000,
Packer Jordan 2001, Woolgar 2002,
and these online games: <www.thesimsonline.com>;
everquest.station.sony.com>; <www.gamneverending.com>).
All of which teaches more of
us how to live in many alternative presents, as well as to be prepared for many
alternative futures. All of which helps us gain perspective, distance, and
perhaps criticism from the "crackpot realism" which
"authoritative" rulers, priests, teachers, and parents may wish to
impose on us. We can and do "escape" from the reality of our everyday
lives by reading, watching television, playing video games. Indeed, most of us
when asked to explain something will give an example, not from our everyday
"real" lives, but from a movie or TV show we have seen. Mediated
reality is far--FAR--more real for most of us than is real reality.
3.
Embracing our sibling artilects: Co-existing with artificial intelligence
In 1997, after many years of
trials and tests, a computer program called "Big Blue" defeated the
world's chess champion and a new era in artificial intelligence seemed to have
been born. Since then, other computer programs have been developed which seem
able to defeat the very best human intelligence in every game ever invented,
including eventually (not yet) the Japanese game "Go" which may be
the most complex game of all.
Even today, much,
increasingly most, of the world is being controlled by autonomous artificial
rules and processes that present us with decisions which we often literally
must follow without question--our very lives depend on it--or which, when we do
try to override, turn out to have been the decision we too would have reached
if we had only had the time. We increasingly use computers to make decisions
for us in situations where it is too dangerous for humans to go, or where it
takes humans too long to decide. Given the speed of transport, and especially
the speed of light at which all information travels, we increasingly have to
leave split second decisions up to machines, just so we humans can survive.
We are also making
"smart" everything--smart houses, smart cars, smart birthday cards,
smart weapons.
Even the term
"artificial intelligence" is itself a swiftly-moving target. It is,
as David Miller says, "whatever machines haven't learned to do yet."
Prof. Miller says that the intelligence (sensing and decision-making ability)
currently in your microwave would have been termed "artificial
intelligence" twenty years ago. Now it is not, and "artificial
intelligence" is something even smarter--which a machine can not yet do
(but soon will).
Susantha Goonatilake, Ray
Kurzweil and Ian Pearson believe that artificial intelligence that surpasses
human intelligence may lie just around the corner, in the early 21st Century,
evolving by the very practical and almost invisible processes just described.
Soon, in the mid 21st Century, humans will realize that they are only one of a
myriad of intelligent entities on Earth. Some humans will choose to merge with
artificial intelligence to form various kinds of cyborgs. Some humans will link
artificial intelligence with biologically-modified beings, and then both to
human beings and human intelligence. Some humans will insist on staying pure
and "natural". And some artificial intelligences might be wise enough
to "reject" any contamination from either human or other enginereed
biosystems, recognizing that biology is just a way-station, if not ultimately a
handicap, and that the only good intelligence is bio-free intelligence,
electronically linked throughout the globe, over the solar system, and
eventually throughout the galaxy (Breazeal 2002, Brooks 2002, Goonatilake 1999, Kurzweil 1999,see also, <http://www.kurzweilai.net/>,
Gershenfeld 1999, see also, <http://www.media.mit.edu/~neilg/>, Moravec 1999, see also, <http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/>,
Pearson 2002
<http://www.bt.com/sphere/insights/pearson/human_evolution.htm>, McNally
and Inayatullah 1988, Dator
1989, Dator 1990).
A recent issue of The
Journal of Futures Studies, (2001, 6:
43-108) is largely devoted to the evolution of 'artilects' and their legal
rights: Sudia, F. W. 'A Jurisprudence of Artilects: Blueprint for a Synthetic
Citizen', Oliver,K. 'A Review of "A Jurisprudence of Artilects: Blueprint
for a Synthetic Citizen''', Dator, J.
'Artilectual Salutations', Inayatullah, S. 'The Rights of Robots?
Inclusion, Courts and Unexpected Futures', Dolan, T. 'Prospective Templates for
Post-Homo Sapiens Public Policies'.
4.
We are all cyborgs now: Genetic/prosthetic enhancement
The most powerful
technologies of the 21st Century may well be those related to biological
engineering. Whatever coal and iron did for the 19th Century, and oil and the
electron did for the 20th, genes and their related proteins, enzymes, sugars,
and other chemicals may do for the 21st--and much, much more.
It has been said that we
presently live in an "information age." Maybe so, but the ultimate
information, dealing with the structure and processes of life itself, is being
better and better understood daily. Old forms of life are being modified, and
new forms of life are being hatched. We are only beginning to enter the true
"Information Age" of biological engineering.
Even though some people and
groups may be opposed to biological engineering--and there are many, and often
for very good, reasons for concern--trying to stop biological engineering is
more like trying to stop abortions or recreational drug use than it is like
trying to stop nuclear generating plants.
Much biological engineering
is comparatively easy to do "in your kitchen", and some of it is
driven by a desire to "correct" a behavioral "defect" in
one's self or one's child, and then to "improve" the performance of
one's self or one's child. It is very private, very emotional, extraordinarily
powerful.
These technologies are certainly
subject to misuse, and they will be misused. But they will be used, somewhere,
by someone in the world. While progress in one place can be slowed and
influenced, and perhaps it should be, it cannot be stopped everywhere.
Moreover, biological processes will be manipulated in essentially all living
organisms--from humans, to other animals, to plants
grown for food, to all plants
everywhere in the world and under the seas.
Manipulating biological
processes influences a lot of the behavior of an organism, though certainly not
all of the behavior. The role of the environment in shaping the behavior of
each individual organism, and a species, is great. Clearly the interaction
between environment and biology is the key to the behavior of any organism.
Indeed, the more scientists learn about genetic and other processes, the more
complicated biological engineering seems to become--at first. But manipulating
genes and their related processes clearly gives humans much more power over the
future of life than does just manipulating the environment alone. And we have
already seen that humans are controlling more and more aspects of all
environments everywhere. Biological engineering is just one more--very
big--step towards artificiality in all domains (Stock 2002, Fukuyama 2002,
Wilmut et al 2000, Gray 2001,
Anton et al 2001, Mulhall 2002,
Sager 2001, Justman et al 2002).
5.
Do it yourself Genesis: New materials and molecular engineering
In 1986, Eric Drexler wrote Engines
of Creation in which he described the
potential power of self-replicating machines that could be created on the size
of molecules--the smallest physical units of elements and compounds--and then
set loose to do whatever they were designed to do, free from further human
intervention (Drexler1986). Nanotechnology has been the subject of considerable
research, speculation, and hope (with some rising fears) since then.
After being viewed initially
as just another ridiculous science fantasy (like any ultimately useful idea
about the future) nanotechnology eventually caught the attention of the
scientific/engineering establishment, and since the first years of the 21st
Century has begun to receive serious funding from such mainstream organizations
as the US National Science Foundation.
"In 2001, scientists
assembled molecules into basic circuits, raising hopes for a new world of
nanoelectronics," "a feat Science selects as the 'Breakthrough of 2001'. If researchers
can wire these circuits into intricate computer chip architectures, this new
generation of molecular electronics will undoubtedly provide computing power to
launch scientific breakthroughs for decades"
(Anon 2001:2442).
At the same time, critics of
nanotechnology (and of the other two technologies we are focusing on
here--artificial intelligence and biological engineering) have become more
vocal. One of the most important is Bill Joy who titled a powerful piece in the
high-tech Bible, Wired, "Why
The Future Doesn't Need Us" (Joy 2000).
If the more advanced claims
about nanotechnology prove feasible, all bets are off. Since there is no such
thing as "waste" (all molecules in anything are raw material to be
restructured into something else via nanotechnologies), the old world of
scarcity will be over, as will be the old ways of producing...everything--food,
clothing, automobiles, buildings; well, everything. The energy requirements of
nanotechnologies also are insignificant compared to those of contemporary
industrial technologies.
And since humans won't need
to pay much attention to the manufacturing processes, it provides even more
reasons why we should begin thinking seriously about moving towards a peaceful,
prosperous, and meaningful world without work.
But whether or not that old
dream can be achieved, the point here is that nanotechnology is one more very
important brick in the wall of artificiality. Molecular engineering controls
matter at its smallest level allowing the creation of countless
"machines" to do countless processes that only nature--and often not
even nature--can do now. As the originator of the idea of nanotechnology,
Richard Feynman, said many years ago, "there is plenty of room at the
bottom." This is grassroots, decentralized, individualized development at
its finest and most powerful (and/or scary).
6.
Not with swords loud clashing: Space exploration and settlements
Even though the fortunes of
NASA and the space agencies of other countries rise and fall with rising and
falling economic, political, and ideological fads and fashions, and even though
the United States seems hellbent on militarizing space against all reason, I
remain hopeful that over the 21st Century humans will establish permanent
settlements on the Moon and Mars, and perhaps also on artificial satellites
stabilized at various Lagrange points. It is also likely that over the
subsequent centuries, manned and artificially-intelligent exploratory missions
will be sent elsewhere in the solar system, and that entirely
artificially-intelligent probes will be moving well beyond the confines of our
Sun.
In what is still one of the
most important volumes on space exploration and settlement from a human
perspective, Ben Finney and Eric Jones said:
"[T]
he use of technology to expand beyond Earth would be entirely consonant with
the whole trend of human evolution. From the time the most adventuresome of
apes left the tropical forest to seek a living in the grasslands of the African
savanna, our ancestors have been inventing technology to adapt to new
environments and to expand over the globe. There is a large techno-cultural
distance between grubbing succulent roots from the soil of the savanna with
digging sticks on the one hand and growing algae to provide both food and
oxygen for Moon colonies on the other. And it is a long way from sailing canoes
to interstellar arks. But ever since our ancestors started using tools to
survive and eventually flourish in new environments, the pattern of evolution
by cultural as well as biological adaptation has been underway. Although the
prospect of traveling and living in space might seem 'unnatural' to many, it
would represent a logical extension to the technological path our ancestors
have been following for some 5 million years."
"If
our descendants spread far and wide through space, the forces of evolution now
braked on Earth will be released once more. " "Human evolution in
space will hardly be limited to the birth of one new species. Space is not a
single environment.... There are innumerable environments out there providing
countless niches to exploit, first by humans and then by the multitudinous
descendant species. By expanding through space we will be embarking on an
adventure that will spread an explosive speciation of intelligent life as far
as technology or limits placed by competing life forms originating elsewhere will
allow" (Finney and Jones 1985: 335)
The point to be contemplated
for our discussion here is that our movement into space is yet another giant
step towards artificiality. It clearly will be necessary for humans to develop
completely self-contained biospheres in which they can safely live in outer
space. Oxygen, water, food, perhaps gravity, protection from cosmic rays and
solar flares--everything that we take so much for granted on Earth--will have
to be brought to space, or created there, artificially, by humans.
At first, humans in space
will probably try to make space as Earthlike as possible, but it is highly
likely that Earthkind in space will eventually become Spacekind--no longer
defining everything, or even anything, by "what it was like back home on
Earth." Thus, as Ben Finney says, evolutionary processes long pent up on
Earth will be unleashed in space, and the most dramatic explosion of speciation
the universe has (apparently) ever seen will occur. This will be greatly aided
by advances in biological and molecular engineering so that myriad of new
intelligent lifeforms will arise or be created as life moves from Earth to the
solar system and beyond.
I consider one of the most
important reasons for space exploration is to provide humanity with the
experience it needs to create a viable artificial biosphere here on Earth. Of
course, I suspect that ultimately, intelligent life--artificial life--will shed
its earthly biological container and the biosphere in which it was nurtured,
and seek other, perhaps silicon, forms.
But, for the foreseeable
future, we desperately need a biosphere that works, given what we have done,
and continue to do, to the only one we know works, Earth. It will require a lot
of human ingenuity to create and maintain a new one, so our experiences in
creating biospheres for space will be very valuable to anyone engaged in a
similar enterprise on Earth.
7.
Directing tsunamis: The pretense of "law making" and
"governance", in a chaotic world
While every culture in the
past has unconsciously invented the world in which it lived, consciously
inventing the world is a special characteristic of modernity. One clear
example, among many, was what the Founding Fathers of the United States did,
first in writing their "Declaration of Independence" so that all the
world would understand the reason for their actions, and then establishing a
written "Constitution of the United States of America," so that
posterity would be guided by their "constituting" words and deeds.
These two profoundly
influential documents were also accompanied by a change in the way
"legislators" came to view themselves. Once upon a time, established
"men of reason" would come together on occasion to
"discover" the law that lay apparent to them in nature (and/or God).
But by the end of the 18th Century, legislators were also viewing themselves as
"law makers" and not as mere "law discoverers"--they came
to believe that they could improve on nature's laws by using nature's
principles (to be sure) to write laws of their own for the benefit of humanity
(Wheeler 1974).
"Law making" has by
now become so characteristic of legislatures--and often judiciaries, in the
American system (Dator2001)--that we think nothing of it. However, the early
pretense was that once the legislators had made a new law, the problem was
fixed, and there was no longer need for more legislation in the area. That is
one reason why legislative assemblies originally met (many still do) for only a
few months in the winter (while the crops were in and there was little work to
do on the farm). But gradually legislators enacted more and more laws, and the
creation, modification, interpretation, and administration of law has become a
full time occupation for an ever-growing number of people.
This led Donald Campbell some
time ago to suggest that, since legislation never finally "solves"
any problems, legislators should view themselves as experimenters, and their
laws as social experiments. Let's enact a law and see how it works, modifying
it as we go along based on what we learn from the operation of the law.
This could become social
engineering on a vast scale, so vast that even Donald Campbell retreated from
his position, recognizing how terribly intrusive it would be to have so many
experimenters measuring and monitoring the effects of their experiments on all
the citizens of the country (Campbell and Russo 1999).
Nonetheless, governments are
engaged in social engineering, more or less consciously and more or less
intrusively. And even if libertarians continue to have their way, and
governments diminish to basically nothing, other social forces--probably
economic--will then move in to fill the political vacuum. So we live in
somebody's or some group's social experiment (currently we live under the myth
of the "magic of the marketplace") whether we like it (or know it) or
not.
Reasons for future hope.
I have already expressed my
profound pessimism about the future of Earth, and humanity. Nonetheless there
are several factors that suggest the possibility of a global attitudinal and
behavioral shift towards humanity's assuming responsibility for our
"rose":
1. Better computer models
with more "lifelike" display capabilities may be able to forecast and
display impacts vividly at the level of an electoral district or other unit of
personal and immediate concern (Giorgi and Hewitson 2001).
2. "Sustainability
science" may mature, precipitating the next paradigm shift in the global
scientific/research community beyond the Copernican/Newtonian empirical
"objective" science that still dominates now, and towards
interactive, ethically-guided educational and research agendas. "A new
field of sustainability science is emerging that seeks to understand the
fundamental character of interaction between nature an society." "The
sustainability science that is necessary to address these questions differs to
a considerable degree in structure, methods, and content from science as we
know it" (Kates and twenty-three others 2001). Earlier, the
"Declaration on Science and the Use of Scientific Knowledge" adopted
by the Unesco World Conference on Science for the 21st Century, meeting in
Budapest in June 1999, said in
part, "The sciences should be at the service of humanity as a whole and
should contribute to providing everyone with a deeper understanding of nature
and society, a better quality of life, and a resourceful and healthy
environment for present and future generations" (See also (Collins 2001,
Mueller 2003, Harremoes et al 2002).
3. Age-cohort changes. New
cohorts may understand, accept, and act on a future generations ethic as older,
resisting, cohorts move out of power and influence. One of the most popular and
provocative examples of age-cohort analysis can be found in a series of books
written by William Strauss and Neil Howe (Strauss and Howe, 1995, 1997, 2000).
But I will conclude by focusing on the possibility of more rapid and extensive
developments in futures studies and especially in future generations studies.
1. Developments in
futures studies.
From its origins as a major
phenomenon in the late 1960s and early 70s, though using "the future"
to help transform political systems during the 1980s (with the emergence and often fading of national futures commissions),
through its establishment in some academic institutions throughout the world,
and especially its expanding utility in more consulting services, futures
studies continues to grow and mature even though it is still absent from most
academic or consulting work in the US (Bell 1997, Dator 2002).
2. Development of a
global ethic towards future generations.
That the present generation
has ethical obligations towards future generations is only slowly beginning to
be understood. It is a concept absent from traditional ethical or moral
discourse since, until relatively recently, there was little present
generations could do to make the lives of future generations significantly
better or worse than their own by their actions or inactions.
Though contemporary economic
theory and practice severely discounts the future (Goulder and Stavins
2002, Brennan 1995, Broome
1994, Lowe 1989, Linstone 1973),
more people are understanding that the situation now is different from the
past, and that, when making decisions, present generations need more fairly to
anticipate the impact their decisions may have on future generations, as well
as upon themselves. Operating initially independently of each other, two
groups, one in Malta and the other in Kyoto, organized to create an awareness
of the need to create ethical concepts and social structures that identify the
needs of future generations and have them effectively active in contemporary
decision making (Partridge 1981, Busuttil et al 1990, Institute for the Integrated Study of Future
Generations 1994a, 1994b, Kim and
Dator 1994, Kim and Dator 1999).
These ideas and activities
are bearing fruit. The first known judicial decision that said that people
professing to represent the interests of future generations have legal standing
in a court of law occurred in 1993 when the Supreme Court of the Philippines
found such a right in their new Constitution (Supreme Court of the Philippines
1993).
On November 12, 1997, UNESCO
adopted a "Declaration on the Responsibilities of Present Generations
Towards Future Generations" is helping the discussion to spread worldwide.
3. Development of
institutions which bring the interests of future generations into present
political and economic decisions.
Beyond provoking more
widespread awareness of the ethical responsibility of present generations is
the need to create social institutions that make carrying out that
responsibility easy, and mandatory. There have been several attempts recently
to conceptualize, invent, and create such institutions.
Co-creating A Public
Philosophy For Future Generations,
cited above, derived from a conference of futurists and politicians from around
the world who had experience in helping existing systems of governance to
embrace future-oriented institutions. There are also useful examples of designs
for new political institutions and processes that are oriented towards
identifying and fulfilling obligations towards future generations in the two
earlier volumes cited above published by the Institute for the Integrated Study
of Future Generations. See Sasaki, T. 'The responsibilities of politics for
future generations', Timoshenko. A. 'Future generations: A lawyer's viewpoint',
Stone, C. 'Should we establish a guardian to speak for future generations?',
and Albery, H. 'Imaginative ideas and projects for creating future guardians
and islands of hope', all in Thinking About Future Generations. See also Slaughter, R. 'How institutions of
foresight protect future generations', Tonn, B. 'Future generations,
environmental ethics, and global environmental change', in Creating A New
History for Future Generations. Special attention is also called to
Tonn's earlier work on a court of generations (Tonn1981) and its more recent
reconsideration (Pollard and Tonn 1998).
Structure Matters.
Let me emphasize the point
about the necessity of creating institutions to support ethical (or political)
policies.
There are numerous popular
ideas and scientific theories about why people behave as they do, and
especially how to get them to behave "properly". Most of the
differences fundamentally come down to two perspectives. On the one hand are
ways to change people's "minds" and "wills" so that they
will want to do good, and so will behave as they should by their own free will. On the other hand are ways to construct
environments that necessitate people behaving properly, regardless of whether
they want to or not. A variant of this is constructing environments that allow
people to behave as they wish, but buffers the undesired consequences of their
behavior (Platt 1973, Platt 1966;108-131,
Studer 1971).
Most reformers seem to focus
on changing people's minds and wills in order to change their behavior. While
we know from the success of modern advertising that there is much power in this
approach, we also know from our numerous educational, religious, and even legal
failures that there are severe limitations.
First of all, it is often
hard to change people's minds about certain things that seem biologically, or
at least culturally, deeply rooted. But equally importantly (though often
overlooked) is the fact that even if people want to "do good" they
find themselves in structures that make it very difficult for them actually to
do good.
Thus, I have concluded that
while sincere efforts should be made to change people's minds about "assuming
responsibility for their rose" so that people will understand and support
extraordinary efforts at planetary management, it is equally, if not more,
important that institutions be created that make such behavior easy, and
perhaps necessary per se, and not to rely upon moral persuasion and/or laws and
enforcement.
For example, I have been
convinced that recycling paper, glass, and aluminum cans is good. I very much
want to do that. But I happen to live in a community that not only does not
even require recycling by law, but also actually makes it extremely difficult
for me to recycle things. On my own volition, I must collect and clean the
items, package them appropriately, and then transport them many kilometers to
some distant place I would not otherwise go for further processing. Indeed, the
powers that be in my community argue that because of our small size and remote
location, it is more economical for us to continue to waste than to recycle. So
I am made to feel a fool (if not in fact a net energy-waster) if I recycle on
my own.
This is a clear example of
how the structures of the society in which I live shape and override my deep
desire to do what I believe to be overwhelmingly good for the environment.
There are many others
examples.
For instance, speeding.
Of course, there are laws
against speeding in my community. But they are so rarely and arbitrarily
enforced that one feels a sense of moral outrage when one is stopped for
speeding, much less is fined for it--"You should have seen me last night,
when it was raining, and I was drunk and speeding much faster than now! Why
didn't you stop me then? This time I am sober, the street is dry and clear, and
I was barely exceeding the limit, going down hill! And why didn't you stop any
of the people who were going much faster than I was, speeding past me? If I was
going any slower, I would have been run over from the rear!"
Laws, infrequently and
arbitrarily enforced, create anomie and actually encourage outlaws while
effectively penalizing law-abiders.
So what should we do?
In the United States, MADD
(Mothers Against Drunk Driving) some years ago launched a very widespread and
largely successful campaign against drunk driving. It is no longer acceptable
(indeed, rather "manly") to drive while drunk, as it once was. Though
this may encourage certain people to rebel against MADD simply because drunk
driving has become a moral and not merely a legal issue, in fact drunk driving
is down somewhat, while speeding with children in the car or where children are
known to congregate is much less likely now than before because of a shift in
the public's ethical position and behavior.
So moral suasion helps.
But what really cuts down
speeding are speed bumps in the road, and "roundabouts". Both require
people to drive more slowly than they would otherwise--or than they want to.
And that is the point--devise structures that require people to behave as they
"should" regardless of how they want to behave.
Here are two more
"silly" examples:
If the exhaust pipe of each
automobile were directly in front of the face of the driver--instead of as far
away from the driver as possible, and pointed in the opposite direction--the
exhaust from cars would be as pure as pure air.
At the present time, we enable each driver to be free of the consequences of
her own polluting behavior, but require her to suffer from the consequences of
everyone else's pollution!
There is a simple
technological fix for that. Just like speed bumps.
Another example: Some
manufacturing processes require the intake of clean water and the discharge of
polluted water. While there could and probably should be laws that prohibit
pollution, and fines for violating them, a simpler solution would be to require
all people to intake water downstream of their operations and to discharge it
upstream. They are much less likely to discharge polluted water if they know
they must intake it themselves.
But these are silly examples.
What about real political behavior?
There are many examples of
how political structures create political behavior.
The best known and most
widely understood "law" in political science is that single-member
districts (as in the US) create two party systems, while multi-member districts
(found in most of the world) enable multiparty systems.
It is simply not possible for
a multiparty system to come into existence in the US. The single member
district system prevents it. No matter how many minds or wills change, neither
a third nor a fourth party can ever gain power in the US. When a third does
arise, it is either rejected, or its position (and members) absorbed by one of
the other two major parties (or it replaces one of the two major parties). It is entirely a question of structure.
Indeed, the entire US
Constitution is the world's first, and best, example of conscious political
design to solve certain "design limitations":
The
"Separation of Power" with "Checks and Balances". The
creation of three "independent" yet overlapping branches of
government so that selfish "power will balance power" creating social
good.
The
"Division of Power" and "Federalism". Enabling "sovereign" nations to join
into a closer political union by "Dividing" power between them.
Bicameralism.
Securing the acceptance of the federal union from the states with small
populations as well as the states with large populations by creating a Congress
of two "houses", one in which the states had equal representation
regardless of their population and another where the states were represented
roughly according to their population size.
Presidential
Electors. Since the colonies forming the union had no history of political
unity, and there were no means for creating a national political dialog at that
time--and no great faith in "the people" anyway--how could the people
in the widely separated new states possibly know who was nationally the
"best man" for President? The "Founders" reckoned they
could not, but that they would know their local "best men", so they
would choose them and they would go to Washington to choose, after discussion,
the national "best man" for President.
Presidentialism. The creation of the presidentialist
system itself has behavioral consequences that even most Americans--even most
American political scientists--do not recognize. Fred Riggs has presented
convincing evidence that, compared to parliamentary forms, presidentialist
systems are much more likely to disintegrate into military dictatorships.
Except for the United States itself, all of the thirty countries that had
adopted the presidentialist system as of 1985 when Riggs did his survey turned
into military dictatorships, while "only" a third of the 43 that
adopted the parliamentary system did so.
After the collapse of socialist systems, the fact that countries like
Russia and many eastern European nations adopted the presidentialist rather
than parliamentary system may have grave consequences in the future (Riggs
1992).
Why the difference? Because,
Riggs shows, the built-in structural equality and conflict of the
presidentialist system leads to inevitable political stalemate that is
eventually broken only by a military coup, supported by the civil servants.
Riggs also shows how certain features of the US system (unrelated to the formal
constitution, but nonetheless structural, and never exported to other systems)
have so far prevented the logic of the presidentialist system from turning the
US into a military dictatorship, though post 9/11 developments are certainly
making that possibility more likely than ever before.
Structure matters. While will
matters also, structure matters even more. If we want to help people
"assume responsibility for their rose" we not only must convince them
to do so, but we must imagine and create institutions that make it easier for
them to assume, rather than to avoid, that opportunity (Miles et al 2002).
The theme of this conference
is, "reconceptualizing environmental values in a globalising world."
A first step in that reconceptualization is to recognize we have perpetual
responsibility for our "rose", Earth. A second step is to develop an
ethical perspective that furthers our acceptance of that responsibility. A
third step is then to recognize that institutions need to be envisioned and
created that make it easier to accept the responsibility than to reject it. And
the fourth and most important step of all is that we then need to do the hard
but necessary task of envisioning, creating, and testing out those
institutions.
As I have shown above, we are
not alone in this work, several conferences have already been held that have
resulted in proposals for institutions which make it easier for present
generations to balance their needs against those of future generations. All
that is needed is for more peoples around the world to join together in this
novel but vital quest.
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