No one can be perfectly happy till all are happy.
—Herbert Spencer
In general, history has shown a healthy indifference to the strengths and weaknesses of particular political leaders. Blunders and oppressions in any one part of the world have tended not to be broadly ruinous; there have always been whole continents full of other polities where more enlightened policies could prove their mettle. The basic path of cultural evolution, toward broader and deeper social complexity, has been safe from the ravages of evil and incompetence.
Until recently, it was unthinkable that anyone would end this benign fragmentation. Genghis Khan couldn’t possibly have ruled the whole planet, even with his high-tech courier service. Napoleon, living in pre-telegraphic days, would also have found world conquest hard to attain, much less sustain.
But Hitler, in an age of telephones and airplanes, could conceivably have conquered the world. True, stagnation might have ensued, as he suppressed information technologies to head off revolt. But ruler can bear stagnation so long as there are no vibrant societies to vanquish or embarrass them.
By World War II, then, "saving the world" had ceased to be hyperbole. Winston Churchill, in rallying resistance to Hitler, was performing a feat whose greatness wouldn’t have been possible centuries earlier. It is in this light, the light at the end of the second millennium, that leaders have come to matter in a larger sense than ever before.
Yet the hypothetical prospect of world conquest isn’t the main thing now putting a premium on leadership. Even assuming that governance moves to the global level peacefully and democratically, inspired guidance will matter in a new way. After all, there’s only one globe. However many alternatives there are for reforming the IMF after a crisis, they can be tested only in serial, not in parallel. And if the first trial fails spectacularly, that’s really bad news.
What’s more, the potential badness of bad news has risen. With more souls in the world every century, the sheer weight of potential suffering has reached an all-time high. Hitler and Stalin made this point, and the coming of thousands of nuclear weapons has underscored it.
Of course, if you’re a person of sufficiently large vision, you can always shrug this worry off. Even if we wipe out all human beings, some species will survive, such as the famously radiation-resistant cockroach. And if biological evolution is directional (see part II), then maybe there will eventually be a species smart enough to reignite cultural evolution, impelling social organization, once again, toward the planetary level. So global concord will get a second chance!
Personally, I don’t feel a strong enough kinship with cockroaches to find much solace in this scenario. In fact, there are mishaps well short of nuclear annihilation that I’d just as soon avoid. I ay we take a stab at figuring out what sorts of things great leaders would do to keep our species not just alive, but in reasonably good shape as it makes the tricky transition to a new social equilibrium.
TIP #1 ON SAVING THE WORLD
There are two basic keys to saving the world. The first is to recognize the inevitable and come to terms with it. Granted, this is not wholly original advice. But, obvious as it sounds, the world has often failed to follow it. World War I began with the Austro-Hungarian empire still refusing to accept that, in the age of print, suppressing nationalism was a loser’s game. The Hapsburgs not only clung to their imperial Balkan holdings but tried to expand them, notwithstanding obviously fierce Slavic nationalism. The event that triggered the war epitomizes Hapsburg hubris. The archduke Francis Ferdinand was visiting Bosnia when a nationalist terrorist tossed a bomb toward his car. The bomb bounced away before exploding. Rather than pause and humbly reassess the wisdom of this particular visit, the archduke resumed the motorcade and proceeded with his scheduled activities—and was assassinated later that day.
So what inevitabilities should the modern world recognize? For starters, the one the Hapsburgs ignored. The present information revolution is comparable in consequence to the print revolution and carries the same basic lesson. Denying self-determination to homogenous, determined groups will get harder and harder, be they Kosovars, Corsicans, or Tibetans.
Even apparent successes in repressing the new technologies of nationalism foreshadow long-run failure. Turkey, with its restless population of Kurds, had long tried to thwart the British-based broadcasts of Med TV, the world’s only Kurdish-language TV channel, by cracking down on satellite dishes. Then in 1999, Britain, Turkey’s ally, revoked Med TV’s broadcasting license. The director of Med TV vowed to find a new home, and that shouldn’t be hard; all it takes is one nation with a satellite uplink. But more important is that in five or ten or fifteen years, when the Internet’s broadband revolution has reached Turkey, you won’t even need an uplink to broadcast—just a computer. There will be dozens of Kurdish TV channels, and the only way to block them will be to ban modems—this in an age when having a modem will be like having running water. Call this Inevitability Number One—the inexorable spread of technologies of tribalism.
As we saw in the last topic, technologically empowered nationalism and micronationalism needn’t be a long-run problem. Newly sovereign polities will someday be securely cemented into supranational bodies, right next to older sovereign polities (with "sovereignty," in both cases, being not what it used to be). But getting from here to there is no snap. Secession movements usually inspire resistance—which, in turn, usually empower militants within the secession. So things could get messy in a lot of places fairly fast—a classic "transitional instability."
Making things even messier is Inevitability Number Two: the growing power, compactness, and accessibility of lethal technologies. This trend dates back to the invention of gunpowder and has now gone beyond chemistry, into nuclear physics and biotechnology. Meanwhile, knowledge of how to harness the new lethal forces is rendered ever more available by ever-subtler information technologies. It seems likely that, for some time to come, more and more people will have the option of committing atrocities of greater and greater severity.
These people will include frustrated nationalists, but also lots of other people—most notably people who in one sense or another suffer from the cultural dislocation that globalization brings. There are Islamic and other religious fundamentalists who find their values threatened by modernization. There are plain old Luddites. There are environmentalists radicalized by the pace of deforestation. All these people, thanks to Inevitability Number Two, constitute a new breed of threat—what the journalist Thomas Friedman calls the "superempowered angry man."
In addition to the superempowered angry man, we face what you might call the quite disgruntled man—maybe not upset enough to bomb the World Trade Center, but still displeased with the drift of things, and, thanks partly to information technology, able to have real political effect. This category includes Americans who lose jobs to low-wage foreigners, and French farmers exposed to high-tech competition from abroad. Their political manifestation is a reactionary nationalism with a nasty, nativist undercurrent that, amid an economic downturn, could get pretty ugly. These disgruntled men (and women) aren’t going away. Indeed, the source of their grievance—the globalization of capital and technology broadly—is so basic as to constitute Inevitability Number Three.
So there you have it: three inevitabilities, all part and parcel of globalization, and all with disruptive tendencies, at least in the short term. What to do?
TIP #2 ON SAVING THE WORLD
The early-twentieth-century sociologist William Ogburn attributed many of the world’s problems to "cultural lag." Cultural lag happens when material culture (technology, basically) changes so fast that non-material culture (including governance and social norms) has trouble catching up. In hort, the disruptive part of culture gets out ahead of what Ogburn called the "adaptive" part of culture. Ogburn’s general prescription was to speed up the latter—"make the cultural adjustments as quickly as possible." But there is another option: slow down the former—cut the rate at which material technology is transforming the world; make the inevitable unfold at a more sedate pace.
Of course, it isn’t that easy. Globalization doesn’t come with a velocity-control knob. And the old-fashioned approach to slowing the spread of material technology—raising tariffs—has a history of inviting retaliation and thus yielding full-blown trade wars (the kind that usher in depressions). But there is a safer approach to slowing globalization down just a tad—a supranational approach.
The idea isn’t to create a Bureau of Global Slowdown at the United Nations. The idea is simply to tolerate various supranational efforts that are starting to take shape and that, as they solidify, will naturally have a sedative effect. As first-world and third-world workers unite to raise third-world wages (and thus keep first-world wages from free-falling), industrialists will complain that this dulls the market’s edge, slowing progress. Yes, it does—but that’s okay. As environmentalists unite to save rain forests, or tax fossil fuels, the same complaint will be heard—and the same answer will apply. In the age of the superempowered angry man, and the quite disgruntled man, the slowing down of deeply unsettling change is a benefit, not just a cost, because anger and disgruntlement are world-class problems.
Note that these two particular forms of slowdown—supranational labor and environmental policies—have the added virtue of directly addressing specific sources of anger and disgruntlement: the rapid exodus of blue-collar jobs from developed nations; and the ecological damage that can radicalize environmentalists and that, more broadly, deepens cultural dislocation in such already polluted places as Mexico City and Bangkok. In a sense, then, these policies address both halves of the "cultural lag." Rather than choose between slowing the "material" change and hastening the "adaptive" change, we can slow the material change by hastening the adaptive change.
In a way, it’s a misnomer to call this a "slowing" of globalization. After all, the things that might do the slowing—supranational labor groups or environmental groups, supranational bodies of governance—are themselves part of globalization. What is really happening is that the further evolution of political globalization is slightly slowing the evolution of economic globalization.
This approach has a proven track record. In the United States during the early twentieth century, as economic activity migrated from the state level to the national level, the national government grew powerful enough to regulate it. And some of the regulation— labor laws in particular—had the effect of subduing capitalism a bit, dulling its har her edges. This was, among other things, a preemptive strike against chaos (in the form of Marxist revolution) and a successful one.
We needn’t worry much about economic globalization grinding to a halt under the weight of regulation. The political prerequisites for real regulation, such as strong transnational labor coalitions, will form only slowly, and the economic impetus behind globalization is mammoth. In fact, the only thing with much chance of stalling globalization for any length of time is the very chaotic backlash—from the angry and the disgruntled—that a slight slowdown might avert. Strange as it sounds, the best way to keep economic globalization from slowing down a lot may be to slow it down a little.
THE LIVES OF A CELL
There is one other inevitability that will shape future life: the growing ability to document people’s day-to-day behavior—via Web-browser footprints, credit card records, and other forms of digital data. Whether this is a good or a bad thing depends on your perspective.
On the plus side, it is a weapon against superempowered angry men. The World Trade Center bombers left damning evidence on, among other things, a bank’s computers and their own desktop computer. In future cases, expect to see evidence from EZ Pass highway toll booths and those rapidly multiplying security cameras. (After the bombing, a number of New York landmarks, including Rockefeller Center, installed cameras that capture the face and license plate of every driver entering the parking garage.)
All to the good—except for one thing: those surveillance cameras and electronic toll booths chronicle the movements not just of terrorists, but of you. Of course, we could always subdue this data gathering by passing laws. And you could dodge some of the data gathering by avoiding places with security cameras. But you may feel safer parking in a camera-equipped garage. And you may be happy for toll booths to save records of your passage, if that will help catch any terrorist who should plant a bomb in some highway tunnel. This could well be the core threat to future privacy—not its unwanted invasion by Big Brother, but the voluntary surrender of it in the name of security. And, depending on how insecure we feel, we might decide to grant police—national, maybe international police—lots of leeway in using such data as grounds for search. This may seem implausible now, but, as I’ve already suggested, a single act of biological terrorism in a big city could redraw the contours of plausibility.
Hence a creepy irony of the coming world: even though information technology’s basic drift in recent centuries has been to expand freedom—to bring political pluralism to more and more nations—it can, at another level, shrink freedom. As the world comes to resemble a giant superorganism, with a fiber-optic nervous system, we could come to identify with Winston Smith, who, in Orwell’s 1984; is asked by a totalitarian goon:
"Can you not understand, Winston, that the individual is only a cell?" But, unlike Smith, we’ll have chosen the life of a cell.
The trade-off between liberty and privacy on the one hand, and order and security on the other, is a hardy perennial. What is new are two things: the growing technological ease of invading privacy, and the growing technological ease of disrupting order. These are what threaten to cast the trade-off in new and severe terms.
In this light, slowing down economic globalization looks better than ever. After all, one way to often the term of this trade-off—to get more order without giving up liberty—is to reduce the number of people who want to disrupt the order: hrink the supply of angry men.
Indeed, if shrinking this supply buys freedom, it’s tempting to ask: Are there any more ways to shrink it? Any further tips for reducing the number of aspiring terrorists and other hate-filled people? Any untapped channels of influence?
THINGS GET MUSHY
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the mid-twentieth-century prophet of globalization, hinted at one. Having forecast the integration of humankind into a "planetized" whole—a giant "super-organism"—Teilhard addressed the obvious, Orwellian fear: the "lives of a cell" scenario. His message: Fear not. "To say ‘love’ is to say ‘liberty.’ There need be no fear of enslavement or atrophy in a world so richly charged with charity."
Well that’s a load off my mind! As usual, Teilhard’s optimism is so fuzzy and boundless as to erode his credibility. And, as usual, his instinct for big-picture dynamics is acute enough to restore some credibility. He seems to sense that, when you face the trade-off between freedom and order, much of your wiggle room comes from a third variable that lies in the realm of spirit—or, to put it more mundanely, the realm of morality; what the world needs is to expand its supply of good will.
Of course, this goal, though moral, isn’t reachable only by moral means. We’ve just seen some political initiatives that, while not likely to unleash a torrent of good will, could at least cut the supply of ill will. There are no doubt other such policies. Still, when one group of people harbors contempt, or even disdain, for another group—fundamentalist Muslims for westerners, say, or westerners for fundamentalist Muslims—the problem is indeed at some basic level moral. What is arguably the biggest challenge of the future— staying safe while staying free—may be a project that is as much spiritual as political.
You may object that this project sounds vague and mushy. Well, obviously! That’s why it’s called a "spiritual" project instead of, say, a "civil engineering" project. Whether it is a doable project is unknown. But moral leadership has occasionally met with success. Neither Gandhi nor Martin Luther King, Jr., accomplished all he had hoped for, but both led wrenching and necessary social transformations with less violence than such transformations had historically entailed. And, while both men were at some level politicians, their political force was inextricable from their spiritual force.
History holds other causes for hope, too. At the end of the Middle Ages, when Europe’s governance, impelled largely by economics, moved from the local to the national level, the nation-state became, in some measure, a unit not just of political organization, but of moral organization, featuring at times a certain diffuse good will. Religion played a role—monarchs didn’t exactly shy away from Christian symbolism—but also important was the sheer sense of common cultural belonging and common destiny. People thought of themselves as being in the same boat.
Well, in some ways, at least, the whole world is increasingly in the same boat. In that light, was Teilhard’s optimism so hopelessly unrealistic? Given inspired leadership, how close could the world’s peoples come to brotherly love—or, failing that, to the less intense psychic unity that a mild-mannered nationalism brings? We’ll return to this question toward the end of the topic. For now I’ll just note that there was a time, centuries ago, when even nationalist sentiment must have seemed improbable to Europeans, given cultural and linguistic differences and venerable hatreds.
There is one other, very different, and somewhat smaller, sense in which modern problems may find quasi-spiritual solutions. Slowing the rate of economic globalization, hence of cultural dislocation, is not only a political project. The less bent on material acquisition people in affluent nations are, the less breakneck the pace of modernization— and, as a bonus, the less environmental havoc there will be. As another bonus, we may discover something sages have been saying for millennia: endless acquisition isn’t the route to fulfillment anyway.
MIXED EMOTIONS
Clearly, the argument of this topic has taken a strange twist. Two of them, in fact—two twists that run parallel to each other.
First, I’ve argued above for subduing the pace of history—this after contending for fifteen topics that the direction of history is largely good. Sounds odd, I know. But it is history’s long-run course that is mainly good, and, as John Maynard Keynes pointed out, it is the short run—the time frame in which we live our lives—that concerns us most. In the short run, the "natural" course of history has sometimes brought much unpleasantness.
And "cultural lag" seems to have been a big reason. Some historians trace the virulence of twentieth-century German nationalism all the way back to the nineteenth century, when industrialization swept lands that had just barely left the Middle Ages. Russia, even more than Germany, had to fast-forward from an age of serfs into the industrial revolution—and, in a sense, Russia never recovered, never developed fitting governance. Among the casualties that can arguably be chalked up to this cultural lag: the many millions who died in the Holocaust or at Stalin’s hands. Today, catastrophes of this size could transpire even without the sponsorship of a national political leader. That’s life in a world featuring unaccounted-for nuclear materials, pervasive biotechnology, and lots of unhappy campers. Hence my concern about the number of unhappy campers.
Which brings us to the second strange twist: the sudden welling up of moral sentiment— my rhapsodizing about the need for good will and about the evils of avarice. The previous topics had evinced a certain austere admiration for the "unsocial sociability" that Kant saw in the human psyche. After all, this tension within human nature has sustained the largely healthful drift of history. The tireless pursuit of social status, even of conquest, has ultimately elevated the human condition, allowing more and more people to live, on balance, better lives. How can I justify turning my back on the very things that got us where we are today—such spurs to progress as greed and hatred?
Well, at the risk of sounding cold-hearted: they’ve outlived their usefulness. From the beginning their value was of an ironic sort. Enmity drove society toward larger expanses of amity. Greed and the lust for status, for power over people, helped drive a technological evolution that granted people more freedom. All along, the darker side of human nature was defensible, if at all, only to the extent that it tended to thus negate its own values system. And, all along, there was the implied prospect that, in the end, if the darker side’s downside grew and its upside waned, defending it would get hard.
The end is here. With the world’s ecosystem already under stress, and billions of additional people apparently on the way, mindless materialism grows more dubious. With society finally globalized, we don’t need war to push political organization (that is, the realm of peace) to broader expanse. And with nuclear and biological weapons at hand, full-fledged war—and for that matter full-fledged terrorism—are less palatable than ever. Hatred just isn’t what it used to be.
Even Herbert Spencer—who had a certain respect for enmity’s fructifying effects—saw the declining virtue of antipathy. He wrote: "From war has been gained all that it had to give. . . ." The social evolution that "had to be achieved through the conflicts of societies with one another, has already been achieved; and no further benefits are to be looked for." Wars, he observed, had not only ceased to be vital to progress; increasingly, they were the cause of "retrogression." (And this was before nuclear weapons.)
War has contained the seeds of its own demise all along. This primal form of zero-sum energy, through the very logic of history that it helped impel, was bound to grow more and more negative-sum until finally its downside was too glaring to ignore. In retrospect, it looks almost like planned obsolescence.
If war can indeed be turned into a relic, then the virtue of greed will recede further. From a given society’s standpoint, one big upside of wanton material acquisition has traditionally been the way it drives technological progress—which, after all, helps keep societies strong. In the nineteenth century, Russia and Germany had little choice about modernizing; in those days stasis invited conquest. But if ocieties no longer face conquest, breakneck technological advance is an offer they can refuse, and frugality a luxury their people can afford.
God knows greed won’t vanish. Neither will hatred or chauvinism. Human nature is a stubborn thing. But it isn’t beyond control. Even if our core impulses can’t be banished, they can be tempered and redirected.
Or, more accurately: some impulses can be used against others. People will always seek social status, and revel in the esteem of their peers, but this very thirst can be used to dampen other thirsts. In defining the kinds of behaviors that do and don’t win esteem, communities have great power over how human nature expresses itself. Among the things that can in principle become prerequisites for social status (and, indeed, in some communities already are): not engaging in conspicuous consumption; not saying hateful things about whole national, ethnic, or religious groups, or even about other people.
Franz Boas, though not big on generalizing about history, once stated as "one of the fundamental characteristics of the development of mankind" that "activities which have developed unconsciously are gradually made the subject of reasoning." The example he cited was the maturation of scientific inquiry, but one might also cite the maturation of history itself. As the people of the world come to constitute a single invisible brain, they can purposefully guide their course, consciously seeking the worthy goals they were once blindly, often painfully, driven toward.
Kant, you may recall, was so impressed with the way narrow self-interest had served the greater good that he believed some gratitude was in order: Nature should be "thanked for fostering social incompatibility, enviously competitive vanity, and insatiable desires for possession or even power." Well, all right: Thank you, nature. More specifically, thank you, human nature. Now get a grip on yourself.
