Living in the Future Tense, Chapter 17.2: Knowledge and
Information and the Human Condition
Wisdom and the Human Condition
Edward Renner
For 5,000 years, humans lived in the past tense: “Yesterday was the same
as tomorrow.” Elders
had a lifetime of personal experiences and they maintain the oral history of
the society. They were the keepers of the existing knowledge and wisdom that provided
meaning to their lives. This meaning was mediated by leaders who were seen to
have the capacity to communicate with the Gods who were responsible for their
external fate at the hands of nature. This imperial wisdom dictated the human
condition for most of human history.
For the next 500 years people lived in
the present tense: “Today can be whatever we want it to be.” Roughly from 1500 to 2000 A.D., humans made a
gradual but incomplete transition to living mostly in the present tense. The
transition started with Columbus and Copernicus who showed that the earth was
round and that the sun, not the earth, was at the center of the universe, which
we now understand to be the solar system.
Increasingly, scientific information created alternative
belief systems about the purpose and meaning of human life. Human fate was seen
to be less at the mercy of the gods, and increasingly as a function of human
ingenuity and instrumentality. The nation state came to replace the church as
the principal keeper of the knowledge and information which dictated the human
condition.
But now, for the next 50 years, we
must start living in the future tense: “Tomorrow’s social, economic and
political constraints must become today’s reality.” We must live
today as if it where tomorrow or else there will be no tomorrow for our
children. There are still vestiges of living in the past tense with their roots
in religion, as well as global economic, political and social institutions
rooted in the nationalism of the present tense. This time, however the transition
must occur over the time span of an individual lifetime: that of the
millennials. The Millennial Challenge is to reconceive our collective body of knowledge and wisdom for living peacefully and sustainably on a crowded planet in the 21st Century as the new defining moment for the human condition.
The Millennial
Challenge
When we lived in the present tense under the umbrella of the
nation state, the human conditions were largely dictated by the time and place
where any given individual had the fortune or misfortune to happen to live.
What makes this transition – The Anthropocene -- unique is that nature itself is
at the mercy of human activity rather than the reverse as it has been in the past.
As a result, the major populations
of the world must within the period of a single life time come to share a
mutual understanding that civilization as we know it is at risk. The challenge
is essential although seemly impossible. Yet, there is a precedent: In 1982,
one million people demonstrated in New York Central Park against nuclear
weapons and for an end of the arms race. The powerful nations of the world
backed down from the arms race of the cold war with a series of disarmament and
nonproliferation agreements that dramatically reduced the stockpile of nuclear
weapon, all within one lifetime. There is reason for hope.
The Role of the United
States
The first order of business is to put to rest the dominate economic
and political ideologies upon which living in the present tense has been based:
consumerism, deferred environmental costs and continuous economic growth, as
well as tax reductions, reduced government regulation and limited roles for
government. Among all of the nations in the world, the United States has
exemplified and set the standard for living in the present tense. As such, the
United States has a special obligation to lead the transition toward a new
alternative.
Living in the present tense was a grand experiment, but we
now know that it is not sustainable. The question is whether the Unites States
in the midst of its affluence can reconceive itself as essential for its own
survival. This will be a crucial test of whether the democratic process which
provided the freedom for capitalism to thrive has the capacity to be
self-correcting when it has sown the seeds for its own limit.
Relinquishing the Past
Tense
The second order of business is relinquishing the residual
elements of living in the past tense. There are still those who believe in a
past in which intermediators with God dictate the human condition.
Spanish conquistadors were bound
by the king of Spain to read “The Requirement” to all foreign people, in order
to give them a chance to submit, before attacking them. It informed foreign
powers their lands had been donated to Spain in 1493 by Pope Alexander VI.
Thus, as an agent of the one true God, the conquistadors gave indigenous people
the opportunity to submit to the obedience of the Pope and the King of Spain
(Ronald Wright, Stolen Contents).
Today, there are Christian candidates for the presidency of
the United States and Muslim Jihadist who, based on such articles of faith, are
engaged in a modern reenactment of 1493. This residue of religious wisdom has
survived relative unscathed five centuries of human intellectual progress. The
political, economic and social ideologies of the past and present are dead
ideas as alternatives to the knowledge-based rational civic discourse required for
living in the future tense.
Claiming the Future
The third order of business is dealing with our beliefs
about knowledge and wisdom itself. If knowledge becomes a commodity, as land
was when people lived in the past tense and as natural resources are for those of
us living in the present tense, humans will lose the capacity to claim a sustainable
future for their children. There is no longer a time or place for ideological
posturing. The Modern Era has provided us with the scientific information we
need to shepherd the very plant on which our lives depend. If we fail, it will
not be because we did not know better.
Dr. Strangelove
In Dr. Strangelove, the 1964 black comedy on the nuclear
age, a fanatical US general launched an air strike against the Soviets which,
if successful, would have unleashed a “doomsday device.” The air strike was
averted, except for one B52 bomber which avoided interception. When the bomb
door jammed, Major Kong manually released the mechanism and, cowboy hat in
hand, rode the bomb to the ground, setting off Armageddon and ending civilization
on earth as we know it.
Thanks largely to the UN, humanity has found a way so far to
live under the mushroom tree, albeit imperfectly. The new challenge for the
United Nations is to once again find a way to avoid the end of civilization as we
know it, but this time due to environmental and societal collapse. The task
will be no less easy or less expensive than ending the Cold War which made
Armageddon a real possibility. Unfortunately, the spirit of Major Kong is still
alive and well, cowboy hat in hand, recklessly calling for military solutions
to the early warning signs of the global deterioration of the human condition. Avoiding
creating a modern Mad Max military response to global collapse will require new
principles for reconceiving how to address the effects of human activity on the
planet.
Three Principles
The three principles from the Forms for a Future podcast
provide a framework for reconceiving how to live in the future tense. One is
political, one is economic and one is social; none alone are sufficient. All
three must be considered simultaneously because each is dependent on the other
two. If there is any doubt about how to act, think of these three principles:
(1) World citizenship needs to become
increasingly more important than the national citizenships of the world.
The fate of our children and grandchildren is every bit as
much, if not more so, at the mercy of stoking a coal-burning economy in the
developing nations of China and India, as it is in the domestic decisions made
in Washington. Consider a ring of concentric circles with the individual at the
center, with “we” the next circle extending through local, state, national and
global as successively larger circles. In the very distance past, the
individual mattered most, with significant help from the others who were physically
very close by; global was irrelevant. We are approaching reversing that order.
I would like to see the United Nations offer a certificate of dual world
citizenship to every person in the world as an opportunity to act as part of a
world community. Personally, each of us can think and speak in our duel role as
citizens of a nation and also citizens of the world, even without a formal world
citizenship document.
(2) We need to
increasingly put our trust in the power of balance rather than winning or
owning the balance of power.
Using the accepted world statistical standard for low wage
jobs (less than two-thirds of the national median wage), the United States has
the largest percentage of its workforce in low wages jobs and pays its low wage
workers the lowest percentage of the median wage of all the OECD countries. A
person can accept someone having two homes as long as everyone has a least one,
but it is not acceptable for a bank to be too big to fail and a person too
small to matter. Nations can accept differences in absolute wealth as long as
there is not famine, migration and civil disorder. The power of balance is a
necessary self-imposed limit on economic inequalities and political policies
that consciously discards some lives as less important. It is the role of
governments to be the keeper of this balance within their domestic authority,
and to restrain their aspiration to be the final authority on world affairs
through superior military power.
(3) We need to
increasing treat all knowledge and information as belonging in the public
domain, not a commodity for financial gain.
The availability and application of existing knowledge and
information for improving the human condition are more important than creating
ever more new pills, gadgets and consumer goods that only the wealthy can
afford. In the past, owning land and natural resources, such as oil and water,
has been the means to wealth and power. While intellectual property rights
might seem like a natural extension of land and resources as the means for
gaining wealth and power, shorting knowledge for financial gain will condemn the
human condition to lacking the capacity for living peacefully and sustainably
on a crowded planet.
In practical terms this means reducing copyright and patent
protections, not increasing them as we are currently doing in our “free trade”
agreements. In terms of the general disruptions produced by the digital
information age, this means the financial savings generated by the displacement
of human labor and judgement by robots and intelligent machines must not go to
the owners of the technology, but rather to provide useful alterative social
roles with real economic value to those who are discarded by it. The cumulative
benefits of knowledge and information must now be democratized to include
everyone. The human condition is not for profit if we are to live in the future
tense.
It is time to turn away from our elders, the past, and from
ourselves, the present, and to see the future in the faces of our children.
This is the Millennial Challenge, and we have one lifetime to accomplish the
transition, globally. What an exciting time to be alive.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Edward
Renner is a retired university professor who writes on the modern human
challenge of how to live sustainably and peacefully on a crowded planet in the
21st Century. A prepublication draft copy of his most recent book is available
at www.livinnginthefuturetense.org.
He may be reached at erenner@livinginthefuturetense.org
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