DEEP FUTURES
OUR PROSPECTS FOR SURVIVAL
DOUG COCKS
Judging from the past, we may safely infer that not one living species will transmit its unaltered likeness to a distant futurity. And of the species now living very few will transmit progeny to a very distant futurity; for the manner in which all organic beings are grouped shows that the greater number of species in each genus, and all the species in many genera, have left no descendants, but have become utterly extinct. We can so far take a prophetic glance into futurity as to foretell that it will be the common and widely spread species, belonging to the larger and dominant groups within each class, which will ultimately prevail and procreate new and dominant species. As all the living forms of life are the lineal descendants of those which lived long before the Cambrian epoch, we may feel certain that the ordinary succession by generation has never once been broken, and that no cataclysm has desolated the whole world. Hence we may look with some confidence to a secure future of great length. And as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection...There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers having been breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; ......from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.
Charles Darwin, 1859, From the
Conclusion to The Origin of Species by
Means of Natural Selection Or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the
Struggle For Life, The Modern Library, New York, pp. 373-4.
***
Certainly we must be able to project our contemplation ahead a short time, say a hundred million years. By that time our particular species, and all other currently extant mammalian species, will exist only as fossil records. All indications of man's tenure on earth will have vanished from the surface. Man's occupation of the earth's surface leaves no permanent scars, although it certainly upsets local ecological conditions to the extreme. The conditions that will eventually prevail, after man's inevitable extinction, will be very different in detail than they would have been without him. The scars of human occupation persist for centuries, perhaps for millennia, depending upon climate conditions and the vigour of the replacing biota. But it is probable that in most areas the passage of a few millennia will eradicate the obvious scars. In time a region will resume its suitable ecological aspect again, even though the component organisms may occur in different proportions or indeed may actually be different. The effect of man's existence for a few million years, in the last analysis, will not be of any intrinsic consequence.
AC Smith, 1969 Systematics and Appreciation of Reality, Taxon, 18: 5-19.
***
If you don’t know where you are going, it
doesn't matter which bus you catch.
Anon
***
CONTENTS
PART 1: Futures we have glimpsed
ch 1 21C ---A difficult
century
Global springboard to the future
Summary: Change in the 21st century
M3, the world of the third millennium
Overview: Dungeons and dragons
Part 2:
Understanding the task
Why do people think about the future?
What do people want of their own futures?
What sort of society do people want?
The process of setting social goals
Quality survival as a goal for world society
ch 4 Understanding how
societies change over time
Systems theory and societal change
Ecological theory and societal change
Evolutionary theory and societal change
Overview: A plurality of frameworks
ch 5 A strategy for managing
the deep future
Picking a metaphor for the deep futures problem
Accepting that rationality is bounded
A
strategy of responding to priority issues
ch 6 Guidelines i: nursing
the world through endless change
Managing fragility and senescence
ch 7 Guidelines ii: learning
forever
Four pillars of social learning
Managing science and technology
Managing stocks and flows of knowledge
ch 8 Guidelines iii: working
on perennial issues
Managing production and distribution
Appendix: Basic properties of
dissipative (energy-degrading) systems
I am very curious about how our species will fare over coming ages. Will the human lineage survive, reasonably happily, into the distant future? Indeed, will we survive another millennium in reasonably good shape? Will the next thousand years be particularly difficult or just ordinarily difficult? Supposing we survive the next thousand years, will we eventually go extinct as most species do or will we evolve into a new species with which one might empathise? And, supposing we continue to evolve, will that new species or its descendants survive the death of the Sun as an energy and light source in five billion or so years? Beyond that, there is the ultimate question as to if, when and how the universe will end and whether, in some sense, life might best that challenge. A question which is almost as big is whether we ourselves can take steps to significantly improve our chances of being part of a long-lasting lineage. It may just be that, given such a choice, we would perhaps not take it? I will ask that question too.
I will of course die with my curiosities unsatisfied and, thereafter, I don't expect to be watching the story unfold from some heavenly vantage point. My only practicable option, in the absence of revelation, is to collect and construct some plausible well-informed stories---optimistic, pessimistic and realistic---about what might happen to the Earth and its inhabitants. In this book I am presenting some of those stories along with the ideas and facts that make them plausible in my eyes. Remember that ‘plausible’ does not mean ‘true’. It means that if things turned out that way, one would not be too surprised.
Philosophically, I am a naturalist, meaning that I do not find stories which invoke the supernatural to be plausible. For example, when I find a gap, a lack of causal specificity, at some point in the evolutionary story---eg what happened before the big bang, the rise of life, the rise of consciousness---I prefer to ‘wait and see’ rather than attribute events to a Creator, a vital principle etc. As an act of faith (and that is precisely what it is), I assume there is always a natural (causal) explanation for what has happened even if it cannot be accessed. For example, it is not evident that the scientific methodology we are using today (limited to electromagnetic and gravity signatures) is capable of providing a full explanation of the universe.
I am also a meliorist. Meliorism is the doctrine, somewhere between optimism and pessimism, that purposive human action can often improve outcomes over what would otherwise be in the absence of such action. Without such a belief, I could not write a book originally sub-titled A guide to surviving well. Not that I quite have the confidence this sub-title implies. I am certainly not a fatalist who believes there is nothing we can do to change the future. My pessimism extends to observing that the deep future may be a shit of a place which we can do little to avoid (I don’t know) but, if we try to make it better, it is unlikely to be worse than if we had not tried.
Put naturalism and meliorism together and you get (to use a term of Julian Huxley’s (1953| 1963) which is now probably dated) a scientific humanist, someone who wants the best for people and thinks that science, dangerous as it often is, offers one of the better prospects of that.
Happily, we have reached an era where science and history have produced a truckload of exciting and plausible, and sometimes contradictory, stories of how things got to be the way they are. Anyone who takes the trouble to read and try to understand a sample of these stories will be rewarded with a sense of the past which is not unlike one’s own memories, albeit ‘false’ memories because one wasn’t really there when it happened. You too can be 14 billion years old if you wish!
And if the stories we similarly create about the deep future are plausible enough, we can ‘live’ for billions more years, we can have a sense of participation in the ongoing evolutionary play. The scientific method has expanded our understanding of life and the universe in spectacular fashion across the entire scale of space and time (Wilson 2000). For example, the 19th century geologists discovered the enormity of time and, in the 20th century, Hubble confirmed the enormity of space. By the same token, we would be foolish to think that our present ideas about ‘everything’ are more than a small fraction of what will be revealed over the almost endless years ahead. Indeed, judging from what happened in the twentieth century, many of science’s paradigmatic ideas will be overturned presently (Maddox 1998).
So, within the confines of a single book I am going to set out my shortened views on where we have come from, where we are and where we might get to---a ‘perspective on everything’ if you like. And, if that is not enough, I want to make some tentative suggestions as to what we might need to do, and how we might need to think, in order to enlarge our lineage’s prospects of surviving reasonably happily for a very long time. When I say ‘my’ views, what I usually mean is the plausible ideas of others. My intended contribution is to synthesise a large body of ideas into a graspable narrative. I have found ideas helpful to my purpose in disciplines as diverse as palaeontology, archaeology, history, sociology, psychology, geography, ecology, complexity theory, evolutionary economics and political science; and, of course cosmology.
I have written Deep Futures primarily for my own peace of mind (how do I know what I think till I see what I say!) but I would also like others to find my efforts helpful; I suspect that most people in modern societies lack a sense of their place in the larger scheme of things and that this makes life a little more confused than it need be. I know that the body of thought to which I have been exposed and to which I have exposed myself is miniscule but I have to describe the elephant even though I have only felt its tail. And, another thing, as Darwin wrote to a colleague ' no belief is vivid until shared by others.' I need to share my ‘creation myth’ and my ‘destiny myth’ to fix them in my imagination.
Enough justifying. What, to cut a long story short, have I concluded about the future of the human lineage? For the moment, let me resort to allegory. Posterity, our hero, finds herself in a labyrinth of dungeons, each holding a fierce dragon. For each dragon she slays, her immediate ‘reward’ is entry into the next dungeon where an even bigger dragon is waiting. Her real reward is that with every dragon slain Posterity matures and grows stronger. But, and this is the question Gertrude, can she continue to outgrow the dragons she is encountering? Furthermore, for the reason that she is a flawed hero, Posterity’s survival will hinge on more than just the balance of power between her growing strength and ever-bigger dragons. Sometimes she unwittingly conjures up dragons of the mind and these have to be slain just as surely as the denizens of the labyrinth if the story is to go on. To translate this allegory, the labyrinth’s dragons are energetic or insidious natural hazards, the dragons of the mind are problems of the lineage’s own making/makeup and Posterity’s growing strength is her growing knowledge of life and the universe. What this allegory does not capture is my emergent belief that, in between anxieties, life can continue to be a great joy.
Chapter 1, 21C ---A difficult century, is a selective review of what is an enormous ‘futures’ literature. Most excursions into describing what the future will be like (some people are willing to make firm predictions) or could be like (possibilistic futures are often called scenarios) have a ‘human’ time scale which means looking ahead days, months, years and, sometimes, as far out as 3-4 human generations. The chapter’s focus is on possible developments within the global bio-physical environment, the global economy, global society and global governance during the century we are standing in. Many see it as being a particularly difficult one to manage, basically because so much is changing rapidly by historical standards---Toffler’s ‘future shock’. And also because we have accumulated some big demanding problems such as rapid population growth, environmental pollution, probable climate change, poverty, bubbling international aggression and a looming energy crisis. Conversely, quality of life could improve in many societies and we may well continue acquiring the knowledge of life and the universe which will be necessary if the lineage is to survive long-term (happily preferably), if that is what we want.
Chapter 2, Deep futures, is long on time and short on detail. While the present century can be discussed in terms of the assumption that much of what we know will persist and much of what is to come will unfold directly out of the present, this starting point for thinking about the future breaks down once you start gazing ahead for tens and thousands of millennia. Out there, a few physical landmark-events and several big slow processes have some probability status but the quintessential nature of humans, post-humans and the societies they will live in are highly uncertain. One can no longer talk about particular nation-states, races, demographic structures, settlement patterns, industries, continents etc. Indeed such categories may themselves no longer exist. In this situation serious future-gazers can do little more than build plausible if…then scenarios---if the world and its inhabitants turn out to be like X then they will also have to be like Y. Much of the challenge is in selecting the warp threads that will persist as the rich tapestry of the future is woven. The chapter focuses on speculations about the lineage’s physical and mental evolution, possibilities for social organisation, technology developments and the macro-environment.
In Chapter 3, What is the question? we move beyond the speculations of future- gazers towards a consideration of ends and means. We turn to asking what people might like to see happening in the future, particularly the deep future. And while there can be no common answer to such a question, the chapter moves towards a particular working answer, namely, quality survival or, less cryptically, to see the lineage surviving, and surviving well. This means a preference for a future where the human through to post-human lineage survives for an indefinitely prolonged period and that, most of the time, most individuals constituting that lineage will be enjoying high quality of life. This working answer to the question of what people would wish of the future is then re-interpreted as a collective goal, opening the way in following chapters to the question of how the lineage might need to behave if some version of such a goal is to be achieved.
Chapter 4, Understanding how societies change over time, is a search for theory, meaning, ideally, a plausible succinct description of some core process that, in diverse manifestations, seems to be operating when societies undergo marked change in characteristics deemed important, eg survival and quality of life prospects. Is there a behavioural or organisational trajectory common to all societies and does that trajectory evolve in an understandable way? Armed with such a grail, it might be possible to learn how to steer a global society towards quality survival or other goals. What do long-lasting societies have in common? Ensure it. Under what conditions does life get better for a society’s people? Implement them. Not surprisingly though, despite the availability of a range of very powerful relevant ideas from a range of disciplines, the yield from this chapter is no more than some partial theories of societal change. That’s OK.
Macro-history, systems thinking, complexity theory, evolutionary biology, ecology and the socio-behavioural sciences all contain models which can be transposed less-or-more directly to the task of foreseeing how the lineage, its organisation and its environment might change over the long future under particular conditions. For example, macro-history suggests that many failed civilizations simply became too complex to run. Systems thinking reminds us that you cannot do just one thing when managing a society. Complexity theory holds out the hope that societies can be purposively transformed if they are nudged in the right way at the right time. Evolutionary biology provides the natural-selection model which not only allows us to think productively about human evolution but about social processes ranging from economic development to fashion. Ecology explains the pervasiveness of hierarchical structures in the world and how these come about; it also explains why complex energy-degrading/converting systems, like ecosystems and societies, so commonly go through a birth-maturity-senescence-death life cycle. Sociology identifies the functions common to all societies and the tendency that all have to pass from being traditional to being modern. And so on.
Chapter 5, A strategy for managing the deep future, confronts both the intellectual difficulty of the task being set and the limited intellectual capacities which humans have in relation to such a task. Managing the future is a ‘wicked’ problem, meaning that it has no definitive formulation and no conclusively ‘best’ solution; and that the constraints and options confronting the problem-solver are constantly evolving. It is suggested that an approach to managing the future which is far from perfect but still worthwhile is to see it as a matter of guiding world society towards quality survival by responding collectively and selectively to a rolling (ever changing) set of priority issues. Priority issues means those judged to have a particular bearing on whether the lineage can achieve quality survival.
Chapters 6, 7 and 8 take this suggested strategy a step further by suggesting candidate guidelines for helping society formulate responses to three families of priority issues that emerge from the discussions of social goals in chapter 3 and the nature of societal change in chapter 4 and from the possible futures that people have foreseen for world society as described in chapters 1 and 2.
Thus chapter 6, Nursing the world through endless change, explores contemporary thinking about the way in which complex energy-degrading systems (like world society) evolve in order to find guidelines for protecting world society from its own instability and, at times, excessive stability. On one hand the reference is to any society’s tendency to collapse or change direction dramatically, and on the other, to its tendency to stagnate, failing to adapt to external and internal change. The true importance of the chapter is that it is arguing for a way of thinking about societal change which, I believe, will continue to throw off a rich stream of insights into when and how it might be possible to move world society closer to quality survival, notwithstanding its emphasis on the unpredictability of systems like these.
The starting point for chapter 7, Learning forever, is that while surviving well will require full use of what we already know, that will not be enough, at least within a framework where managing the future is interpreted as a matter of guiding world society towards quality survival via selective policy responses to a rolling set of priority issues. The chapter is a search for guidelines for making world society into more of a learning society than it is now, a learning society being one in which high priority is given to the social learning task, ie to the building up of a sufficient body of collective knowledge (useful information) to ensure quality survival. The chapter analyses the social learning process and suggests how it can be nurtured and boosted. The importance of taking an experimental approach to social learning is emphasised. In particular, despite its many problematic consequences, scientific research must continue to have an increasing role in social learning. How it is to be channeled and what its priorities might be are addressed in some detail. For example, more knowledge of how the world and the universe work, with a degree of emphasis on human behavioural and mental processes, is particularly important.
Chapter 8, the third chapter on finding guidelines for quality survival, is Working on perennial issues. That is an umbrella heading which allows a little to be said on each of four families of substantive issues (social learning and managing change are more process or ‘means’ issues) that collectively absorb much of world-society’s problem-solving capacity and will continue to do for the foreseeable future. The four families cover social, political, economic and environmental issues respectively. The social issues I have included on the basis of being most in need of guidelines are fraternal-sisterly relations, participation and the social contract, and cooperation-competition. My Global governance issues, chosen on the grounds of their importance for quality survival are democracy, world government, war and oppression. Under the heading of Production and distribution, my global economic issues are ideology, global investment and relations between business and society. My environmental issues under Managing the global ecosystem are biodiversity, genes and population and depleting non-renewable resources.
Chapter 9, Stories to live by, closes the book on the important idea that clear thinking about priority issues, change management, rolling strategies, social learning etc. will never be enough to ensure the lineage’s quality survival if these ratiocinative activities are not supported by a critical mass of passionate people who want and believe it is possible to survive and survive well. More than that, if Posterity is to negotiate all the contingencies that no amount of forethought can anticipate, she will need role models that provide her with the style and attitudes that serve as all-purpose behavioural guides. For example, enormous insight into Posterity’s challenge to achieve quality survival flows from recognising that her challenge is strongly analogous to that which every mature human faces to make the best of a finite life.
Special thanks go to my friends Mike Austin and Franzi Poldy who, through numerous stimulating discussions, have shifted and sharpened my thinking on some of the major themes of this book.
Cecily Parker has similarly broadened my thinking about the human psyche, as has John Burton on the nature of conflict and its resolution.
Roger Bradbury, Michael Dunlop, Barney Foran, Graham Turner and Sarah Ryan have all read and made helpful comments on various draft chapters. Sarah clarified my view of how the book should be written when she suggested a reordering of chapters.
Inge Newman, the world’s greatest librarian, has been as competently helpful with this as with my previous books.
Steve Morton and Brian Walker, present and former chiefs of the CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) Division of Sustainable Ecosystems have provided the fellowships which have allowed me to work inside the scientific establishment, with all the benefits that brings. Barney Foran has been a generous program leader.
Finally, it has again been a pleasure to work with John Elliot, Publishing Manager for University of New South Wales Press.
Doug Cocks
Canberra
July 2002
What sorts of futures have we humans foreseen for ourselves? The answer is ‘all sorts’; from fleeting to eternal and, in terms of quality of life, from short and brutish to rich and fulfilling. In this first chapter we focus on the 21st century and ask what serious observers have detected in the way of possible worldly changes during this period which stand to significantly influence quality of life prospects, up or down, for large numbers of people?
Of all the centuries that comprise humanity‘s possible future, the 21st is particularly important for two reasons. One is that we are standing in it, most will die in it and our unborn grandchildren will grow old in it; it is the century that captures our personal interest, our self-interest, and the one which extends into what most people think of as the distant future. Second, it just may also be an especially difficult century for our species to get through without enormous suffering and, perhaps, collapse of the world system. We do not know that of course and insofar as numerous historical ages have seen themselves as uniquely challenged by the circumstances they face we need to be cautious about such a judgement. In any case, we have to pay particular attention to negotiating the 21st century simply because it’s the one we have direct responsibility for and, perhaps, most control over. That was indeed my view when writing my book Future Makers, Future Takers, an exploration of alternative strategies for managing Australian society up to and beyond 2050.
However, while it is important to appreciate what has been envisaged for the 21st century, given that that there is no escape from traversing it if we are to reach what I am calling the deep future, it is equally important for my present purposes (of which more later) to collate a picture (in the next chapter) of what observers have envisaged for those deep futures, the plural implying that there are multiple possibilities. This is notwithstanding the fact that what might happen in the world in coming millennia, perhaps thousands of them, rather than coming decades has been of interest to a much smaller group of observers---scientists, fiction writers and the religious more so than the economists, political scientists, social theorists, environmentalists, entrepreneurs, gurus etc. who dominate the business of thinking about the ‘immediate’ future.
For much of recorded history, societies evolved in relative isolation. This began to change with the age of colonialism and today societies are intermingling to an increasing degree, a process called globalisation. The world, the globe, can be viewed as a system of interacting nations, trans-national organisations (eg companies, NGOs) and supra-national organisations (eg World Trade Organisation). Systems, by definition, are networks of (many) separable components or units continuously interacting with each other according to their own behavioural rules. So, we can view the world as a system of interacting nations etc., each changing the others’ social, political, economic and natural environments while collectively evolving in ways that can be described in terms of whole-of-world characteristics.
However, before looking for possibilistic future worlds under these headings, we might take a moment to scan the past century or so to see if there are some powerful trends and established patterns that might carry over into and shape this century. I am accepting Elise Boulding’s (1978) view that we need to look at how the world has behaved and changed in the last hundred years if we are to have any understanding of the forces that will shape the next hundred years. This is notwithstanding Boulding’s own admission that our capacity to image the future has probably been weakened by the increasing rate of change being experienced in many dimensions of the global system (cf. Snooks 1996).
The distinguished British historian, Eric Hobsbawm (1994), has written with great insight about what happened and why in the world during the period 1914-1991. This period (which he calls the short twentieth century) begins with the First World War and ends with the collapse of the USSR. He divides it into:
An ‘age of catastrophe’ from 1914 to the aftermath of the Second World War. Apart from the two world wars, this age includes the great depression of the thirties and the rise of fascism;
A ‘sort of golden age’ of extraordinary economic growth and social transformation (eg national independence movements) for 25 or 30 post-war years up till the early 1970s (called ‘the long boom’ by Daly and Logan (1989)); and
The ‘crisis decades’ since the ‘golden age’ in which capitalism, as well as communism, has failed to deliver----as evidenced by mass unemployment, cyclical slumps, increasing divergence between wealth and poverty and between state revenues and state expenditures. An increasingly integrated world economy has undermined the institutions of all regimes. In an effort to recover, many regimes have replaced the Keynesian economic ideas which ruled in the golden age with neo-liberal and laissez faire ideas. But followers of that path have done no better than others. This has also been the time when the potentially catastrophic ecological consequences of economic growth have begun to emerge. The growth rate of the world economy dropped from five per cent per annum in the 1960s to two per cent in the 1990s (Thurow 1996).
Overall, between 1914 and 1991 people in the advanced economies, basically the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries came to live longer and better (at least until the eighties) than their parents. Technological revolutions, particularly in transport and communications, ‘virtually annihilated time and distance’ (sic). But it was a murderous and barbaric century. As predicted by Marx, social relations in the first world disintegrated under the advance of a-social individualism. Capitalism (Box 1.1) has been a permanent and continuous revolutionising force.
Box 1.1: Capitalism clarified
Technicalities aside, capital is the savings from past profits or wages that are available to
finance new enterprises. Physical
capital exists as factories, machines etc. and finance capital is wealth
invested in financial instruments such as loans, shares, bonds.
Capitalism is not a dirty word. It is a
term describing an economic production system characterised by wage-labour that
does not own the means of production.
Capitalism creates a social order characterised by constant change
caused by the drive to accumulate capital by innovation and expansion of output.
It is the drive for capital accumulation which energises the
system---accumulate or be accumulated!
Undoubtedly, the central issue in capitalist societies is the relation
between business and government, the economy and the state.
At
the end of this century it has for the first time become possible to see what a
world may be like in which the past...has lost its role, in which the old maps
and charts which guided human beings, singly and collectively, through life no
longer represent the landscape through which we move, the sea on which we
sail. In which we do not know where our
journey is taking us, or even ought to take us (Hobsbawm 1994).
Thus, beyond the ‘crisis decades’ Hobsbawm sees an ‘unknown and problematic but not necessarily apocalyptic future’---a period of destructuring and simplification rather than destruction. Particular problems he foresees include the following:
We enter a world in which for the first time in two centuries there is no international system or structure---as evidenced by the emergence of dozens of new territories without any independent mechanisms for border determination. It is a world in which the First World can win battles against the Third World but not wars, not in the sense of being able to control the conquered territory after ‘victory’. There is a global disorder and no obvious mechanism for either ending it or keeping it under control. Hobsbawm’s view matches that of Singer and Wildavsky (1993) who divide tomorrow’s world into two parts. One part is zones of peace, wealth and democracy. The other is zones of war, turmoil and development in which a century of disruption can be expected.
The privatisation of the means of destruction means that it is now quite possible for small groups of political or other dissidents to disrupt and destroy anywhere. Concurrently, the cost of keeping unofficial violence under control has risen dramatically. Note though that the rapid fall of the twentieth century’s totalitarian and ruthlessly dictatorial regimes has effectively demonstrated the limits of sheer coercive power.
Global population will rise above 10 billion and regional differences in population change will generate great migratory pressures. There can be little doubt that friction between natives and foreigners will be a major factor in the politics, global and national, of the next decades. Eventually, the problem of how to keep world population stable will have to be faced.
The ecological consequences of ongoing economic growth will not make the world uninhabitable for humans but will change the environments in which people live and perhaps reduce the carrying capacity (numbers that can be supported) of the globe dramatically. In the long run, a balance will have to be struck between humanity, the (renewable) resources it consumes and the effect of its activities on the environment. Nobody knows, and few dare speculate how this is to be done, and at what level of population, technology and consumption such a permanent balance would be possible. One thing however is undeniable. It would be incompatible with a world economy based on the unlimited pursuit of profit in capitalist economies of the type now existing.
While globalisation