Knowledge as Public Domain

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 21^st 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.

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 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

The Fantasy of Life in a Fact Free World

Adapted from Chapter# 14, Living in the Future Tense

The End of Truth:

The Fantasy of Life in a Fact Free World

Edward Renner

We know from archeology that whole societies have collapsed in the past. Then, they had the excuse of not knowing any better; that is no longer true. The paradox is that the more we know, the less knowingly we are living our lives. How can the Information Age also be the Age of Stupid?

In the past, a societal collapse was sometimes initiated by a lifestyle that overused the natural resources necessary to sustain their population as in Easter Island. At other times it was due to an external catastrophe such as the role of drought in the Maya collapse, or a conflict between people that could not be resolved politically as in Nordic Greenland. Regardless of the initial cause they all shared a common factor of an entrenched belief system that failed to see the warning signs. By ignoring truth tellers the societies became the author of their own misfortune. 

The most difficult part of human change is letting go of the security of existing beliefs and values to embrace the uncertainty of a different future. The result is often the loss of the capacity to see, hear or speak the truth.

We have not yet learned that lesson. The challenge of our time is how to live sustainably and peacefully on a crowded planet in the 21^st Century. This will require alternative economic, social and political process. Instead, we are persisting in pursuing the fantasy of narrow, single-minded ideologies based on economic growth, consumption and nationalism.

Yet, we know the planet cannot support the energy intense lifestyle of the developed countries and also fulfill the comparable aspirations of developing nations, in particular those of China, India and Brazil. As emerging markets, they are essential for the survival of free-market capitalism in the developed countries, and in particular for the United States. The developing countries cannot give up using coal if they are to emerge as consumers, and the developed countries cannot give up growth if they are to maintain their current lifestyle.

The dilemma of the necessity to embrace the uncertainties of a global community without the capacity to change is a prescription for either mutual environmental collapse or internal civic disruption and external conflict between nations and regions over who will be forced to abandon their aspirations and accept harsh austerities.

We need a global energy initiative and an alternative sustainable global economy, not ideological wars in Washington over global warming and, in the Middle East, over securing Western influence and the New American Century. Our invasion of Iraq and the Arab Spring did not bring democracy to the Middle East; indeed, just the opposite.

The Iraq war has spread into a regional conflict and growing sectarian divide. The Islamic State (ISIS) now controls large areas of both Iraq and Syria. The US and its Gulf allies are providing arms to the rebel forces in Syria while Russian and Iran are supporting the Government of Assad. In Syria alone, 12 million people have been displaced, 300,000 killed and 4 million have fled the country creating a world-wide refugee crisis.

Three trillion dollars later, and still counting, the war without end continues. The national debt has soared without – for the first time in the history of the US – a war tax increase to pay the cost. Instead, the debt has been thoughtlessly passed on to our children who will have no realistic way to deal with it. The physical infrastructure required to be competitive in a global economy has been allowed to decay, and the social programs necessary for a strong functional democracy – education, health, economic security and poverty assistance – are collapsing. The nation is divided with racial and ethnic tension while the level of poverty is increasing.

 “The public backlash against the Dixie Chicks for speaking their mind about the war was vindictive.  Country station stopped playing their music. The Dixie Chicks did not back down; they answered their critics with a cover picture on Entertainment Weekly.  A picture that then Managing Editor Rick Tetzeli (2002-2009) regards as his favorite cover – an endorsement of the right – indeed the necessity -- to speak to truth.

In the end, they were proved to be right. But, their career was over for saying they were ashamed the President was from Texas!

What has gone wrong in our country?

Speaking the truth has lost its currency, politically, economically and socially. Political Action Committees (PACs) have reduced civics to marketing and politicians to puppets. Eleven million VW cars world-wide lie about their emissions and those who perpetrated the financial crisis of 2008 knowingly said to each other at the time: “You will be gone and I’ll be gone.” To complete the circle, wealth and income inequality have placed power in the hands of the super wealthy who own the PACs which serve their own private, not public, interests.

The commercial consolidation of the media and journalism, and the commodification of higher education, is silencing the last frontier of truth telling. Each episode of terrorism increases our willingness to accept more intrusive surveillance and limits to privacy as a necessary sacrifice for keeping freedom and democracy safe.

Those who speak to truth are not answered with substance, but are labeled as dangerous. Chelsea Manning is imprisoned, Edward Snowden and Julian Assange are living in exile as criminals for revealing failures of public trust by the very government whose essential function in a democracy is the keeping of that trust. We are withdrawing into the fantasy of living in a fact free world, where repeating ideological myths of greed, patriotism and hate have displaced civic political discourse.

When societies have collapsed in the past it was because they silenced truth tellers by holding on to the false security of ideologies until it was too late for change. This time, it not just the collapse of the US that is at stake, but of the planet itself. And, it all started back in 2003 when we stood by in silence and watched while the Dixie Chicks were sacrificed to the patriotic fantasy of the exceptionalism of the new American Century.

Maybe it is time for a Dixie Chick reunion concert. We owe them one.

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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.

Carrying Capacity

A version of this essay was published in the Tampa Bay Times on Sunday, May 19, 2013, P1-2. This essay may be reproduced, reprinted and republished.

Saving Our Planet:

Why Climate Change Has Not Inspired Action

Edward Renner

 

While Climate change has entered the national conversation, it has not received popular support nor resulted in a cooperative international approach. New measurements show that the climate-changing gas carbon dioxide is at the highest atmospheric concentrations -- 400 parts per million – in at least three million years. And yet a recent Gallup poll shows that only a minority believe that global warming will “pose a serious threat to them or to their way of life during their lifetime.” 

One possibility is that the focus on climate change has let us, as individuals off the hook because there is not, really, anything that each of us can do personally that will make a difference. Yet, we know that something very significant is happening to the environment about which something must be done. 

With such a disconnect, and so little political will, action seems impossible. But there is a way. If we would shift our focus from climate change to the concept of Carrying Capacity, then are there many necessary things we can do ourselves, over which we have direct control, including holding our elected officials and global corporations accountable for specific changes in public policy.  

What is Carrying Capacity? 

Carrying capacity is a well-established biological concept: It is the maximum population size of the species that the environment can sustain indefinitely, given the food, habitat, water and other necessities available in the environment. 

As a practical metaphor, a row boat can hold a limited number of people. Add one too many and the boat will sink and everyone drowns. Likewise, the planet can support a limited number of people. Add too many and its capacity to support life will collapse. 

Of course the planet is far more complex than a rowboat. But only in two very simple ways: 

First, the impact on the planet of adding one more person to the population of the US is the same as adding 10 people to the population of Mexico. This is because the average American uses more resources and makes more waste than the average Mexican. Similar to the row boat, it is not the number of people that is important, but their combined weight. For the planet, this is the Effective Population; it is the number of people multiplied by their average impact which is the total burden of the human footprint on the planet. 

Second, nature is not a static situation like a row boat floating in still water. Nature is a dynamic system in which all the elements influence each other over time: When a growing population cuts down trees to clear land to grow food, the result is soil erosion decreasing the amount of food to feed the increasing number of people who are cutting down the trees. In a similar way, the row boat, when exposed to stormy weather rocks and dips in ways it did not when in still water. 

In the past, individual societies have collapsed when they exceeded the biological capacity of their local geographic area. When an area and thus society collapsed, other areas and societies emerged. Today, however, human activity is damaging the carrying capacity of the entire planet, and there is no other place to go. On August 22 we will have used as much resources and created as much waste as the planet can replace and absorb in a year. At that rate, it takes 1.4 planets to support our current life style. 

We are depleting the planet of its resources to support human life. That is the issue.

Clearly, there is a theoretical limit to how long the effective population can continue to increase all the while reducing the biological capacity of the planet necessary for living. Growth is finite. 

The Tipping Point 

When collapse occurs in nature, there is a “tipping point” in which the accelerating demands produce a rapid decline in capacity. The process is similar to the over-crowded row boat which, with the addition of a small amount of extra weight, starts to take on water, which, the moment that happens, causes the boat to take on even more water, and it quickly sinks. Once the tipping point is crossed, neither the boat nor nature can continue to support life. For thousands of years this has not been an issue for the planet. However, it is an issue for those of us alive today. We are the ones who will be responsible for bringing our planet to the tipping point. 

In nature, the rapid collapse occurs due to “Forcings.” These are incremental changes of one element that forces additional depletions in all of the other elements, which in turn trigger even greater reductions in each of the other elements. This leads to an accelerating Titanic-like downward spiral toward total collapse.

 

Jared Diamond in his book Collapse has chronicled how past societies which existed and thrived for hundreds of years – some more than a thousand – have collapsed over the period of one lifetime when a single forcing -- such an extended drought --- pushed the society beyond its tipping point. Today, climate change is Nature’s mechanism for causing forcings – drought, desertification, famine, water shortages, and dead seas, to name a few. The social, political and economic consequences of forcings are the ingredients for societal collapse: migration, social unrest, war lords, starvation, economic recession and growing inequalities in which a very few are rich and powerful while the vast majority are poor and weak. Civic order cannot withstand large numbers of desperate people.

The failure of national governments, dysfunctional internal political process and regional and ethnic conflicts are early warning signs of impending collapse. 

Avoiding the Tipping Point 

Fortunately, unlike the ways of nature, carrying capacity is something we can do something about. We have knowledge and control over all of the elements responsible for staying within the carrying capacity of the planet. We can measure the biological capacity of the planet to provide the resources we use and to absorb the waste we create. We already know how the growth of the effective population is exploding at the same time as our resources are shrinking. Although we do not know exactly where the tipping is, we do know that it is within the lifetime of the majority of people alive today. Given a six thousand year human history on the planet, that is all we need to know. The choice is ours. 

If, between now and 2015, just 3% of the effective population would reduce their total footprint by 25%, and by 2020 the percent doing so doubled to 6%, and by 2030 double again to 12.5%, and by 2040 to 25%, and by 2050 to 50%, then the total footprint of the effective population would be reduced, and the danger of crossing the tipping point would be averted. The collective effective footprint of the human population on the earth would start to decrease at around 8 Billion, even though the actual population is projected to reach 9 Billion by 2050.

An Interactive Graphic   To see the effect of different levels of participation or different percent reductions enter alternative numbers from 0 to 100 without the % sign in the highlighted chart. A negative number in the "% Reduction" column will illustrate the effect of continuing to increase the size of our footprint.

 

Half the population eventually reducing their impact by 25% over the next 37 years is not an unreasonable possibility. The largest population growth is in underdeveloped countries with relatively small per capita footprints. The largest footprints are in developed countries which have the capacity to make the necessary adjustments.  

The impact of total distances traveled and the efficiency of transportation, the amount and sources of energy used, and what we eat and how it is produced can each be divided into sub-categories, which can be further broken down into the hundreds of specific everyday actions over which we have personal control, such as using fewer plastic water bottles, driving one less mile or eating less meat. 

A small percentage of people making regular small contributions, and encouraging progressively more people to join with them, can have a large cumulative effect.  

However, while these individual efforts are all necessary, they alone are insufficient. Rather, they must be our daily reminder that public policy issues, such as effective mass transit to replace personal automotive commuting, the infrastructure of alternative energy sources and national policies independent of the short-term self-interest of big agriculture, big oil and multi-national corporations are essential. 

This challenge is of particular relevance to those of us living in the US, because we are putting in jeopardy our way of life, far more so than China who is our major competitor. We are the biggest offender in the world of per capita over use of natural resources. We have more to lose than any other nation if, collectively, the human race exceeds the carrying capacity of the planet.

We have become distracted from the necessity for institutional and political accountability by the emphasis on the abstract threat of climate change over which we have little direct personal control. Climate change is simply the most important of Nature’s mechanisms for causing forcings. In contrast, carrying capacity can be documented down to the number of gallons of gasoline, diesel and aviation fuel refined; the tons of fertilizer and pesticides used; the number of wind farms created; and, the BTUs of coal and oil that must be remain in the ground. These are all subject to public political control, and the policies required to regulate these events are known. 

What is absent is the social and political awareness to shift our focus away from the abstract event of climate change, and our necessary but insufficient personal responsibility for it, to the collective and essential government and corporate accountability for specific and measurable policies and practices of not using more resources and producing more waste than the planet can replace or absorb in a year. 

This, we know how to do.  

The political, economic and social discussions we need to have are not whether we need shift the burden from primarily a personal responsibility to one of greater government and corporate accountability, but rather the most feasible ways to do so. 

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Edward Renner is a Professor in the Honors College of the University of South Florida. He may be reached at kerenner@usf.edu. An introduction to his University level course, Forums for a Future, is available in pdf format from USF at http://tiny.cc/7ij7fw, or free in iBook format from iTunes at http://itunes.apple.com/us/book/invitation-to-forums-for-future/id533089665?mt=11.The environmental data is from the Global Footprint Network data base: http://www.footprintnetwork.org