A Crystal Ball into Humanity’s Long-Term Fortunes
History is not destiny
Given the accelerating global-scale degradation and destruction of soil, water, air, forests, ocean habitats, biodiversity, biomass, and all the planetary systems of which these are part, it is becoming ever more obvious that Civilization’s path is no longer viable.
Whether we begin tomorrow or in a thousand years, Civilization will one day transition into a sustainable relationship with the rest of Earth. It must (by the very meaning of the word “sustainable”), or it will disappear.
To get there from here, or from anywhere approximating our current circumstances, we will collectively have far fewer children, eat far less meat, consume far less stuff, and help the biosphere restore itself. We will likely farm and manufacture locally and regionally. We will integrate our food, energy, and material systems, satisfying most of our needs locally and diminishingly less from progressively farther away. In this way, most of our transportation needs will disappear, as will most of our demands for storage, packaging, and advertising.
Still, evolution’s trend of increasing complexity and our growing planetary consciousness will ensure that we will communicate with people worldwide. We will develop mass transportation systems that run on renewable energy forms. And we will continue developing communication networks that support a virtual global village.
Of course, we will recycle and conserve and we will use all sorts of smart, efficient, effective products and systems developed by our engineers and innovators. We will learn how to wisely integrate technology into our lives with minimal disturbance to the environment; how to integrate our economies into a sustainable paradigm, developing economies without necessarily “growing” them; how to scale our systems, where to be local, where to be planetary; how to mimic Nature, where to be simple, where to complexify; how to get the most out of our natural resources; and how to inspire society’s entrepreneurial, innovative, and ambitious members without the crude rewards of material wealth and power.
To restate my premise, we will likely develop our societies towards these ideals, or our complex civilization will not survive. We will intelligently wed the simple and the sophisticated in our agricultural systems, in our homes and communities, and in the technological sphere. And we will have gone far to extinguish the saboteurs to sustainability—planned obsolescence, conspicuous consumption, externalities, perverse subsidies, and the like.
Although we cannot completely remove all inefficiencies and behave with machine-like precision, many of the organizations in a sustainable society will behave more like instruments for the social good and less for self-serving oligarchs and the institutions that defend their wealth. This enlightened intention will, by itself, serve as a powerful catalyst towards peaceful, equitable, and sustainable societies. With far less of our resources and efforts going into superfluous products and imperious ventures, we will more efficiently and effectively direct material and energy toward the necessities of all our family, human and otherwise.
The perhaps most radical, revolutionary, and profound change will involve the full empowerment of women and people of all genders, ethnicities, and beliefs, so that the way in which we perceive, analyze, and act reflects the wisdom of our entire human family, not just its most aggressive men. For the past millennia, Civilization has been like a plane trying to fly with only one wing – the female wing – torn from its body. After six thousand-plus years of patriarchy, the plane is falling out of the sky. And everywhere that women have been empowered, the society – no matter how dire the initial circumstances – has significantly improved. Whether it has been in villages of India, Bangladesh, and Kenya, or in the cities of the Sweden, Finland, and New Zealand, the women benefit, as do their children, their extended family, and the greater community. Only when women are truly free, with equal voice and power and influence at all scales of society, will Civilization fly true and prove itself resilient in the face of reality’s inevitable turbulence.
If much of this sounds like the kind of wishful thinking of romantic dreamers and naifs, it is less because people cannot behave or have never behaved in this way, and far more because millennia of civilization have made cynics of us. Sure, there is selfless behavior, the cynic concedes, and peace and love and compassion, too, but the dark forces are more powerful and always triumph in human affairs. Patriarchal civilization is synonymous with stratified societies based on the exploitation of people and Nature. And religions and Science alike have hammered home the simplistic paradigm of humans as demigods who tread temporarily on this strange and soulless planet.
History, however, is not destiny. It is the story of our evolution. These six thousand years have been our growing up period. We are now like late-stage adolescents facing a scary future and needing to mature quickly to the next stage, to awaken to a more aware and responsible existence. Some of us will choose this path voluntarily. Many of us will be forced to it as we transition through the extreme turbulence of population diebacks, economic crashes, and societal collapses.
We already have available to us a powerful tool to help us adapt to the existential difficulties facing humanity and to make wise choices towards a harmonious relationship with the planet – that of the psycho-spiritual realm, the internal science, if you will. Contemplation and meditation tend to reveal the worth of living by virtues valued by most ethical and philosophical systems, virtues such as compassion, love, kindness, tolerance, generosity, and honesty. Should living by these values be adaptive, as I believe they are, we will likely refine practices that integrate them into society’s economic, political, and social realms, with or without the participation of religious institutions.
The precise path of our species is unknowable. The best that we can do is to pay attention, to be conscious and conscientious. We will hopefully learn from our many mistakes, perhaps suffer other diebacks and collapses along the way, as we try to balance and harmonize ourselves on an ever-changing planet in an ever-changing cosmos.