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Introduction
Almost all of this
book is based upon the assumption that the onward progress of humanity
and its social institutions will take place relatively unhindered
by major destructive forces.
This Candide-like assumption
allows the exploration of one particular future for humanity; but
of course there may be a Lisbon earthquake, and other, less attractive
futures are also possible. This chapter will explore some of the
dangers that may de-rail the globalization
express.
Gaia
- The Planet Fights Back
It's impossible to
open a newspaper nowadays without reading another warning that sea
levels are going to rise by 10 metres, 30% of the earth's agriculture
will disappear, and so on.
This chapter does not
suggest that environmental damage is unimportant, or shouldn't be
limited - quite the contrary. However, the only goal of the chapter
is to look impartially at whether the consequences of global warming
and environmental damage or depletion would hinder the globalization
process that is so evidently taking place at present.
In fact, even the most
pessimistic forecasts of environmental doom allow that action could
be taken to limit or even reverse global warming (that's if it isn't
a natural phenomenon) by making costly adjustments to our current
techniques for producing and using energy.
Changes to energy production
are needed, for sure, and a move away from the use of fossil fuels
is overdue. Research into effective alternative energy production
has been puny, simply because it has not been in anyone's economic
interest to pursue it while it is so easy to dig a hole and pull
out the coal and oil. Perhaps now real money will be put behind
renewable alternative energy sources such as fuel cells and photovoltaic
conversion. Many prominent scientists believe that nantechnology
will have a major role to play in the onward development of such
technologies. In a presentation to the US government in 2003, Rice
University Professor R E Smalley 1 listed
many energy-related applications of nanotechnology including photovoltaics,
photoconversion of water to produce hydrogen, materials to harvest
sunlight in space, and improved electricity transmission cables.
It seems absurd that
even economically advanced hot and sunny regions around the world
import fuel oil to burn in power stations to turn into electricity
to power domestic appliances when only a small fraction of the sunlight
falling on the roofs of people's houses is captured. Why is it beyond
the wit of man to devise the power-generating coatings for roofing
materials which should be obligatory in all sunny countries? In
fact, recent research has come up with such coatings which work
almost as well in cloudy weather. And how long will it be before
someone invents coatings or modified leaf biochemistry which will
generate electricity as a by-product of photosynthesis?
If alternative energy
is left to the market, perhaps with some governmental prodding in
the shape of tax incentives, it will arrive
eventually but at high cost in terms of remedial action against
the consequences of global warming. It is commonly predicted by
people who might know that such action would be likely to knock
1% or 2% off the value of global GNP over a period of decades. That's
to say, it would continue to grow, but at perhaps only 3% or 4%
instead of the current 5%.
Rising sea levels would
cause mayhem in coastal tourist areas, and would demand massive
investment from nations which have reclaimed large areas of land
from the sea, such as the Netherlands; but it's difficult to see
a major impact on the march of the global economy. Changes to agricultural
production patterns are perhaps a more serious problem. If it's
true that large swathes of Africa and Australia will become much
less habitable, then there are serious economic as well as humanitarian
consequences.
On the other hand,
trite as it may be to say that Siberia, which is seriously under-populated,
will be warmer and will grow more food, it is nonetheless true.
In fact, the whole of the previous Soviet Empire, covering 16% of
the world's land surface, is grotesquely under-farmed even now,
before it gets warmer. Just the Ukraine, with its famous black earth,
could produce enough grain to feed the whole of Africa and Australia
four times over if it was farmed to modern Western standards. There
isn't a resource problem, then, in absolute terms; it's more of
a resource allocation or a distribution problem.
That's not to dismiss
the horrors that may come out of poor, bloody Africa. It's to say
that the world probably won't be able to continue to take the detached
view it now has of the human disasters taking place there - pace
Bill Gates - but will need to do something painful and expensive
(and global) to ameliorate them and head off the extinction of large
populations.
Given the head of steam
that is building up internationally over global warming, it is likely
that some form of concerted global action will indeed take place.
Ironically for the anti-globalizers, this
will itself be an intensification of the globalization process.
Action will no doubt involve a re-invented Kyoto Protocol, this
time with America on board and with real teeth, numerous Codes of
Conduct to control polluters, the creation of global organizations
charged with the support of pro-environmental technical change;
and so on. All very global!
Actually there wouldn't
be an environmental problem if there weren't . . .
Too
Many People
How many is too many?
How can there be 'too many people'? Each person is too perfect not
to exist, surely?
Well, yes, but too
many people would be more than can be supported by the planet's
resources, managed sustainably, at least until mankind colonizes
other planets. See the next section and Chapter Thirteen, which
argues that people may not need to exist in physical form for too
much longer. The Matrix has been there already; but in a dystopian
way.
The
vision of globalization laid out in the remainder of this book presupposes
continuing progress towards a human population of educated, economically
viable individuals who have access to the Internet and other modern
electronic technologies. Sometimes this can seem a doubtful outcome,
but historical trends support it.
Even though in absolute
numbers there are many more poor, undernourished, uneducated people
in the world today than ever before, the proportion they form of
the population is falling, and falling fast, as global giants China
and India bootstrap their economies and populations to adequate
levels of economic and intellectual achievement. History says that
economically successful countries experience falling birth rates,
and even declining levels of population, so that in the absence
of a disaster along the way, the world's population will indeed
stabilize at a sustainable level, and the globalization process
will continue on its merry way.
The problem is that
there may be a disaster along the way. There are culturally survivable
diasters, and other kinds that are not survivable. For the Roman
Empire, internal decay meant that the exogenous shock of barbaric
migration form the East was not culturally survivable. Exogenous
population shocks (irresistible population movements) may be thought
to be a thing of the past. It does not seem likely that it will
ever be in China's interest to conquer the world by over-running
it, even if it were a physical possibility to do it. Economic migration
does indeed continue, and is a useful safety-valve to reduce the
head of steam in countries that feel themselves excluded from Western
economic success. The USA and the European
Union are having to do more to accommodate such migrants, who flood
across borders in increasing numbers. Legislation and border fences
do not stop them; nor should they.
All
in all, there are such advantages to be gained for a nation state
by joining the existing world order as opposed to fighting against
it, that a crisis resulting from population pressure as such seems
unlikely. If one is to come, it will more likely be from
A
Tale Of Two Religions
So much has been written
about the 'clash of civilizations' between 'Western' Christianity-based
countries and Islam that it seems nothing can be left to be said.
How can it be that
one thousand years after the Crusades this clash of ideologies still
has life in it?
Religions, like nation
states, can be seen to be perversions of the 'groupish' nature of
humans, which has been sketched in places in previous chapters.
Both had real roles in the development of modern human society,
but both are now doing more harm than good. The
good that religions did stems from their role in the establishment,
teaching and maintenance of moral standards. As
the human group expanded outwards from the kin-group or village-sized
unit of say 150 individuals, who could be provided with moral leadership
by the 'Fathers' (the male elders of the
tribe), larger-scale institutions were needed to provide moral
frameworks for population units numbering in the thousands. This
moment can be dated roughly to the time at which nomadic hunting
bands began to settle in permanent communities, with technology
allowing farming and the construction of settlements, about 10,000
years ago. The earliest archeological evidence for established religion
(as distinct from ritual, which preceded it) dates from 7-8,000
years ago.
From that point until
the emergence of the nation state, between
1400 and 1700 AD, religions (Gods, temples, churches, priesthoods
and their schools) were the moral and ethical underpinning of society.
Then, as described earlier, the nation state gradually took over
the role of ethical leadership, until by the 20th century, at least
in economically advanced countries, the church had largely lost
its predominant ethical and educative role, although most Western
nation states retained their nominal Christianity - and they almost
all still do in formal terms, although the social reality has long
since been otherwise.
It's therefore possible
for Islamic countries, which if not theocratic as such are certainly
much more influenced by religious ideas and have much more powerful
priesthoods than do Christian countries, to see countries such as
the USA and the UK as being actually opposed to them on doctrinal
grounds. That is objectively not the case; but it seems to be so
to many inhabitants of Moslem countries. Hence the USA
can sincerely view Islamic terrorists as being in some sort the
agents of Moslem states, although that is again objectively not
the case. And many inhabitants of the Moslem countries probably
feel glad about the activities of the terrorists in their hearts;
some of them even say so, although their leaders, even the theocratic
ones, (almost) never do.
The
danger, evidently, from the perspective of a hopeful globalizer,
is that the Christian countries' reaction to and defence against
terrorism is so severe that it alienates the Moslem countries and
their populations to the point that they withdraw from useful engagement
with their perceived enemies. Because what is needed is time: time
for the ineluctable process of education via the Internet
and the other media to change cultural mindsets in the populations
of the Moslem countries to accept global religious diversity and
to understand that religion - however important it may be any given
individual - is no longer a casus belli in the modern world.
Put in those terms,
a bad outcome seems unlikely, or is that just Micawber-ish optimism?
The persistence of
religious belief at an individual level, most markedly in the USA
where it contrasts so strangely (to outside eyes) with the most
materialistic society on earth, is easy to understand as a reaction
away from the mindless and soulless ethics of the State to a more
real, human 'groupish' cultural reality.
Stephen
Hawkings' Meteorite
There are exogenous
threats to human civilization, such as meteorites plunging from
space and creating global extinctions, possibly including us, and
as Stephen Hawkings points out, the only way of avoiding them for
certain is to colonize other planets. That needn't involve the bodily
transportation of humans, once human genomes and brains can be electronically
represented, as is described in Chapter Thirteen, and may therefore
be possible in the not very distant future.
Apart from meteorites
and clouds of poisonous space gas, there are terrestial events that
could be threatening, such as massive volcanic activity, or a devastating
epidemic which killed such a high proportion of humans that progress
would go into reverse. Neither has happened in the last few million
years, and the timescale of our escape from this planet is presumably
to be measured in hundreds of years; so the chance of our being
stopped is pretty small.
Of course, we may be
being watched by little green men, who are going to stop our escape!
There is not much that
can be done about such threats, so no more words will be devoted
to them here.
The
Bomb
Of all the threats
to humanity, or at any rate to our continued progress, nuclear war
is possibly the greatest, and maybe the only one with real significance.
As with religion, much
has been written on this subject, and there is little that can be
usefully added here, except to point out that globalization,
whether economic, cultural or political, is the best possible way
of avoiding clashes between nation states which might end in nuclear
exchanges.
The world is right
to be scared of a rogue nation such as North Korea which does not
join in or benefit from global organizations. There are few of them,
however, and the extending reach of the media will perhaps work
to reduce their viability in the same way that it is working to
open up countries closed off by sectarian curtains.
As a result of media
intrusion, rogue governments and authoritarian, repressive regimes
in general have become vulnerable to 'people power'. This is a new
and hopeful phenomenon. Historically, revolutions were bourgeouis
affairs, even if they carried democratic banners. It is only now,
when whole populations have access to the whole, real world through
television and the Internet, that they are armed with ideas that
encourage them to protest or rise up against their tormentors. There
are plenty of dictatorships left, still, but a far higher proportion
of humanity lives under relatively free and even democratic regimes
today than ever before, if China be excepted, where a sort of middle
way allows the leadership to maintain a precarious hold on power.
Not perhaps for very long, we may hope?
Footnotes:
1.
Smalley, R E, (2003) NANOTECHNOLOGY, the S&T Workforce,
ENERGY & Prosperity, Podcast, Washington (Rice University)
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