The geopolitics of the twenty-first century are showing increasing signs of the raggedness that history suggests can persist for a very long time between one period of stability and another. People claiming to predict the future in such times tend to be either Pollyannas or doomsayers, and while their predictions may make headlines for a while, over time they tend to become background noise, the static that always accompanies the tearing apart of certainties. If wisdom is still possible for anyone living in times like ours, it will inevitably be forced to alternate between irony and silence.
That unfortunately won’t prevent anyone with a smartphone these days, including me, from having opinions. Without pretending to look to some chimerical crowd-sourced consensus to save us, what do we think we know about our present? What do we, what can we expect from our future?
Addressing the scariest stuff first, what of the threat of global warming and the hope of success from proposed technology-based responses to it? The technology to substantially reduce the burning of fossil fuels already exists, and China has demonstrated what can be achieved with a concerted effort to deploy advances in both photovoltaic and wind technology at scale. Europe, chastened by Putin’s depravities, is already relying on these technologies to wean itself off cheap Russian gas. Even an official U.S. policy of climate change denialism is unlikely to persist much beyond Donald Trump’s time in office.
What hasn’t been adequately addressed by the increased economic competitiveness of renewable energy sources, however, is the colossal release of methane from the melting of the permafrost in the upper reaches of the northern hemisphere, nor the possibility that a steady increase in human energy generation and consumption, even from renewable sources, is unsustainable. Whether CO2 in the atmosphere can be reduced or not, turning the earth into a perpetually glowing ball on a schedule which defeats the capability of natural biological selection to compensate for its effect on non-human species seems like a recipe for disaster in the long run, even if Bill McKibben’s exhortations in the present do eventually bear fruit.
Then there’s the pressure of a steadily increasing population on the production and equitable distribution of global food supplies. We’re already seeing one critical consequence in the collapse of subsistence agriculture in the Global South. This is clearly a significant contributor to the northward mass migrations that have already caused measurable increases in political instability in both Europe and the U.S.
The industrialization of agriculture, on the other hand, has been both a blessing, and more recently, a curse. The undeniable evidence in recent years of the cascade failures that can arise from the increasing intensity of our land use and our increasing deployment of inadequately researched technologies, including biotechnologies, in support of it, is more than a little concerning. The damage caused by fertilizer runoff—ecological imbalances, groundwater contamination, localized species extinctions, etc.—are among the indications that our present methods may in fact be unsustainable. So also are the profit-based preference for crop monocultures, the intensive use of environmentally questionable pesticides and herbicides, and the deployment of genetically engineered crops that can spread uncontrollably through cross-fertilization outside the boundaries of the fields they’ve been planted in. The mass die-off of pollinating insects, already well-advanced, seems a clear warning of what we may be facing if we don’t mend our ways.
And what of war, specifically of nuclear war? With the Pax Americana now brought to an abrupt and inescapable end under Donald Trump, unilateral abandonments of global trade treaties and agreements have become commonplace. The retreat to xenophobia and hard-core racial and religious bigotries in the so-called liberal democracies is now abundantly clear to anyone who’s been paying attention. The fanatical navel-gazing of fascist ideologues is on the rise everywhere we dare to look.
These are all malignancies that have their origins in fear, and derive their motive power from it as well. Once that fear becomes endemic in a society, it fosters an infatuation with and ultimately a legitimization of violence that embeds itself in every aspect of social and political interaction up to and including routine government policy choices.
Anyone familiar with the history of twentieth century conflicts and the impact of digital technology on all aspects of human interaction, is forced to confront the possibility that wars from now on will not only be cyclical, but global, and that wars conducted with the present level of military technology can lead to the falsely rational conclusion among our political leaders that genocide, symbolic or actual, is the only policy response that can adequately address the magnitude of their uncertainties. Do we really imagine that facing what they believe to be an existential crisis, the leaders of our present and future nuclear powers will voluntarily reliquish the use of weapons they’ve now had at their disposal for nearly a century?
Where will we be ten years, fifty years, a hundred years from now? Will we still be here at all? That’s the real question. As far as I can tell, there doesn’t presently seem to be a comprehensive and credible answer to that question. If there’s ever to be an answer at all, it’s very unlikely to be a single answer. It’s much more likely to consist of a lot of little answers, a collectivity of answers cobbled together by all sorts of people, not all of them of good will, all over the world.
If we succeed in overcoming our present uncertainties, and the fear they engender, without resorting to butchering one another on a grand scale once again, perhaps on a scale we can’t recover from at all, I have no idea what form that success will take. What I am certain of, however, is that no present ism or ology will prove to be of as much help as many of us think. We’ll need to be both more flexible than we are today, and more tolerant, we’ll need to invent not only new technologies, but new selves. If we can manage that, then maybe our failures to this point will one day come to be understood as steps along a road that finally led somewhere more promising than the edge of a cliff.
