How
has the year 2000 functioned in discourse?
To begin to understand how
the post year 2000 future can look like, we need to analyze how the
year 2000 has functioned in our discourses.
First, it has been an
empirical indicator of progress, of the rise of the West. “Two
thousand years and still going strong, with every attempt to
dislodge the West, having been appropriated” might be the
operating slogan. The rise of the West – clearly not predictable a
1000 years ago, with China or the Islamic world far more likely to
ascend to world dominance - has occurred for various reasons:
because of military
technology (and the willingness to use it),
through more efficient organizations, and through inflows of
wealth (conquest and economic colonization). But more crucial has
been through liberal ideology, where the image of the melting pot
invites all in but always on the terms of the West, most recently
specifically on the terms of America. Dislodging the West from its
temporal claims, through rescuing one's own authentic cultural
difference, will be problematic since all other views are allowed
in. This is the traditional Hindu model (now being challenged by the
BJP); there is no need to convert others, since all are hindus. In
the American case, everyone wants to go to Disneyland, play American
football, watch the baseball world series, eat hotdogs and
hamburgers and date blonde cheerleaders.
How could it be different?
American-ness has become universally naturalized.
So much so that aspects of Japan, South-East Asia are far
more Western than the West itself (and poor copies thereof as well).
Others see themselves through the eyes of Pax Americana –
beauty, truth and reality become narrowly defined.
Of course, with the United States set to become the second
largest Spanish speaking nation in the world, and with immigration
the only likely savior to the rapidly ageing West, multiculturalism
appears to be here to stay. The US Army also will be dramatically
muslim in 30 or so years (and with many senior US government posts
coming from Army leaders, we can well imagine a shift in US foreign
policy around 2025). [1]
The long-term net result of multiculturalism may be an entirely new
set of identity arrangements. In California, where in 30-50 years
there will be two distinct classes – a rich white ageing cohort
and a younger Hispanic-Asian poorer cohort – the issue will be who
will secede from whom. However, what has brought the West to the
year 2000 is unlikely to help it continue. This is far more than
Spengler's decline thesis, wherein the evil of the money-spirit
leads to the fall. It is liberalism itself, the partial opening of
the doors of the West to the "other" which could herald
the West's final days. The right wing has realized this and thus
attacks immigration and the other whenever possible. Social
movements, the varied nongovernmental organizations too have
realized the demographic and cultural shifts underway but construe
the limits of the nation-state and the creation of a multicultural
planet as part of our evolutionary journey, as a positive step in
human evolution.
Another alternative for
the West will be genocide. That is, either the West becomes
authentically multicultural, disavowing the melting pot metaphor and
moving a salad bar or even a global garden of varied flowers – a
gaia of civilizations - or it limits intake and is undone by its own
economic success. What will result will be an ageing population with
no youth to help pay for pensions and to instill cultural and
economic dynamism. Alternatively, taking the Roman path, the West
could tax the provinces heavily, and when they rebel, send in the
military. This, of course, will only hasten the decline.
A final possibility, which
is central to the Year 2000 discourse, is to go it alone. This means
the creation of an artificial, high-tech society, where few work
(thus no need for masses of youth), biotechnology, space-technology,
nano-technology, etc, maintain the West's advantage over others.
This is the "museumization" of the other, of culture in
virtual space. Authentic transformation, dialogue with other
cultures is avoided, since they can be uploaded and intercourse made
virtually possible.
This last scenario will
solve some of the pressures of the end of the modern world but not
all of them. That is, what will result is a rich society living in
anonymous space pretending to me in community with each other –
not a virtual hell since all emotions will have been selected out
– but a passive slow death of success (that is, success as the
final step on the ladder of failure).
Which direction the West
decides to take as forces for creating 500 nations from our current
180 or so gather momentum will be among the stories of the next 30
years. My preference would be for the 500-nation scenario in the
context of a strong world government focused on international and
local human rights. The development of this world would be
incremental with current steps toward regional and global governance
central to this story. While Europe has moved towards integration,
other parts of the world are far behind, South-Asia and Africa, for
example. However, expansions of size must come out in the context of
equity – economic, cultural and epistemic. Merely expanding size
for efficiency reasons often continues unfair terms of trade and
cultural hegemony. Global governance is possible once regions
themselves have a language and identity outside of those defined by
the large hegemons.
Second, The year 2000,
much like Kennedy’s vision of man on the moon has represented a
goal to realize; a high tech, liberal, fair society where the
American way can flourish, where hardwork, gusto, and splendid
organization can realize anything.
The dark side of "man
on the moon" has been the strengthening of the technocratic and
militaristic dimensions of the US – the privileging of the
military-industrial complex. Even with the new information and
communication technologies, command hierarchies are required, any
semblance of transparency is lost.
While certainly some large projects are needed for every
civilization, the year 2000 functions as a metaphor that counters
economic democracy, "small is beautiful" approaches.
What is needed is a mix of
large state/global projects, along with a large people's economic
sector, a real market of buyers and sellers of goods, services,
information and worldviews. A third layer of the market would
ideally be the cooperative layer, wherein those who work, own.
Together. Such a three layered system would function as an antidote
to the command structures that operate on principles of nationalism
and authority.
Third, the year 2000 has
represented the future. Defined as the latest technology, the latest
gee-whiz solution, the turn of the millennium represents gadgets
that will make life easier. What is lost in this particular
construction of the future are social technologies, changes in
social institutions and management. These are lost partly as they
are harder to imagine since they are seen as given (and not human
created as with technologies) and partly because each institution
has embedded political interests, which make social and political
change difficult.
While technology will
always be the great seducer, the challenge for an emancipatory
futures studies is an unending critique of our social institutions
and the creation of new structures that better meet our changing
needs.
Fourth, the year 2000 has
represented the past. Implicit in it is the mythology of Christian
civilization and its prophet. How we time or calendar the world is
an indicator of which civilization’s myths we accept.
Using the scientific notation of BCE, before the Common Era,
exacerbates this – what is common about it, one can ask? Egypt’s
television commercial that plays on CNN International - visit
Egypt's fifth Millennium - is one way to disrupt the
universalization of a particular culture’s time.
Aboriginal Australian's claims that they are celebrating
their 42nd millennium serve a similar purpose. As Greg
Dening writes in Time
Searchers: "For 42 millennia all parts of this land – its
rivers, its deserts, its coastal plains, its mountains – have been
imprinted with the human spirit. It has been filled … with
language. Language encultures the land. Language brushes the land
with metaphor."[2]
Fifth, the year 2000
represents hope. Humanity has survived – nuclear accidents,
biological warfare, asteroids have not ended humanity. There is much
to celebrate. However, in our joy, we need to ask how much we have
participated in the degeneration of hope. Why must we celebrate not
becoming extinct? What planet have we created wherein children in
the Pacific cannot sleep at night because of French nuclear testing
or in South Asia because of domestic politics, and constructing
other as the enemy?
The growth data on this
last Millennium does look good, though.
Economic growth in the last 1000 years, since the rise of the
west, has outstripped growth for the first 1000 years. Since 1820,
GDP has grown .96% a year compared to the Middle Ages when it rose
.05% a year. [3]What
is left unanswered is distribution; the question Marxists have
focused on. We know
quite well that the world's richest people in the world have assets
that exceed the combined GDP of the 48 least developed nations, and
the world's 225 richest individuals have a combined wealth of over 1
trillion US$, equal to the annual income of the poorest 47% of the
entire world's population. We
also know that the
trend is toward greater inequity with the share of global income
between the world's rich and the world's poor doubling from 30-1 in
1960 to 59 to 1 in 1989. [4]The
number of people living in absolute poverty increases by nearly 25
million a year, and over 40 million people die of hunger-related
diseases each year (the equivalent of over 300 jumbo jet crashes a
day with no survivors). [5]
Movements from outside the
centre have also focused on issues of structural violence, how
skewed distribution leads to poverty and misery. Intellectuals in
the cultural studies camp have added that knowledge itself is
defined by the centre, such that Western hegemony has occurred not
only through the conquest of local economies, the secularization and
urbanization of rural space, but as well through defining others as
less scientific, and more irrational. The year 2000 has remained an
important benchmark in this process. The West has owned it.
Futurists have also used
the year 2000 but most often uncritically oblivious to the package
that comes with that year. Hoping to use the year 2000 as a way to
change the present, more often than not, it is the future that has
not changed. At least this dimension of futures studies will not be
available any more but the codes of progress, of the "future as
new" are so deep, that merely a change of sign, of symbol does
not mean a change of political structure.
From the year 2000 discourses, we will move to "humanity
in the third millennium" hype.
What
will change?
Now that it is the morning
after, shall we expect the world problematique to change?
First, we should not
expect change from reports on the future, from global think-tanks
pointing out the world's problems. These merely continue the litany
of everything that can go wrong or of the dramatic new technologies.
They create a politics of fear. They do not question the causes
behind particular futures, the worldviews that support certain
interests, and the grand mythology that provides cultural legitimacy
for them. Without such a layered analysis, any attempt to forecast
or see the future will be trivial. Damning data will be presented,
reports circulated, conferences held but it will be merely an
information gathering exercise, with no possibility for social
transformation.
Second, while any serious
thinking of the future must have a language for transformation, we
should not be stupid and forget the deep structures that mitigate
against change. The symbols of progress, of velocity (the
post-industrial Internet net era), of soft fascism, monoculture
appopriating the other (Disneyland), of artificiality (genetics and
plastic surgery) and standarization (Mcdonalds) remain dominant.
The
future will be driver by technological linear progress, with
corporations as the world's leaders. Instead of the welfare state,
distribution will come about through the altruistic behavior of
wealthy businessmen. This is Herbert Spencer's vision, each one of
us lives it, breathes it.[6]
The recent attack on the welfare state confirms Spencer's vision of
the future.
To
merely engage in scenarios of the future without understanding the
stronghold of these myths will only result in fantasy futures,
preferred images without any basis of possibility
Opening
up the future
But
are there attempts to open up the future? Unfortunately, most
visions of the long-term future remain technocratic. With 2000 now
history, 3000 beckons. And it is being defined in the same old
terms: linear, space oriented, technological, one culture, man as
superior, white as normal. One example is the painting that adorns
the walls and website of the Foundation for the Future (www.futurefoundation.org).
While otherwise a foundation with some multicultural intentions, its
focus on space and genetics continues the colonizing impulse of the
year 2000 but now extends it toward the year 3000.
With the year 2000 now history, it will be a mixture of
space, genetic and artificial intelligence that will become the
defining discourse, the straightjacket of the future. The Internet
is already a marketing tool for telecommunication giants, and, it
has a clear double-edged nature, i.e. it is chaotic, and could
become more so. Biotechnology has become equally corporatized and
space exploration will follow suit.
While
Johan Galtung and many others have always called on futurists to not
be drawn into short term policy analysis, the long long term, when
defined within current categories and technologies can be equally
oppressive.[7]
Positive signs
Where
to then? Are there positive signs?
Well,
first of all we do have an emerging language, ethos of an
alternative future. That is, while the likely scenario is the
artificial society, there is also the possibility of a
communicative-inclusive society, less focused on information per se
but more on a conversation between cultures, on authentic
civilizational dialogue.[8]
While there are certainly limits to dialogue without changes in
power relations – economic, military, technological,
epistemological, spatial and temporal – still the possibility of
listening to how other civilizations see themselves and their
futures is now possible. Travel, the net, the economic growth in
East Asia, projects within Islam, Indian civilization to recover
their futures silenced by external and internal colonization.
Second,
the language of rights has also become dominant.[9]
While the much earlier battle was to increase the rights of the
nobility vis-a-vis the king, rights in the last few hundred years
have expanded to include the rights of labour, the rights of the
environment, the rights of women, children, and now even parents
rights. Rights have become a powerful vehicle for social change
because those victimized now have a language in which they can be
understood. While certainly slavery continues in practice, as does
racism, there is agreement that it is wrong to enslave others and
construct others as racially inferior. Rights create new forms of
legitimacy, new categories of possible redress.
Third,
it is not so much futures studies but future generations studies
which personalizes the future, locating it in family and in the real
lives of our children's children's.[10]
While a decision-maker may be less apt to concern himself with
futures a decade from now – given the short term nature of
electoral cycles – asking him what world he wants for his children
changes the dynamic. For example, one can ask a Pakistan leader,
shall I put money into nuclearization or poverty alleviation. The
first almost guarantees that children generations from now will live
in misery; the second guarantees, that they will live. The future
must be personalized.
Future
generations assert a double vision. As Greg Dening writes of
Aborigines and other First people: "The first people had a
double vision of their landscape. They could see it for what it
really was – rocks, trees, rivers, and deserts. They could see it
for what it also really was – their ancestors' bodies, the tracks
of their walking."[11]
Feminists
and others who are not part of the dominant paradigm share this
double vision. They function within modernist and postmodernist
modes of limited rationality, of consumerism, of hypercapitalism, of
patriarchy, of quick time, and they live in spiritual time, slow
time, future generations time, in gendered partnerships, in
alternative visions of what it means to be human.
It is this double vision that multiculturalism seeks to
embrace and enliven by supporting it, by legitimating it.[12]
Fourth,
is the language of alternatives to capitalism. While the fundamental
question of how and when the capitalism system will transform
remains unanswered – the system survives every crash, and even as
the financial economy continues to delink from the real economy –
the system continues to flourish, expanding globally and temporally.[13]
Even
with the next crisis to come when the current babyboomers begin to
sell stocks and when there are not enough young people to pay the
pensions of the elderly, the system will likely survive by allowing
the Third World in. The cost to the system will be multiculturalism
and the nation system, but the gain will be the survival and
prospering of capitalism.
Still,
at the very least there is the language of economic democracy, of
corporate accountability, of the quadruple bottom-line (gender,
profit, nature and society) and we can add the fifth line, future
generations. Little of it is followed, however. For example, in the
USA while Congress talks of environmentalism, funding for
alternative energy is cut and tax support for oil corporations is
increased.[14]
Fifth,
globalism, even as it reduces the choices of most, gives us a
language that can be used for systemic transformation. Ideally,
globalism will move from the globalization of capital to the
globalization of labour - its free movement without visa
restrictions (a necessary approach if the West is to survive
ageing). Eventually we could see the globalization of ideas, that
is, the transformation of what is legitimate news and knowledge from
the confines of the West.
The
final stage is the globalization of security. While most likely this
will be NATO-led, in the long run, we can imagine a world security
insurance system (for small nations), a real world government, with
four levels of governance (a house of non-governmental
organizations, a house of corporations, direct voting, and a house
of states). This means
the continued porousness of nations, being made less sovereign at
all levels – ideational, capital flows, environmental crisis, and
in the recent precedent, maltreatment of minorities.
While real-politics remains the guiding ideology behind
changes in governance, one cannot underestimate chaos factors and
the new technologies. Cyber-lobbying, for example, allows a small
group of individuals to spread news for good and bad. Amnesty
International and other non-governmental organizations (as social
movements and not as Red Cross Band-Aid agencies) can use these
technologies to challenge the hegemony of news that large powers
have.
Sixth, is the language of
action at a distance. Whether this comes from physics of mystics,
the important point is that ideas – or more accurately fields of
awareness - can transform the world. They do so through rational
logic but as well through presence.
The Indian idea of microvita is crucial to this discourse,
and even the TM movements flawed experiments on meditation and
social peace are an important step in loosening the stranglehold of
materialist science.[15]
What this means is that information is not merely data but
perception at far more subtle levels. It means that who you are,
one's lived life, is open for all to see. While we largely remain
officially blind of such a notion of presence, it is that which is
most foundational and elusive in changing the world.
What
then is the model of the future?
The
following criteria are implicit in the Communication-inclusive
vision of the future.
1.
Epistemological pluralism – an openness to many ways of
knowing, postnormal science using Jeremy Ravetz's language.[16]
2.
Economies that include growth/distribution and are soft on
nature. Ending the development paradigm and moving to an economics
based on global labor, human rights, access to power and justice.
3.
Spiral view of history and future, that is, the future is not
linear but can turn back on the past to reinvigorate. This means
seeing the future outside of the new, allowing for emergence but not
making it into a fetish.
4.
Progressive – that is, the dynamic dimension of
progress is crucial but progress
must be rescued from the exclusion of other, that is, seeing
others within the terms of those that are economically currently
ahead. Progress is needed for visioning the future but not as a tool
for subordination. A history of progress must be about inclusion, of
rights, as well as of increased economic wealth. Progress also means
far better use of more subtle resources in managing our affairs,
that is, imagination and spirituality.
5.
Gender balance – gender equality, access to resources,
self-meanings. Without ending male dominance, any future will be
more of the same.
6.
Ecological balance – living softly with nature – a
commitment to future generations.
7.
A spiritual core. Without this dimension, any social justice,
environmental gain, merely leads to anomie. It is the spiritual that
gives meaning, that provides the sensitivity to touch upon grace,
essentially this is about ananda.
Integration
after postmodernity
Is
any of this likely? First we need to see postmodernity, the loss of
a centre, the delegitimation of the Enlightenment project, mission,
as a natural end-phase of modernity. Following chaos, there will be
a return to a new universalism. Ideally it will be both local and
global. Political power will have to be global so as to have some
way to challenge local fascisms; the danger, of course, will be a
global government becoming another Pax Americana. Economies,
however, must be decentralized. Alternatively, the artificial
future, where only a few work and the rest of us exist without
meaning or hope, remains possible, even probable.
But
the "morning after" after the year 2000 means that the
ideology of monoculturalism, linear economic growth, technocraticism
has lost one of its ideological pillars.
Another pillar that is slipping is the idea of endless
growth. Economist Robert Henry Nelson, however, believes that it is
this attack on progress, on growth, that has weakened the
Enlightenment project, and, from his view, social movements, instead
of creating new models of growth, wrongly focus on social justice,
environmental rights, and spiritual insight.[17]
As
the intelligentsia for hypercapitalism search for new legitimating
factors, the challenge in this possible window of opportunity will
be for the anti-systemic movements to create visions and practices
of a more multicultural society with an alternative economics that
is spiritually grounded.
Can
it be done? Perhaps.
Will
it be done? Yes. Once realized will it be a better future? For the
majority of the world, it will be a vast improvement, as they will
finally regain their lost dignity. Feudalism, slavery, sexism, and
capitalism will disappear from most pockets of the planet. Virtual
futures will not disappear nor will space exploration. Exploitation
of the other will not be eliminated either but at least it will be
minimized. Still, with a multicultural spiritual episteme defining
the real, it will be a balanced society, prama,
with glimmers of bliss for all.
