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New Futures Ahead: Genetic or Microvita Transformation (2000)

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By
Sohail Inayatullah

The conventional view of the future assumes that life will keep on getting better. Income will go up, houses will increase in value, new technologies will make life better for all, even if in the short run some of us have to retrain. Our children’s lives will improve. To be sure, there will be difficult times, but challenges will be solved, either through government or through entrepreneurial activity. OECD nations will remain fair societies, where the most vulnerable will be taken care of.

This incremental view of the future is being challenged with claims that we are in the midst of the emergence of a post-industrial knowledge economy, a postmodern future. Indeed, this is a time of many “posts”, meaning that the new era we are in is still being created, its outlines not yet clear, the institutional arrangements (what will government look like, who will watch over whom) still being sorted out.
Deeper changes

But perhaps the transformation is even deeper, challenging not just industrialism, but the entire rise of capitalism and the long term ascension of Western civilization, the Colombian era.

Nano-technologies and artificial intelligence might make production on a scale never before possible. Of course, these technologies are not yet on line but we are seeing hints of a post-scarcity society, challenging the idea that poverty will always be with (well at least because of technological reasons).

Smarter markets, meaning all products bar-coded with complete pricing details (how much the Indonesian worker was paid, how many trees were cut down, how much the middle-man made) will soon be possible, allowing consumers to vote with their dollars. Standards will then continue their transformation from merely the product’s physical quality (what it looks like, is it safe and safely made) to its functional quality (how well it does what it claims to do) to its context (ethical quality).
By giving accurate information to consumers, the Internet could level the inequalities of capitalism, creating a giant peoples market. Capitalism could also transform through another depression, a global one once the speculative bubble of the world’s financial markets finally bursts.

Equally transformative is the rise of multiculturalism. Taken to its full extent it shatters any notion of one culture, one state, one knowledge system, and one view of science. Can nations adequately organize the emergent differences being created, the vision a world of many cultures – a gaia of civilizations – of an ecology of different worldviews?

Proudly negotiating the tensions between the local and the universal (between feudal and empire/world church), even if the passport office remains its power to deport, the nation-state as the sole holder of power has entered a terminal process. Whether it will take 50 years or a hundred, we know well that revolutions from below (nongovernmental organizations), revolutions from above (international institutions), revolutions from capital (globalism), revolutions of culture (new ways of seeing self and other, of boundaries) and revolutions of technology (air travel, the Net) all make the nation-state deeply problematic. Of course, the Hansons, the Milosevics, the brahmins and mullahs will not disappear. With no place to hold onto, they will fight until the bitter end, hoping that enough of us will retain sentiments of ethno-nationalism, of patriotism (and be willing to kill for it). They will hope to transform the quite legitimate concerns of individuals fearing change, corporate control, foreigners and loss of jobs into a politics of exclusion, of attacking the other.

Governance
What world is likely to result from these historical revolutions in governance? There is a range of historical-structural possibilities. Either one religious system dominates creating a world church, temple or mosque or one nation dominates creating a world empire. The former is unlikely, as reality has become too fragmented. Neither christians nor muslims (or buddhists) are likely to convert en mass tomorrow, even if Jesus, the madhi, or amida buddha return. The problem of universally recognizing God is not likely to be solved in the year 2000, even if the Redeemer does return.

A world empire is difficult given the democratic impulse. The only nation currently vying for the job is caught by its own democratic participatory language. Disney and Microsoft are far more likely victors than the US state department, irrespective of what conspiracy theorists in Belgrade, Baghdad, Beijing and Kuala Lumpur believe.

But can the world capitalist economy – the third alternative – remain the hegemonic definer of identity? It has flourished because the economy has been global, expanding, while identity has been national, fixed, and thus has politics. With the nation in steep trouble, can a world economy with national identity politics continue? Localist – the fourth alternative – movements hope to capture the spaces being created by the loss of national identity. However, in their attempts to be authentically local, to challenge corporatism, they find themselves forced to link with other environmental, spiritual, labor, organizations. Cyberlobbying, the politics on the Net, too, forces them into global space indeed, all forces do. Localism only succeeds when it becomes global.

Globalisms

In this sense while we are half-way through the first phase of globalization, that is, of capital, phase two is likely to be the globalization of labor, Marx’s dream all along. If capital can travel freely, why not labor? Already, elite intellectual labor does, and soon other forms will as well. At the very least information the conditions of labor will via “the smart products method” become global. The next wave will be the multicultural. News – not the details of reporting but what we report about – will begin to flow not just downwards from Hollywood, New York and London upward as well. Already, the best newspapers are those that include the feeds of many cultures. The Pakistani paper, The News, for example, far exceeds any reporting The New York Times might manage, largely, as it is weaker, and thus to survive gets feeds from Arab, South Asian, East Asian and Western sources. Not just news, but ideas, language, culture is beginning to filter all around, and even if Murdock is likely to standardize, still standardization is being challenged throughout the world. Customization is the likely future, technology allows it so, and postmodernism provides the cultural legitimacy for it. The search for authenticity in postmodern times, even if largely about style, forces a questioning of one’s once presumed universal values. To question: the male, western, technocratic, linear, capitalist basis of reality. History books (why are muslims seen only as threats, why is the Pacific, the water continent seen as irrelevant?) and children’s stories are all being deconstructed (why are witches constantly portrayed as evil?) and seen as particular of a worldview (Europe defining what is true, good and beautiful), and not as universal. Facts come to be through narratives, or at the very least, what meanings we give to the facts change.

The final phase of globalization is likely to be a world security force, inklings of which we are already seeing (although certainly still within the hegemonic framework).

With empire, one church, localism and a world capitalist economy around nation-states nearly impossible to sustain, what this means is that we will soon move to a world government system with strong localist tendencies, with thousands of bio-regions. The guiding ethic will be a move from strategy as our foremost paradigm to that of health and healing (of negotiating reality, difference, of reconciliation, and of having a big stick, ie the world security force) along with a neo-Magna Carta guaranteeing the right of culture, language and income.

The details are terribly important and burdensome, and how the Chinese will get along with the Americans is difficult to predict (just as the modern era was not possible to articulate from the feudal), but the structural forces are such that the only solution to the future is that. Many hope for a world governance system with strong localism. But this is unlikely, as localist systems alone do not survive because they get taken over. It is not love alone that will create this new world system.

Aspirations

That said, aspirations for what people all over the world fall into three scenarios.

The first is the globalist scenario. A jet plane for each and every; the capacity to speak many languages; multicultural; postmodern; Net-hip, and no more scarcity.

The second is the organic scenario. Community and connecting with others is far more important. Relationship is not just about communication but it is a way of knowing. Slowing time down from the fast, always-one, always-everywhere, globalist world is a priority. Good sex, good food, and regular exercise and meditation also rank high. The image of the future is that of self-reliance electronically and spiritually (through the medium of microvita, Indian Philosopher P. R. Sarkar’s notion of the basic units of life).

The third scenario is the collapse, the return of Mad Max, the end of capitalism, tidal waves galore, escaped viruses (of the internet and biological types), airborne AIDs, and thank god for it since we have collectively sinned – mixed species, mixed marriages – forgotten what reality is really about. The aspiration dimension is that after the collapse, a moral order, with a strong father figure, returns.

There is a generational aspect to the future as well. Generation X is concerned about ethics, about the environment, about others. The globalist scenario is loved by the .Com generation. Growing up where difference is essential, they surf culture and the Net.

But there is more to the globalist scenario than just the freeing of capital and information. Indeed, that is why many believe we the transformation we are witnessing is far more fundamental than the victory of liberalism, the end of industrialism, and even the ascension of progress and the West.
End of Nature

For the first time we are on the verge of changing nature. Technology is the verge of the rapid redesign of evolution itself. Imagine a hand, writes information evolutionist Susantha Goonatilake, wearing a glove, writing with a pen. The hand represents the stability of evolution, our body constant over time; the glove represents culture, our meaning systems, our protection, our method of creating shared spaces and creating a difference between us and nature; and the pen, technology, representing our effort to create, to improve, to change culture and nature. While the traditional tension was between technology and culture with evolution “stable”, now the pen (technology) has the potential to turn back on the hand and redesign it, making culture but technique, a product of technology. Thus the traditional feedback loop of culture and technology with biology the stable given is about to be transformed.

Evolution ceases to be something that happens to us but becomes directed. Add the Internet revolution, and suddenly we have information and genetic technologies or IGTs. Through the web we’ll be able to order children. But isn’t this far far away? Not say geneticists such as Leroy Hood, William Gates Professor of Molecular Biotechnology and Bioengineering. He argues that we are in the midst of a dramatic paradigm shift in the sciences, specifically the ascendancy of biology and the movement from hypothesis-based science to discovery science. Once the human genome is mapped, the first stage of application will be genetic prevention, the friendly visit to the local genetic doctor (or genedoctor.com). This is something we all would agree to, well, except the disabled, who now find themselves in a double whammy, says David Turnbull, made irrelevant by globalism, now they will be soon as the genetic discards of history, to be forever removed, like a bulldozed slum. But as with all slums, they will come back, and in far more problematic forms.

But we can now engineer intelligence, that is, genetic enhancement, making us all smarter and thus be able to deal with the externalities we create. If needed, we can make some of us stupider to do the dirty work. But ideally the dirty work will be done by the robots. And if the robots are not quite ready, the traditional solution of immigration remains. Indeed, for the West with rapid ageing soon to challenge economic growth, immigration will decide with OECD nations prosper and which decline. The ones that let in young Asians and Africans will have bright futures, others will slip away, lag behind. However, along with immigration there are two other possibilities. One: increase production through the Net. Two: create new humans, genetically.

Thus, after genetic enhancement, genetic recreation. The issue of whether we should do this, that is, ethics, unfortunately remains the endnote to the science and technology revolution. When you are changing the very nature of nature, why let a bit of ethics comes in the way between old and new species.

And ultimately that is what it will soon be about. Once genetic inequality becomes a main issue – that is the right to genetic enhancement – the world state will come in and regulate not if we should have baby factories but that they are safe and nicely air-conditioned.

Can anything be done to avoid the baby-factory future, or is the conflation between Big Science, Big Business, State, and our own materialistic urges so strong that the future will be one where we exist in not an ecology of types of life, but one where “we” as natural humans will be circumspect. Doyne Farmer of the famous Sante Fe Institute describes it in these apocalyptic terms:

If we fail in our task as creators (creating our successors), they may indeed be cold and malevolent. However, if we succeed, they maybe glorious, enlightened creatures that far surpass us in their intelligence and wisdom. It is quite possible that, when the conscious beings of the future look back on this earth, we will be most noteworthy, not in and of ourselves, but rather for what we gave rise to. Artificial life is potentially the most beautiful creation of humanity.
Along with Nature, reality, truth and sovereignty are equally contentious.

Reality once given, is now made. As we learn in Blade Runner, the toy maker to the question of what do you do, says. “I make friends,” meaning not relationship and communion but the manufacture of others.

Once we knew what was real, now we have the virtual. What is maya and what is not. The Matrix ceases to be entertainment becoming a profound critique of what is to be.

Truth has already been deconstructed. Postmodernists, feminists, postcolonial theorists have rampaged across the globe questioning the epistemic basis of modernity, leaving all in tatters.

And sovereignty is already long gone, not just of the nation, but of the self. We have become many selves, many identities, numerous communities. While some hold on to the 9/5 job, living in the Pleasantville of work and home, others have become far more fluid, traveling in many spaces, many cultures.

Genetics or microvita?

Where then is home? Where in the future is our resting space? And who will create it? Will it be those who are part of the current system, those in the Continued growth model of the future? Government leaders and corporate CEOs? Or will it be the “bedouins”, those imagining a more organic connected future, those outside of official power. Will the current bedouin members and members of the social movements create a new future. Will their challenge for new rights (for humans, animals and plants), for gender partnerships (womanists and feminists), for spirituality (seeking to transcend religion and secularism, finding meaning in a lived relationship with the infinite) and for social activism (a moral not amoral economy and politics) and against 500 years of continued growth be successful?

But instead of the bedouins, the “others” – steeped in ancient cyclical time – the likely future remains that of speed, the teflon postmodern self, and our genetic recreated offspring, the double helix generation to come. They imagine a future with no limits and have the wealth to create it.

Are there any limits to the technological changes ahead? Gordon Moore, founder of Intel – and Moore’s law (that the number of devices on a piece of silicon doubles every year or two), when asked about the pace of change says:

We’re working with feature sizes that are so small, they’re hard to imagine—you could say that the features are about the size of a … virus, …We currently use visible light to etch components on the semiconductors, but now we’re getting down to wavelengths for which essentially no materials are transparent. You can’t make lenses any more. We’re looking at three major alternatives to go beyond what we do now—X-rays, electron beams, and something called extreme ultraviolet … The next problem we run across is the fact that materials are made out of atoms. I don’t see a way around that one.

But perhaps the solution to these limits will be from outside the material, outside our expectations. P.R. Sarkar writes that the very nature of reality must be ideational and physical at the same time – microvita. At the crudest form they are viruses, at the deepest, they are pockets of energy that can be used to direct evolution that can carry information. Like the geneticists, he believes we are directing evolution but it is being directed through our creative collective unconscious, through our aspirations for a different world. These aspirations become not mere visions of dreamers but the program for, at least, our social, if not, biological evolution.
Which future will it be then? Incremental Change? The globalist artificial society? The organic global community? Or a collapse followed by a strong moral order?
Will the technocrats or humanists win this one, or are we creating a world where neither one has the current metaphorical capacity to recognize the future?

Dr. Sohail Inayatullah. Professor, Center for Future Studies, Tamkang University, Taiwan; Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of the Sunshine Coast; and the Communication Center, Queensland University of Technology.

The Apocalypse Never Need Be Nigh (2000)

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So assert Australia’s leading futurists Dr Peter Ellyard and Dr Sohail Inayatullah  following gloom’n’doom predictions from futurists of the northern hemisphere. 

London School of Economics professor Ian Angel has written that there simply will not be a human race by the year 3000 because the world already is overpopulated. Geoff Jenkins, head of Britain’s Hadley Centre of climate predictions has offered the gloomy prospect of melted ice sheets flooding out whole countries if the world continues to use fossil fuels.

 Dr Ellyard, Executive director of Preferred Futures, Melbourne, chairman of the Universal Greening Group, former Executive director of the Australian Commission of the Future refuses to stoop to such grim prognoses. “What’s the point of being a futurist if you cannot be positive?” he says. 

One day he thinks that people will be taking degrees in futurism. Meanwhile, this abstract occupation which melds economics, conservation, politics and philosophy, suddenly has found a footing in the world realisation that the future has arrived and it is called 2000. 

Perhaps the first sign of global cohesion emerged in the New Year’s Eve celebrations of the world, beamed instantly through satellite communications from and to every corner of the globe. 

Suddenly, it was the global village party. 

According to Dr Ellyard, such phenomena are just beginning and, if humanity plays its cards right, we can not only treat our global ills but create a new“planetary culture”. 

It will not be simple, but it is achievable. 

This now is “the century of the planet” and it heralds the time for many major changes of the ways in which we do things. 

“Dr Ellyard calls the new path “Planetism” which, he says, succeeds Post Modernism. “The Earth is becoming more interdependent and co-operative,” he asserts. “This new planetary culture is being moulded by a combination of political, economic, technological and ecological forces of great power which are all working synergistically to create it. “My grandparents grew up identifying themselves with Western Australian and New South Wales rather than Australia. My grandchildren will identify themselves with their planet as much as their nation.”  

Thus does Dr Ellyard, former director of the South Australian department for the Environment  and director of the State’s now defunct Ministry of Technology, speak of a global trading system, one which has learned from the protests of Seattle’s World Trade Conference. He sees a positive in the United Nations which, while still imperfect, has potential in the role of planetary peacemaker and peacekeeper. 

“The world is also being united by ecologically driven fear, fear of global ecological disaster,” he says. 

“For centuries fear has divided humanity, now is  beginning to unite it … fear of unpredictable climatic change and an ozone-depleted atmosphere is forcing people to think 40 years ahead, and to co-operate on an unprecedented level.” 

Dr Ellyard, who has worked as a senior consultant to the United National Environment Program, says Australia’s stand on emissions has been shameful and that priorities should move away from working with the coal industry to developing alternative energy. 

He thinks the world has been too much concerned with survival and not with what he calls “thrival” , which has higher aspirations. “We are a means-to-an-end society but we must really focus on our destination because if you know the destination you may find other means of transportation.”  

Dr Ellyard believes in the division of an old“cowboy culture” of individualism, independence, autocracy, patriarchy, unsustainable lifestyles, conflict resolution through confrontation, reliance on defence and a sense of humanity against nature and a new “spaceship culture” which is based on communication, interdependence, democracy, sustainable lifestyle, gender equality, conflict resolution through negotiation and reliance on security. We must leave cowboys behind and board the spaceship for a successful transition to 3000. 

Author Dr Sohail Inayatullah, of Tamkang University and a visiting academic at Queensland University of Technology, sympathises with such thinking, commenting that while the year 2000 represents hope because humanity has survived nuclear accidents, biological warfare and asteroids, it also has been an era of immense growth, albeitwith failures in distribution which have the world’s richest 225 people with assets exceeding the combined income of over the poorest 47 per cent of the world’s population. 

Both futurists look to solutions based on education and communication and lifelong learning as opposed to the pressure cooker education of children being just one strategy. Both believe that some form of world governance is likely. 

Dr Inayatullah sees four possible structures for future governance: a world empire run by one national or civilisation, a dominant religious system creating a world temple, church or mosque, a world economy or localist mini-systems devoted to retaining regional language, culture, environment and economy. 

“A world economy, in a nation state context, is our current model,” he says. “However, since the nation-state is increasingly porous, the world economy/nation state model is now unstable. It appears that the latter alternative, a world government with mini-cultural systems, is quite possible in the mid-term.” 

Dr Inayatullah notes that with the USA 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 30or 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,” he says. 

“The long-term net result of multiculturalism maybe an entirely new set of identity arrangements,” While information technology is offering us a single, highly-networked world,  everyone on earth soon will be able to participate in global events. “Teleconferencing, e-mail, multi-media workstations and faxes are only some of the new tools of planetary co-operation and dialogue,” says Dr Ellyard.

“New computer software is now assisting cooperative dialogue and decision-making independent of space and time.” 

“We know more about what is going on all over the planet than ever before. John Donne’s famous of the year 1620 has never been more true. 

Donne wrote: 

No man is an Island, entire of itself;

Every man is part of the continent, a part of the main;

If a clod be washed away by the sea,

Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were,

As well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were;

Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind;

And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;

It tolls for thee.           

 Dr Inyatullah cites future images wherein genetic engineering and human cloning may be things of great beauty and achievement, correctly applied. He cites a world where not only humans and animals roam, but also chimeras, cyborgs, robots.  “The key issue is how will we treat them.” 

The future, therefore, is not so much “given” or created by God or nature, but made by human intervention in evolution and in the creation of new forms of life. 

Reflects Dr Inayatullah: “Our future generations may look back at us and find us distant relatives.” 

Samela Harris

The Advertiser, January 4, Adelaide, 2000

De-masculization of the Future and of Futures Studies (1999)

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By Ivana Milojević

From Verdandi to Belldandy: the Goddess of the Present Wishes a Better Future

The Reality
The majority of the liberal, or `progressive’ futurists today acknowledge the fact that Futures Studies – a not yet recognized field of enquiry within traditional disciplinary scientific divisions – have been dominated by one-civilizational view of time, reality and space. The futures of non-Western people and countries have been colonized in a similar way to their presents or pasts.[1] But even among the most progressive futurist there is a very strong underlying belief that, somehow, futures studies are at least gender-free. These futurists believe that futures studies are field in which personal values and attributes transcend polarized gender divisions. Some of them would rather belong to `people’s movement’ then to one which is part of and belongs to a particular gender group, or they describe the future like a `loo’ with separate entries but with the inside the same for everyone.

This reminds me of the debates and realities in my own country, and the efforts to transcend particular national identities while creating a new, Yugoslav one. Not surprisingly, it was always easier for the largest national group within the former Yugoslavia, the Serbs, to have their identity changed, as they did not feel that this new identity would deny their previous one.

On the other hand, marginal national groups, not just in Yugoslavia, often see the overlapping globalizing identities as a threat to their own, as they realize they would always be outnumbered. The reason why I, and some other women futurists, believe we should still occasionally work within `women’s groups’ is because within futures studies – especially where money and status are involved – women are outrageously outnumbered. The big umbrella of futures studies should be big enough to cover eveyone’s issues and concerns, but in reality, the famous futures fork is always leaning towards the male side and masculinity.

What is even more disturbing is the fact that most women futurists within `people movements’ work within accepted styles, on problems and issues as defined by masculinist concerns. This is, again, not surprising. Past and even present events teach us that if women `come out’ as feminist, or try to discuss women’s own views on future, they usually come under vicious attack.   One example is a special report in The Futurist on `Women’s Preferred Futures’.[2] This report was initially included in the journal as a result of women futurists complaints that an article in the journal: `Women of the Future: Alternative scenarios’, had been written by a man.[3] Women futurists who sent the letter, Hazel Handerson, Eleonora Masini and Riane Eisler, did not want to `condemn’ the article itself believing it was `well meaning’, but felt that women futurists should had been allowed `to speak for themselves’.[4] This feeling was intensified partly because of one illustration on the same page represented a chained woman.

Behind all the immediate and transparent reasons, the reaction was probably partly intensified as a result of long-term frustration with male domination in the field. Not only are men the greatest experts when it comes to the future in general, or when it comes to the every particular aspect of it, their views and opinions are also consulted when it comes to women’s futures, issues and concerns.

In response to critiques of the representation of women, the World Future Society, which publishes The Futurist, decided to `put up’ with women’s issues, and invited women futurists to `tell their vision of a preferred future’.[5] The section has been `written, edited, typeset, designed, and illustrated solely by women’.[6]  Not long after, this special report came under attack in the letters section. Even though this report asked women futurists what would be their preferred vision for the future, women who contributed were labelled as an `unrealistic bunch’.[7]

The other critique, also by a man, is a paradigmatic critique which follows feminism from its early days: this bunch could not claim to represent the `majority of women’ and instead the average woman should had been asked to `speak for herself’.[8] While it is, of course, perfectly acceptable, that western male futurists can make any generalization or universalistic statements about `the future’, when it comes to women’s futurists visions, `their opinions and prophecies’ are labelled as `self-serving of their own emotional and financial needs’.[9] The writer of the letter suggested that we should instead try to go out and find the average woman, meaning a `mother, homemaker, wife, school volunteer, or factory or office worker’.[10] The only letter sent by a woman, however, labeled one particular aspect of report as `enriching’, as it is gives an alternative to the issue she, in her working life, finds `distressing’.[11]

For most gender-conscious women futurists it is obvious that there is a big discrepancy in the way most people think about future trends and their alternatives, depending on which gendered interests they represent. Feminine alternatives are usually labelled as poor writing, or naive, or without enough substance, or utopian, while masculinist images, especially techno-maniacal and dystopian, are usually seen as realistic, far reaching and logical. It is interesting that especially the darkest images of the future get to be chosen as `realistic’ – somehow, people `take it as axiomatic that fears are realistic and hopes unrealistic’.[12] For feminist futurists it is also obvious that the way to the `future’s loo’ is all high-tech, making-life-easier, on the gentlemen’s side, and far too difficult, naturalized with thorns and bushes, on the ladies side.

The domination of the masculinist images of the future has now reached a new peak. These images are accepted by globalizing popular media, local and global policy planners or even by many liberal futurists. They all give priority and attach higher value to grand historical analyses and issues, and especially concentrate on discussions where power is going next. And this is where a women futurists might rather wish to be on the `other side’, either among `average women’ or among radical feminist separatist groups. Because the power in the `next millennia’ starting with 21C definitely does not seem like it is going in the direction of women. Just take the year 2200 as an example: according to Kurian and Molitor it will be an era in which women own up to 20% of the world’s property (a dramatic increase from the hardly believable 1% as it is apparently today).[13] At the same time, world income received by women will increase from the current 10% to 40%, which would represent a significant increase – if it is realized.[14] Kurian and Molitor, however, do not state on which `facts’ they base their forecasts. In fact, there is an ever increasing gap between rich and poor, and women are, unfortunately, still the majority of the world’s poor.

Posmodernism and the influence of non-Western feminist have changed the way we write and think about `women’ and destabilized previous universalistic conception. However, even though we now accept that the category of `women’ is as diverse and different as category of `men’ or `people’, since there are certain things we, as people, all share, there are also certain things we, as women, still have in common. One of those things is that we (women) all lack the most important resources for liberating ourselves and the future from masculinist domination: resources in time and personal energy. Both time and our energy are shattered over the multiplicity of the tasks necessary for adjustment and survival within patriarchal societies. Furthermore, together with many other marginal groups we lack the initial resources in wealth, education and knowledge, informal networks and even more importantly the will to engage in the power battle. Having said all this, I wish to conclude this section on `realistic’ writing about the future, or the writing which starts `with the trends as they seem to be emerging now, and then speculate on how they might develop’.[15]

Instead, I will now further explore women’s tradition of thinking about and influencing the future, and contemplate how the future could be liberated or de-masculinized.

Women and the future
At present, the fact is that women are not in charge of the future. Although being `practicing’ futurists'[16] women do not decide much about the general future, nor are they expected to. But that was not always so. The importance of looking in the past, for our efforts in thinking about and creating of the future, can be summarized in a famous sentence by Kenneth Boulding: if it exist, it is possible.[17] So even if present trends do not promise much to girls and women of the future, our own ability to also create the future certainly gives us more hope.

The past
The evidence of women’s one time importance when it comes to understanding and creating the future can be easily found in the realm of old and long memories – those expressed in Slav, Greek, Roman, Nordic, Saxon or Indian mythology.

In my own, Slav tradition, there are stories of so called sudjenice (from serbo-croatian word for destiny: sudbina) which are represented as three women in charge of deciding everyone’s personal destiny. They are also known as sudjaje, rodjenice, or rozanice.[18] They arrive when the child is born and decide every particular aspect of her/his future life. Their will can not be changed, but people can try to please them and in that way increase the chances of a positive outcome.

In the Greek tradition, they are The Fates, or Moirae (`cutters-off’, `allotters’), which personify the inescapable destiny of man. Clotho, the spinner, spins the thread at the beginning of one’s life; Atropos, the measurer, weaves thread into the fabric of one’s actions; and Lachesis, cutter, snips thread at the conclusion of one’s life.[19] The process is absolutely unalterable, and gods as well as women and men have had to submit to it.[20] As goddesses of fate, the Moirae `necessarily knew the future and therefore were regarded as prophetic deities: thus their ministers were all the soothsayers and oracles’.[21] The Roman equivalent were Fortunae, or (apparently in the medieval period) three Parcae (`those who bring forth the child’): Nona, Decuma and Morta. Most religious traditions call the Fates `weavers’ and latin word destino means that which is woven. [22]

In the Nordic tradition they are called Norns. There are also three Norns: Urd, representing fate, Verdandi, representing being, and Skuld, representing necessity. Three Norns could change into swans for ease of travel but they could have been usually found near the roots of the ash tree Yggdrasil. Yggdrasil had tree huge roots: one stretched to the underground spring of Urd (earth); the second reached to the well of Mimir, the well which was the source of all wisdom; and, the third went to Niflheim, the underworld presided over by the goddess Hel.[23]

Each one of three Norns knows and is accredited with a particular province: Urd knows the past, Verdandi the present, and Skuld the future. In fact, it seems that the only deity which was especially in charge of the future, is not a deity, but a deitess, Skuld. According to Barbara Walker all of Scandinavia and also Scotland was named after her, Skuld, or `as Saxons called her, Skadi’.[24]

The Saxon Weird sisters also represented the past, present, and future: become, becoming, and shall be.[25] It seems that Norns and their equivalents were based on the great Indo-European Goddess as Creator, Preserver and Destroyer and are in some ways close to the Indian goddess Kali.[26]  Kali also symbolizes `eternal time and hence she both gives life and destroys it’.[27]  Mother Kali continually ruled the Wheel of Time (Kalacakra), where all the life-breath of the world was fixed.[28]  In most archaic traditions, `the deciding of men’s fates was a function of the Goddess’.[29]  Goddesses were also often creators of the universe: for example, in Sumerian cosmogony the ultimate origin of all things was the primeval sea personified as the goddess Nammu – the goddess who gave birth to the male sky god, An, and the female earth goddess, Ki.[30]

Past and present
In patriarchal times the Fates became `witches’: Shakespeare’s three witches were called Weird Sisters (adapted from Saxon tradition).[31]  The Christian church appropriated this ancient beliefs and transformed the trinity of She-Who-Was, She-Who-Is, and She-Who-Will Be into its holy trinity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.[32]  As God became male so did time, so did the future. Men decided which parts of our past tradition deserved to be recorded[33] and passed onto future generations; they decided which direction we should choose next. From many secret symbols which celebrated the power of women and female principles, the symbol of Venus (representing love and sexuality) was chosen for women. If we try to deconstruct this symbol we can see that its essence is in the cross below, the cross which, especially if surrounded with the circle, has traditionally been the symbol for the Earth. Men’s symbol, the sign of Mars (god of war) has its essence in the arrow: a symbol often viewed as a phallic symbol, as a weapon of war. In the male symbol the arrow is pointed towards the upright direction, which is not surprisingly also how we draw trends and movements toward the future. The present understanding of women is in their role as conservers, deeply rooted in the ground, with their essence in the body. Men are the ones who transcend their mind, and are in charge of the future, as they are the ones who bring about political changes and preach radically new prophecies.

I said it is not surprising that we draw future trends in the same way we draw the symbol for God of war as this is exactly the direction we are heading toward. Each year we face more and more people being killed, especially civilians in wars between countries, and in wars on the streets. We are fighting against `mother Nature’ and against our own, inevitably animal bodies. Our most popular images of the future are the ones of war games, of the future with ever more powerful weapons and ever more powerful enemies. Conquest in the future is as important as the conquest now, and it is both the ultimate conquest of old enemies and battle for life and death with new ones (aliens, cyborgs, mutants, androgynes). This has resulted in the sad fact that, according to the recent UNESCO study, the killer robot played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, or the `Terminator’, `was the most popular character among the world’s children’.[34] The survey, which was billed as the first worldwide study of violence in the media, said 88 percent of children around the world knew Terminator, who was `a global icon’ and that more than half the children – raised in environments of violence – wanted to be like him.[35]

Recent present and the future
Such an idiotic obsession with death, killing and self-destruction has had the impact of awakening worshipers of peace, nature and tranquility. If Raine Eisler is right, time is right for yet another shift in the power battle between the female and the male principle. Women, say Aburdene and Naisbitt, have lately evolved `into a more complex state of wholeness’, successfully absorbing positive masculine traits, and will lead the way to the future.[36]

As a part of this process many feminists have tried to revive the Goddess as a symbol of this power shift. The reason behind the Goddess reawakening is empowerment: as `long as people visualize God as male, women are diminished and inferior’.[37]

But this time it might be much more difficult for the Goddess to express its female principle. For postmodernists, essence as `women’ (or female) and `men’ (or male) does not exist as such any more. In fact there are hardly any criteria left which would suffice to describe two different and opposite genders. Criteria like appearance can be challenged by transdressers and transvestites. Sexual orientation has always been problematic as a criterion since homosexuality among humans has (probably) always been present. Thanks to modern medical science, the natural characteristics of the sexes can be transformed and changed, women becoming men and vice versa. Woman (or man) as a social category is also problematic since any universalist statement about woman (man) can be questioned from the position of epistemological (and group) minorities and different perspectives. The Reawakened Goddess of the Future will have to work rather in a context of future multiple-gender diversities then in the context of traditional female-male polarity.

But this is not the only challenge the awakened Goddess is facing. She ruled in the societies which belong to a totally different historical context. The renewed symbols of Goddesses are also symbols which make much more sense within the context of agricultural societies. The cyclical understanding of time, reclaimed as women’s, as opposed to a linear patriarchal one, has probably resulted from observations about cyclical changes within nature – observations obviously extremely important for agricultural societies. It is difficult to revive the ancient cults of earth and goddess worship in times when less and less women live by the dictums of their own natural cycles, where enormous number of world’s women live in cities, and where reproduction within women’s bodies might soon become obsolete – several thousands years of masculinist rites and gods notwithstanding. Donna Haraway senses this change while declaring she would rather be a cyborg then a goddess.[38]

And our own Norn Skuld does not sit under the secret ash tree any more, but in front of the computer, with her sister Urd.[39] While surfing the Net we can visit `The Sacred Shrine of Skuld-sama’ where we are welcomed to an information resource and place of worship dedicated to Skuld, the technologically-minded young Goddess from ‘Aa! Megamisama’. The Skuld of Today is 12 Earth years old, 150 cm tall, with brown eyes and black hair, while her vital measurements are se-cr-et! She is a second class goddess with limited license. Her domain is still the future but her travel medium these days is water. We are also informed that she likes her older sister Belldandy. And 131’s Ice cream. Besides eating ice cream her favorite activity is to build all sorts of mechanical devices. Her best inventions include Banpei-kun, the anti-Marller defense robot and Skuld’s Own Debugging Machine, a modified rice cooker that specializes in catching bugs in a manner similar to the Ghostbusters’ Ghost Trap. She is still a very strong-willed girls displaying sometimes fiery temper, and is in charge of `debugging’ the Yggdrasil mainframe up in the Heavens, as well as the occasional bug that appears on the Surface. She has her own Image, Music and Sound, Literature, and Movie World Library, her own Desktop Themes (Skuld backdrops, cursors, a game, and more!) and, of course, her own Mailing List.

Women as practicing futurists
However, it is not only in the distant past or in the emerging future that women thought and think about or tried and try to influence the future. Even during the peak of the patriarchy there are some individual women who were trying to change gender relationships. At least, women have always been `practicing futurists’. And they have always been active within the grass-root movements. At the same time though, women did not and do not decide much about the general future. Women’s encounter with the future is reserved for us in order to better care for future generations and present households. Therefore women have to know something about the future, but not too much. They should organize local networks to support global political and economical processes, but should not intervene within the essence of the latter. Even old and traditional women’s activities directed towards influencing the future (through their role of witches or fates) were primarily local, personal, family and community-oriented.

The feminist dictum of the personal being political suddenly gave us the legitimation to bringing what has always been extremely important to us (personal relationships, family, community) into the societal level. For example, the issue of violence against women is less and less considered as a private matter, an event which happens and should remain behind the closed door. Rather, it is seen as a global issue: and the actions in prevention and reduction of violence are therefore being conducted at the world level as well.

The legitimization of `women’s issues’ have created the opportunity for many women futurists to write about not only local but also global futures directions. Many are envisioning radically different future societies and suggesting feminist (or women’s) alternatives to patriarchy. Their images can easily been labelled as utopian: for example, Boulding’s vision of gentle/androgynous society or Eisler’s partnership model/gylany. However, the images brought to us by the work of Boulding, Eisler and feminist fiction writers, utopian or feasible, are extremely important for the de-masculization of the future. Because what we can imagine, we can create.

Elise Boulding, Raine Eisler and feminist utopias
Elise Boulding’s image of the `gentle society’ is an image of a society situated within decentralist (and demilitarized) but yet still interconnected and interdependent world.[40] The creators of the gentle society will be androgynous human beings (she brings examples from history in the images of Jesus, Buddha and Shiva), people who combine qualities of gentleness and assertiveness in ways that fit neither the typical male nor the typical female roles. The coming of the gentle society will, according to Boulding, happen through three main leverage points: family, early-childhood school setting (nursery school and early elementary school) and through community. Boulding believes that both women fiction writers and `ordinary’ women imagine and work in a direction of creating a more localized society, where technology will be used in a sophisticated and careful way to ensure humanized, interactive, nurturant and nonbureaucratic societies. Through women’s triple role of breeder-feeder-producer women can bring radically different imaging and are therefore crucial for the creation of more sustainable and peaceful world.

For Raine Eisler – in our nuclear/electronic/biochemical age – transformation towards a partnership society is absolutely crucial for the survival of our species.[41]  Since today, due to many technological changes, our species’ possess technologies as powerful as the processes of nature, if we do not wish to destroy all life on this planet we have to change the dominator (patriarchal) cultural cognitive maps. In gylany (as opposed to androcracy) linking instead of ranking is the primary organization principle. It lacks institutionalization and idealization of violence and stereotypes of masculinity and femininity. More equal partnerships exist between women and men in both the so-called private and public spheres and there is a more generally democratic political and economic structure. She also envisions gylany as society in which stereotypical `feminine’ values can be fully integrated into the operational system of social guidance.

Boulding’s and Eisler’s imaging of future societies corresponds in many ways to feminist fictions writings. It also corresponds to most grass-roots women’s activities and to women’s involvement within the peace or green social movements. For Boulding, education is one of the most important social institutions, crucial for our future. Similarly, in most feminist utopias, education and motherhood are not only extremely respected, sometimes they are the main purpose for the existence of the utopian society in question. There are also some other common themes in feminist utopias: future societies tend to live in `peace’ with nature and have some sort of sustainable growth; they are generally less violent than present ones; families seldom take a nuclear form but are more extended (often including relatives and friends); communal life is highly valued; societies are rarely totalitarian; oppressive and omnipotent governmental and bureaucratic control is usually absent, while imagined societies tend to be either `anarchical’ or communally managed.[42]

On the other hand, the masculinist colonization of the future brings about images of the totalitarian futures societies, societies with some sort of feudal social organization, and the ones in which the `progress’ is defined in terms of technological developments. Feminist writings about the future might be `naive’ or too utopian but mainstream images are rather evil and dangerous. Some of the elements within feminist imaging of the future are rather reminiscence to the times when gender relationships were more equal – in past agricultural and matrilocal societies. But even with all the recent technological developments there is nothing in the world (except our patriarchal cultural cognitive maps) to prevent us from giving priority to education and parenting instead of to the corporate and military sector. We can use new technologies rather to repair environmental damage then to keep on increasing it. We can use them to improve health and happiness of future generations rather then to steal the future from them. New technologies can also help create the system of direct democracy or connections between World Government and local communities. The Net can enable equal access to social groups previously discriminated because of their dis/ability, gender or race. It can help celebrate, understand and learn about diversity, difference and `the other’ rather then making our songs unison.

The De-masculization of the futures studies
If futures studies were to adopt the work within `feminine’ guiding principles they would most likely put priorities on the futures of education, parenting, community, relationships or health – the real grand issues! The method most commonly used would not be forecasting or trend analyses but rather backcasting – and the work with most disadvantaged groups in order to empower them. Futures research would always have gender differences in mind, from deciding which problems are going to be investigated, to research design, collection and interpretation of data. Futures research would not only acknowledge the pervasive influence of gender but would also be concerned with its ethical implications. [43]

Sometimes it is quite easy to make necessary changes. For example, the sentence `A host of new fertility treatments now enable barren women to have a much-wanted child'[44] should read `A host of new fertility treatments now enable childless couples to have a much-wanted child’. First is the language of the patriarchy, where it was always women who were blamed for the lack of children in the marriage and where the responsibility for child bearing and rearing was solely women’s. The second sentence is more in accordance to present knowledge in medicine about causes and reasons behind infertility – men’s inability to father the child being equally the cause of the problem. It is also the language of potentially emerging egalitarian relationships between genders and societies where parenting and education of children are going to be respected more -both by men and by general society.

The de-masculization of the future and futures studies seems very radical and most likely it will be a rather slow and difficult process. But the change needed is no more radical then the change which transformed Weird Sisters into witches, triple Goddess into Holy Trinity, and Verdandi into Belldandy. The emerging change might be utopian, but it is possible.

Ivana Milojevic, c/o Communication Centre, QUT, PO BOX 2434, Brisbane, Qld 4001

Ivana Milojevic, born in 1967. in Novi Sad, Yugoslavia, now temporarily lives in Brisbane, Australia. Her interest and research are in the area of women’s studies, future’s studies and sociology. She has several articles on issues dealing with gender and the future, including `Learning from Feminist Futures’ in David Hicks and Rick Slaughter, (eds), 1998 World Yearbook For Education, Kogan Page, London; and `Towards a Knowledge Base for Feminist Futures Studies’, in Rick Slaughter (ed), The Knowledge Base of Futures Studies, Vol. 3. DDM, Melbourne, 1996.

[1]. Zia Sardar, `The Problem’, Seminar 460, December 1997, pp. 12-19; Sohail Inayatullah, `Listening to Non-Western Perspectives’, in David Hicks and Richard Slaughter (eds), World Yearbook of Education 1998. Kogan Page, London, 1998, pp. 55-69.

[2]. The Futurist, 31(3), May-June 1997, pp. 27-39.

[3]. The Futurist, 30(3), May-June 1996, pp. 34-38.

[4]. The Futurist, 30(5), September-October 1996, p. 59.

[5]. Ibid.

[6]. The Futurist, 31(3), May-June 1997, pp. 27-39.

[7]. The Futurist, 31(5), September-October 1997, p.2.

[8]. Ibid.

[9]. Ibid.

[10]. Ibid.

[11]. Ibid.

[12]. Elise Boulding, Kenneth E. Boulding, The Future: Images and Processes, Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, 1995, p.100.

[13]. George Kurian, Molitor Graham T T, Encyclopedia of the Future, Simon & Schuster Macmillan, New York, 1996, p. 400.

[14]. Ibid.

[15]. The Futurist, 31(5), September-October 1997, p.2.

[16]. Elise Boulding, The Underside of History: A View of Women through Time, Westview Press, Boulder, 1976, p. 781.

[17]. Elise Boulding, Kenneth E. Boulding, The Future: Images and Processes.

[18]. Also narancnici, orisnice (Bulgarian) or sudicki (Czech). Spasoje Vasiljev, Slovenska mitologija, (Slav mythology), Velvet, Beograd, 1996; Dusan Bandic, Narodna Religija Srba u 100 pojmova, (100 Notions in Serbian Folk Religion), Nolit, Beograd, 1991.

[19]. Robert E. Bell, Women of Classical Mythology, Oxford University Press, New York, p. 310; Michael Grant and John Hazel, Gods and Mortals in Classical Mythology, G.& C. Merriam Company, Springfield, Massachusetts, 1973, p. 175. Due to my `broken’ English I was surprised not to be able to find in these books any reference from ancient Nordic or Indian Civilization (I was not surprised there was no reference from Slav tradition as our tradition rarely gets mentioned). Then I saw a book on non- classical mythology and thought: `How interesting, what  contemporary mythology might be?’. My biggest surprise was that I saw references on classic and ancient Indian, Chinese, Nordic, even a little bit on Slav mythology. Only then I realized that only mythology from Greece and Rome deserves the name and the category of classic.

[20]. Robert Bell, ibid.

[21]. Ibid.

[22]. Barbara G. Walker, The Woman’s Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects, Harper & Row, San Francisco, 1988, p. 158.

[23]. Ibid., p. 460.

[24]. Ibid., p. 267.

[25]. Ibid., p. 266.

[26]. Ibid., p. 267.

[27]. Margaret and James Stutley, Harper’s Dictionary of Hinduism, Harper & Row, New York, 1977, p. 137.

[28]. Barbara Walker, Ibid., p. 16.

[29]. Ibid., p.36.

[30].Roy Willis, World Mythology, Henry Holt and Company, New York, 1993, p. 62.

[31]. Barbara Walker, ibid., p. 43.

[32]. Ibid.

[33]. One example is previously mentioned World Mythology, by Roy Willis. Although the author states that `the goddesses of Egyptian mythology are often more formidable than the male deities’ (p. 50) he does not allow them nearly as much space. He also dedicates the special session on `Powerful Goddesses’ (according to the tradition of `Women Question’) only after many pages of description of male Gods.

[34]. The Courier-mail, Brisbane, Saturday, February 21, 1998, p.29.

[35]. Ibid.

[36]. Patricia Aburdene and John Naisbitt, Megatrends for Women, Villard  Books, New York, 1992, p. 262.

[37]. Ibid., p. 244.

[38]. Donna Haraway, `A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,’ in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, Routledge, New York, 1991, p. 181.

[39]. http:/www.auburn.edu/-weissas/shrine

[40]. Elise Boulding, The Underside of History: A View of Women through Time, Westview Press, Boulder, 1976; Elise Boulding, Women: The Fifth World, Foreign Policy Association, Headline series, 1980; Elise Boulding, Building a Global Civil Culture: Education for an Interdependent World, Teachers College Press, New York, 1988; Elise Boulding, Women in the Twentieth Century World, Sage Publications, New York, 1977.

[41]. Riane Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future, HarperCollins Publishers, San Francisco, 1987; Riane Eisler, Sacred Pleasure, HarperCollins Publishers, San Francisco, 1996; Riane Eisler, `Cultural Shifts and Technological Phase Changes: The Patterns of History, The Subtext of Gender, and the Choices for Our Future’, in Johan Galtung and Sohail Inayatullah (eds.), Macrohistory and Macrohistorians, Praeger, New York, 1997.

[42]. Francis Bartkowski, Feminist Utopias, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, Nebr,. 1989; Debra Halbert, `Feminist Fabulation: Challenging the Boundaries of Fact and Fiction’, in The Manoa Journal of Fried and Half-Fried Ideas, Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies, Honolulu, 1994.

[43]. Judith A Cook and Mary Margaret Fonow, `Knowledge and women’s interests: Issues of epistemology and methodology in feminist sociological research”, in Joyce McCarl Nielsen (ed.), Feminist Research Methods, Boulder, San Francisco, 1990.

[44]. Seminar, 460, December 1997, p. 13.

Home Alone and Stuck in the Office (1999)

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SOHAIL INAYATULLAH (Australian Financial Review, October 1, 1999).

Far from being fun, working from home may increase domestic pressures and social isolation, writes Sohail Inayatullah.

John Worthington works from home. He saves on petrol and gets to spend more time with his children and his wife. He drives to his inner-city office once or twice a week for meetings with colleagues. A win-win story? Perhaps, perhaps not.

The internet, while making it possible to telecommute, is still much slower at home than at most offices. However, in a decade or so, with information piped through cable (this is ATT’s big gamble) it will become lightning quick.

Also, although individuals like John Worthington no longer spend long lunches with office friends, they do have their new virtual communities: friends from various email groups they are part of. And in the next 10 years, they will not only be able to read their emails, they will be able to see and hear them with v-net (visual net).

And yet all is not quite well. There is no one to help keep the house tidy. At work, any mess was cleaned up overnight. In the morning, the office was immaculate. At home, there is a constant battle between the children’s toys, the partner’s work and your own work.

Endless filing cabinets cannot solve the problem. While working from home offers a great deal of flexibility if the children become sick, work is always staring you in the face.

Moreover, life has become more anonymous. Working from the suburbs often means that the only community is the net. Office friendships, chance lunches with colleagues, and even the office will
disappear.

It will be a lonely life. Yes, the screen no longer flickers, but virtual reality is still virtual.

Digital gurus such as Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Professor Nicholas Negroponte have forgotten, in their rosy forecasts of digital nirvana, that technological change without real institutional change only makes life worse for most.

As author Marshall McLuhan warned two decades ago: “Excessive speed of change isolates already fragmented individuals.” The technology is not the issue: community and relationship is.

For Sharon Jones, the “pros” outweigh the “cons”. She too spends more time with her kids. But she wishes that they had an extended family. The net has allowed the return to the home, but the home is no longer what it used to be.

The neighborhood community does not exist. Mum and Dad are not there to help, they keep on getting sicker, and now are in an old folks home. She wishes she could get them to live with her, but she can barely manage her kids, and her husband does not make things easier insisting on working from home, but doing nothing to help around the house, as that is still a woman’s job

Just as neighbourhood shops disappeared a few years back, malls have now started to go bankrupt.

Internet shopping has reduced their traffic, and now there is nowhere to take the kids (in any case, they prefer their virtual friends). And the email grocer delivery person keeps on changing.
John and Sharon, two only slightly fictitious examples, are our present and future. Yes, we will work from home. Technological advances will let us do so. Globalism will ensure we do so, as it will save government, university and corporations on office space and other infrastructure costs.

Tenure and life-time jobs will disappear and we will be mostly contract workers. In the long term, few of us will actually work.

But the dream of telecommuting will not solve all our problems, largely because home has changed so much.

For men, home was the safe, secure space to retreat to after a hard day’s work. The kids were already in bed, and all that was left to do was eat, wash a few dishes, watch television and try and have sex with one’s wife.

But with working from home, responsibilities will begin to shift. Women will expect and demand that men help with the housework, with parenting. Not just their fair share but equal responsibility. Men will not be able to escape to the office.

While men will only have to upgrade themselves, women will continue to face a difficult and uncertain future.

Michelle Wallace, head of the School of Workplace and Development at Southern Cross University, says: “Women who try and combine work with family are considered by management as not serious about their jobs.

“Studies show that women work the `double shift’ and that men with working wives often do not share half of the domestic/family responsibilities.”

Does this mean that the more things change, the more they stay the same? Technology rearranges some of our work practices, but it does not change deeper-held beliefs of productivity, hard work and “blokism”. Without fundamental change, it only amplifies oppressive practices.

Worse, says Wallace: “The whole move to family-friendly policies [by governments in Europe, for example, especially Sweden] and increasing interface between public and private can also be seen as increasing surveillance of workers’ lives.”

The power of management over the worker expands from the office to the home. While there is a definite shift from blue collar to white collar, and in the next 10 years to no-collar workers, management may soon desire to know what you are wearing underneath that no-collar.

But are there any bright futures in all this?

First, there is an age generation gap. Older managers will try to control workers who begin to telecommute. Productivity will not be enough for them; hours worked remains their measure.
The bonding or teamwork necessary through face-to-face meetings the endless boring office meetings everyone loves to hate will also be an issue for older managers.

But younger people raised on the net might see things differently. Networking relationships less hierarchical, and more based on productivity, excellence and quadrupling the bottom line might matter more.

Generation Xers writes Rosemary Herceg, author of Seven Myths and Realities of Generation X (www.Futurists.net.au) are far more sensitive to issues of gender, environment, social justice and future generations, and the impact of our current politics on the long term.

They are also more comfortable with multi-tasking. This is not just the ability to go from one Windows application to another, but to go from editing and writing to changing nappies; to go from web designing or net commerce, to a lovely afternoon spent with one’s partner while the kids are at daycare (or busy on their own screens, since they will have become screenagers).

This new generation might also begin to rethink the home. This means homes designed not for a 19th century office, with the old teak desk, the single book case, and the quill or Parker pen, but high-tech smart homes and offices, with plenty of space for filing (electronic and paper).

This also means homes that bring the ageing and aged back in. With Australia and other OECD nations rapidly ageing one out of every four will be over 65 in a few decades and the average age will move from the historical 20 to 40, or 50 finding meaningful lives for the aged will be crucial.

Ending the world view that life ends at 40, 50 or 60 will be the first step. Ending the view that one works for 40 years and then mindlessly slips into death, or plays endless golf, will be the next step.

This means that the grand divisions we have had for centuries of the male public sphere and female private sphere will be challenged. The separation of inner city and suburbs will be next. The separation of work and play will follow soon.

An information-based post-industrial cyber era does not only mean that there will be tons more data, or that we will remove ourselves further from the farm; rather it could mean that the divisions of the industrial era are about to collapse.

A high-tech world, where work will intermingle with play, where kids and the aged will play together and communities will once again flourish once tele-decentralisation goes into full swing is quite possible. Once men move back home, they will make sure that there is money for daycare, for creating community at home.

And what of the fancy offices of inner cities? They will become like the steel mills of the industrial era. Tourism relics. Just as the foreman has disappeared from our vocabulary, the office manager, or the university professor or anyone else who needs a captive physical audience to exist will slowly disappear.

Alternatively, the digital era could reinforce managerial power, surveillance and male domination. In response, we will return to a feudal digital era, where the house becomes the man’s digital castle.
In either scenario, real changes are ahead. Welcome to the Wired World.

Alternative Futures of Europe (1999)

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Visions from Young People at the University of Trier, Germany

What will Europe look like in the next 50 years? What are the plausible scenarios? Which are  the preferred? A seminar held on June 23, 1999 at the University of Trier at the Centre for European Studies explored these and other questions.  Facilitated by political scientist and Unesco Chair, Sohail Inayatullah, the seminar intended to help participants gain a sense of power over their own personal and collective futures.

Participants were students at the university finalizing their thesis and had undertaken the seminar, titled “Europe in an International Perspective”, to enlarge their perspective of Europe, particularly by seeing Europe through the eyes of other civilizations.

Participants spent three weeks discussing trends impacting the future of Europe. These trends included the aging of Europe, and long term population decline (unless immigration dramatically increased) as well as other trends such as the development of the knowledge economy, genetics and artificial intelligence and the possibility of the collapse of capitalism. Following discussions of these trends – the knowledge base of the future –  participants articulated their own visions for the future of Europe.

Scenarios

Four scenarios emerged. The first was Community/Organic. In this scenario, young people moved away from the chemical corporate way of life and searched for community-oriented alternatives.  Local currency networks, organic farming, shared housing and other values and programs favored by the counter-culture were favored.  The current scare of Dioxin in Belgium (with similar scares in the future even more likely) argued Eric Rieger could lead to quite dramatic changes away from artificial, pesticide and genetic foods, in the longer run, he believed.

They imagined a community household system where goods and services were shared. However, one participant, Sabina Frerichs imagined Europe not within the urban/community dichotomy but saw the entire of Europe as becoming community-oriented. This meant a clear move away from the view that I shop therefore I am  to I relate therefore I am.

This focus on relationship was also central for other participants. Indeed, it was the return to a strong family life that was pivotal in terms of how they saw the future of Europe. Taking care of children – and ensuring that the state provided funds for this – taking care of the elderly, and in general living so that familial relationship were far more important then exchange relations was a foundational value. In contrast to the community scenario, this future was far more focused on the nuclear family – the Family Future. Indeed, efforts to maintain this institution were considered crucial by some participants especially with the rise of genetic engineering, and the possibility of test-tube factories in the not so distant future.  Indeed, while more formal visioning workshops with technocratic experts examine scientific variables, these students asked, “will I have children? How many? How will I spend my time with them?”

Other participants believed that the new technologies would be dominant and instead of resisting them we should rejoice. We should celebrate in artificial intelligence, plastic surgery, gene enhancement, said Nadine Pepe, creating Plastic Europe. Anonymity in fact gives freedom from other; it allows the individual to express herself, while community and family suppress the individual. The new technologies as well promise great wealth, said Martin Valkenberg. Indeed some argued that far more important than family life was single life. It gave choice; it was not steeped in outdated institutions such as marriage. Europe was flexible and it should remain so when it came to formal relations.

A Bright Future?

While these visions were explored, the context was not always of a bright future. One participant, Christina Weiß, argued that oil reserves would certainly run out, and Europe would quickly decline, while Africa, with its plentitude of sun, and eventually solar energy,  would rise. Mass unemployment in the context of Castle Europe – keep the barbarians out – was the likely future. AIDS, Ebola, and many other disasters loomed ahead, said Green activist Jost Wagner.  Eva  Michels added that nuclear technology could also lead to serious problems and new forms of energy were needed.  Unless alternative forms of energy were developed, the future was bleak.

But again it did not need to be, argued Frerichs. The new technologies create the possibility for a network instead of national identity. They allow creativity to grow, and along with more spiritual views of what it means to be human, let humans transcend their narrow limitations.  What Europe could offer, said Asma Nitardy, was its multilingual focus, its vision of a multicultural society.  It was this gift she wanted to give her children, to ensure that they could speak German, Swahili, French, English, and mandarin, for example

The future can be bright, even if many of the trends do not currently look positive, was the overall conclusion of the seminar.

Deconstructing the Year 2000: Opening Up an Alternative Future (1999)

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Sohail Inayatullah[1]

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.

 

References:

[1] Ayeda Husain Naqvi writes in “The Rise of the Muslim Marine” (NewsLine, July 1996, 75-77) that while

hate crimes against Muslims rise all over the world, surprising the US military is one of the safest places to be a muslim. Indeed, Qasem Ali Uda forecasts that in 20 years, 25% of all US marines will be Muslims and in a 100 years, most will be Muslim. Given the incredible influence that that former military personnel have on US policies (ie a look at Who’s Who in America shows that military background and law school education are the two common denominators on the resumes of America’s most influential people.)

[2] Dening, Greg. “Time Searchers,” The Australian Review of Books (August, 1999), 11.

[3]  Maddison, Angus. “The Millennium – Poor Until 1820,”Wall Street Journal (Jan, 11, 1999).

[4] United Nations Human Development Report 1998, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Summary is from: Horin, Adele. “For Richer … For Poorer, “Sydney Morning Herald, 45.

[5] http: www.nilan.demon.co.uk – Wealth and poverty.

[6]  Inayatullah, Sohail.  “Herbert Spencer: Progress and Evolution,” in Johan Galtung and Sohail Inayatullah, eds., Macrohistory and Macrohistorians. Westport, Ct: Praeger, 1997, 68-75.

[7]  Galtung, Johan. Peace, Vision and the Future in Inayatullah, Sohail and Wildman, Paul,  eds. Futures Studies: Methods, Emerging Issues and Civilizational Visions – A Multimedia CDROM Reader. Brisbane: Prosperity Press, 1998.

[8] For a series of essays that explore this possibility, see, Sardar, Ziauddin, ed. Rescuing All of Our Futures: The Futures of Futures Studies. Twickenham, England: Adamantine Press, 1999.

[9] For more on this, see Inayatullah, Sohail. “The Rights of Your Robots: the Politics of Exclusion and Inclusion in History and Future,” in Ryden, Edmund, ed., Human Rights and Values in East Asia. Taiwan: Fujen Catholic University, 1998, 143-162.

[10]  See the special issue of Futures titled, Learning and Teaching About Future Generations edited by Slaughter, Richard and Tough. Futures. 1997. 29 (8).

[11]  Dening Ibid., 13.

[12] Milojevic, Ivana. “Women and Holistic Education,”New Renaissance, 1996. 6(3), 16-17. www.ru.org

[13] See the symposium titled Beyond Capitalism. Journal of Futures Studies. 1999. 3(2).  It includes essays by Charles Paprocki, John Robinson, Alan Fricker, Brenda Hall-Taylor, and Sohail Inayatullah.

[14] Thompson, Dick. “Capitol Hill Meltdown,”Time. 1999, August, 9, 50-51.

[15] See Gauthier, Richard, The Microvita Revolution in Inayatullah, Sohail and Wildman, Paul. ,  eds. Futures Studies: Methods, Emerging Issues and Civilizational Visions – A Multimedia CDROM Reader. Brisbane: Prosperity Press, 1998. For the TM movement, see their various sites, including: www.kosovopeace.org.

[16] Ravetz, Jerome, special issue of Futures.

[17] Nelson, Robert H. “Why Capitalism Hasn’t Won Yet,” Forbes (November 125, 1991), 104.

Governance in the 21st Century (1999)

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By Sohail Inayatullah, May,1999

(A version of this appeared in Sohail Inayatullah and Susan Leggett, Transformating Communication. Wesport, Praeger, 2002)

Five revolutions in how we govern ourselves, in what we consider legitimate government stare at our faces.  These include: a revolution of size, the emergence of global institutions; the globalization of capital;  cyberdemocracy; people’s movements; and the return to an imagined past.

All make the nation-state far more porous than it has ever been. This does not mean, however, that the power of the passport office has been reduced, indeed, as governance changes the boundaries of conventional political life, efforts to maintain tradition will become even more pronounced.

These revolutions are the drivers creating the possibility of a range of different worlds, of different metaphors of governance for the future.

Metaphors of  the Future 

These new worlds include

1. Mountains apart – a world where different interests groups are far apart in their ideals, and have no way to understand each other.

2. Clash of Civilisations, a postnational view of the world where individuals identify more with their cultural and religious roots and less with nation or corporation.

3. Gaia of civilisations, an idealistic vision of the future where we become all interdependent, where the perspectives of ecology and complexity  best describe the future,

4. We are the world, an idealistic vision of unity, of spiritually or electronically linked self-reliant communities,

5.  King of the Hill, a realistic approach to world politics, with the goal that of dominating others before they can do you in. This vision can devolve to feudalism, or kings of many hills, or evolve upward to the emperor of the mountain, the one leader above the planet.

6. Related to this approach is Father Come Back, the Confucian ideal of the wise male ruling other, providing a link between Earth and Heaven.

7. The last approach is that of building bridges, creating a transmodern world where differences are acknowledged, but similarities are sought. It is this vision that in the short term best offers hope for the next century. Former ambassador to Nato, Harlan Cleveland, believes it is this view which he calls Different, Yet Together that will help us find our way in the difficult times ahead.

While these might be general images of the future of governance, to understand which future is most likely we need to investigate the revolutions creating the future.

Size and Power 

The first is the revolution from above – a globalism of size and power. This is the strengthening of regional and global government, and their respective institutions. The most obvious is the European Union. Less successful but equally noteworthy is ASEAN. Related to this revolution from above are international organisations such as  APEC, World Trade Organisation, the World Bank, the IMF, the International Court, the World Health Organisation, International Labor Organisation, and the full range of United Nations organisations.

They are all vying to become more than just a voice of the member states, to move from representing the views of nations to advocating specific positions on how best to manage the transition from nation-states as the main actors to regional blocks and international institutions as the main actors. These institutions impact not just politics but all areas of life, from the regulation of trade, oceans, and climate to atomic energy and space travel.

However, Marc Luyckx, co-Director of the European Commission’s Forward-Looking Unit believes that the most important factor and resource in creating new models of governance is cultural.

Believing that this century heralds the end of the modern nation-centric world based on secular enlightenment ideals, Luyckx, ever the visionary, imagines a transmodern world, where transnational institutions are just one type of governing organisations. He believes that civilisation will be the other, a dramatic revolution from above, which, of course, since civilisation is also about each one of think, eat, see nature, think about business and god, is as well a revolution from below.

But unlike the famous Huntington, who believes that civilisations will be at war with other (the image of the future as that of an unending clash of basic ideals) – Christianity against Islam against Confucianism, Luyckx prefers to imagine, following the Indian philosopher Ashis Nandy, a gaia of civilisations. Civilisations interlocked with each other, engaged in cultural and economic exchange, dependent on each other – a multicultural garden. Nandy as well, even as he imagines this grand revolution from above, believes it will come from below, from the local. Cultures have always existed in dialogue with each other, in plurality, it is especially in recent modern times, that culture has been used to divide peoples, to use the idea of fearing the other as a way to gain power, as Hanson in Australia or Milosevic in Serbia know so well.

Money and Power 

But as important as culture in this revolution from above is business. Corporations have swiftly moved to become economically grander than many nations. Their wealth in players such as GE, Microsoft and the large banks, while appearing to be limited to the private sector, in fact shapes global public policy. So much so that peace activists such as Johan Galtung have argued that a newly arranged United Nations should not only have a house of people, direct voting, and a house of nations, but a house of corporations as well. Such a move would give them legitimate but open power, and institutionalise the private power they already have. Writes David Korten, editor of Yes Magazine that such a change would force corporations to be more democratic and accountable to not just their shareholders but to those whose lives they impact. Any view of the future of governance that does not take into account how transnational corporations impact how each one of us think, well at least what we think about, what we eat (the food distribution channels, what is grown, with what fertilisers), is myopic indeed.

People and power 

The third is the revolution from below – this is a globalism of the people, which often is seen as the opposite of the revolution from above. Indeed, they can be seen as mountains apart, each reflecting some basic urges of humans. Corporate globalism that of creating wealth and people’s globalism that of creating a more sustainable world for future generations, where we walk softly on nature and treat each other with more love and dignity, where relationship is central.

This is very much the ideals of the 1960s, of people’s power, of student power, but now transformed into the local/global politics of international nongovernmental organisations, or ingos. These include groups like Transparency International, Amnesty International, Greenpeace, Women’s International Network, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, People against x, and the thousands of other associations working on consumer, gender, cultural, environmental, spiritual, peace, war, violence issues. They are much more active than the traditional Christian model of charity since they take stronger advocacy positions. Some are single issue, and some have moved from just solving the latest crisis to addressing the deeper causes of crisis, for example, instead of just engaging in a tree planting campaign, asking why peasants in the mountains are cutting down trees, or what the relationship between logging and pollution are? Instead of just asking for more government help in child care, women’s groups contest the division of public/private with men dominating the public and women bearing the burden of the private. Instead of just organising for more women in government, they contest the maleness of industrial politics, seeing statecraft as essentially male-craft.

In Australia, it is claimed that these nongovernmental organisations have greater representation than the traditional political parties. This is so as they approach issues outside of the right/left divide but rather focus on giving individuals and communities more power to change the future. Instead of merely going to one’s representative in parliament and asking him or her to address the problem, they address the problem themselves. These are often called the cultural creatives.

Essentially, while the revolution from above seeks to create a network of international organisations to deal with transnational issues, eventually leading to a world government, possibly by 2050 or so, nongovernmental organisations seek to create a more just, fairer, gender equitable, corporate responsible local world. Of course, as organisations seek, they find that local solutions are global, and global problems are local – the future will see a mix of global/local organisations working simultaneously at both levels.

The guiding model of the future is the vision of we are the world. It is an idealistic vision, which believes that people are essentially good. By joining hands and creating links worldwide, the long dark era of greed and fear can be ended.

What they have not quite figured out is that even as they work against gender discrimination, environmental pollution, materialism and for transparency, multiculturalism, their own organisations are not immune from these traditional and modern problems – essentially the problem of bureaucracy, the battle between ideals and structures of governance. As commentator Eva Cox has written, we need to pay more attention to Max Weber and far less to Karl Marx. Of course, for these ngos, Marx is not the guiding prophet since he saw the world only in terms of capital or labor power, forgetting cultural, women’s, indigenous and spiritual power.

Cyberpower 

The fourth revolution is the electronic revolution – this is a globalism of technology. Less concerned with specific political issues – be they nuclear testing or the melting of the Antarctic – they believe the internet will allow for direct referendum globally on all major issues. Like the idealistic non-governmental approach, the guiding vision is We are the World but the linking agency is the internet not Teilhard de Chardin’s idea of the Noosphere or some idea of the collective unconscious.

James Dator, professor of political science, argues that representative democracy made sense when distance was an issue, when legislators/parliamentarians had to travel by horse and buggy over long distances. Since communication was slow, they had to represent the people, but now the people need not be representative. The technology is there for a world web governance system where each one of us can vote for issues affecting us (and not affecting us as well). The details have yet to be worked out, and of course, the implementation will be stage like. First, there will be cyberdemocracy in the US, Finland, and other OECD nations, and eventually in less advanced nations.  This revolution challenges first not the nation-state but traditional bearers of national governance. Of course, there will be resistance from all parties. Can the people be trusted? How long of a cooling off period should there be for emotional issues (this is Al Toffler’s idea)? Should there be direct voting on all issues or just one issues that don’t deal with national defence and security. And what of those not quite Net fluent or affluent? But more important than these details, which can be worked out, are two other issues. 1. Many people do not want to participate in political life. They want to be left alone. Nice parks, roads and schools are far more important than the grand issues of which civilisations will be in dialogue and which in conflict, or what percent of the national wealth should go to the armed forces and what to the olympic committee. 2. Creating an electronic village will be far less likely than the future of an electronic los angeles, anonymous, face-less communities pretending to be in relationship with each other – Blade Runner here we come.

Certainly cyberdemocracy will be the future, but will the Chinese have the same voting rights as the Americans? While Australia has begun the task of linking remote communities through the internet, for other nations, class/feudalism/wealth remain far grander obstacles to creating a cyberdemocracy. Finally, cyberdemocrats have not quite worked out the difference between good direct governance and the art of leadership, of challenging humans to be more than they can, of giving direction, of wisdom.

Back to the Past 

But there is a last revolution that is uncomfortable to groups engaged in the above three – this is the revolution of not the future, but a revolution of the past. It is essentially about realistic politics, about determining who should be King of the Hill.

Whether it is Pauline Hanson taking Australia back to a world when men were men, when time was slow, when neighbours were friendly, when you clearly knew that the enemy was in some foreign land, and had different eyes than you, or the Taliban taking the Islamic world back to a council of elders, or the BJP in India reinvoking Rama Rajya – the ideal kingdom of Rama, when humans were moral and did their yoga regularly, this is a revolution of a fantasised  past.  It is related to Father Come Back, a model of governance where power is centralised in the strong male. Unity is enforced, and differences are traded-off for strong economic growth.

The revolution from the past is a revolution particularly against multiculturalism, against postmodernism, against genetic technology, against virtuality, against corporatism, against all that changes the stable agricultural world. It is a revolution against anyone who is different, from afar, of all types of globalism. It is a lower-middle class revolution. It does not intend to overturn capitalism or end the nation-state, rather it reinforces the nation-state through the slogan of one god, one leader and one people. The ideal governance structure is not an issue, traditional moral values are. It is a world that essentially returns us to monotheistic religion, to a strong public/private distinction for men and women, to hard work (men in industry and the fields and women in the kitchen) and savings (against speculative trading).

Which Revolution?

Which revolution is most likely to be dominant? Which revolution will change the world the most. Most likely, it will be a complex mixture of interests – a world governance system but probably not a world government; strong global community groups balancing large corporations; virtual governance but not binding, that is, direct initiative and referendum but over-turnable by the executive and legislature. The revolution from the past won’t go away, it will come back in the rise of individual leaders, in luddite movements, in religious fundamentalism. As groups and individuals cannot manage the rate of technological change, some will seek to arrest it, either through non-governmental organisations or through conventional political processes (or through more direct action). The more difficult task of inventing social institutions that can better manage the transition to an advanced technological society will largely be unattempted. However, these institutions must be created, and must be done so in consortiums that include actors in all the revolutions mentioned earlier, even the revolution of the past. It will have to be an approach that Builds Bridges, that negotiates our many differences and creates shared realities. It is a vision of governance that is neither the nationalism of the modern world or the everything goes of the postmodern, nor the traditionalism of the feudal. It is a vision of authentic diversity, working together to create shared realities – and have strong global institutions to monitor what is cultural relativism and what is evil – eventually over the many centuries creating an ecology of identity, where being human first is far more important than national identification.

If we do not embark on this path, we will create a world in the next century that is ungovernable for all of us – where the mix of types of power, levels of authority make a world so utterly chaotic that a king will emerge, and he will desire only one thing – order!

Aging Populations – From Overpopulation to Underpopulation (1999)

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By Sohail Inayatullah

As the world welcomes passenger number six billion – symbolically chosen by Kofi Annan to be a baby Bosnian from Sarajevo – the debate on overpopulation heats up. Concern over the carrying capacity of the Earth, resource use of the rich, and fear of billions of “others” at immigration gates consistently make population a high ranking world problem.[1]

Delivering contraceptives to the teeming masses is the solution most often raised. Others point to poverty, seeing population as a development problem, not as a trait of “impulsive races.” Still others go deeper, examining women’s power, their control over the future, their bodies. It is concern for the future, that is, one’s social security, of who will take care of oneself in one’s older years, that is seen as a decisive variable. While most states in India have high birth rates, Kerala does not, largely because feudalism has been overthrown and a stable social security system, a stable view of the future, created.[2]

But, there is evidence that instead of overpopulation it will be underpopulation that will be the world’s biggest world problem, first in the West, and then most likely throughout the world. Only nations that have high immigration in-takes and can make the switch from a youth economy to an old person’s economy will survive. This will mean among the biggest changes in human history – pensions, growth economies, 9-5 work schedules, student/work/retirement life pattern and male domination – all will have to end if we are to succesfully navigate the agequake ahead.

Writes Paul Wallace, author of Agequake, historically “we have been remarkably young. Our average age has been around 20 or less. But in the current generation’s lifetime, the average age of the world will nearly double from 22 in 1975 to 38 in 2050, according to the UN’s latest projections issued at the end of 1998. Under another projection, it could reach over 40 as early as 2040. Many countries will reach average ages of 50 or more.”[3]

Not only is the population pyramid about to flip but populations in Europe are generally poised to plunge on a scale not seen since the Black Death in 1348. “An extraordinary crossover is already starting to occur as older people outnumber younger people for the first time in human history. In the early twenty-fist century, this tilt from young to old will take on a new dimension. It will go hand in hand with the onset of population decline in many developed nations as they experience the first sustained demographic reverse in centuries.”[4]

But this is not just a Western trend, indeed, because of the speed of the demographic slowdown in the developing world, it means that “they will age much more quickly than the West,” says Wallace. In twenty years’ time, China will be one of the most rapidly ageing societies.[5]

The worker to retiree ratio

While many of these changes will be obviously positive, longer life (by mid-century there will be over two million centenarians compared with 150,000 today)[6], healthier life styles, less childhood deaths, and falling number of young people (which means falling crime rates), others are not so positive. Who will pay for the retirement benefits of the older population? This is especially important after 2010 when the ratio of the working age population to old dependents will decrease. And over the next thirty years the ratio of workers to retirees on pension in industralised nations will fall from the current 3-1 to 1.5 to 1. How will societies stay rejuvenated with new ideas? Would we have had a personal computer revolution if youngsters like Steve Jobs were not there to challenge authority and create new products? And what of the Internet.com revolution and the associated changes in corporate culture and organizational culture? Of course, the definition of ageing will change, and older people may become much healthier than they are now, but this does not solve the problem of dependence on the young for economic growth. And what will happen when those purchasing stocks in the 1980’s and 1990’s begin to sell them 20 years later to pay for their retirement? There will be no age-cohort to purchase them as the baby boomers have currently. Will we enter a long term bear market and thus possibly a long term economic depression? Will the demand problem be worsened by the continued delinking of the finance economy from the real world economy of goods and services, of cyberspace from manufacturing and investment space?

But what is the cause of the ageing of society? Two factors. First, we are living longer and second, birth rates are falling. “In the late 1990’s fertility rates are already at or below replacement level – 2.1 children per woman – in 61 countries with almost half the world’s population,“ writes Wallace.[7] And so on, even nations like India and Indonesia are likely to fall below this level.

Along with ageing, there will be a genderquake. In the West, children are being postponed as women focus on their careers, this brings down fertility as there is a strong link between a woman’s age at first birth and the average size of her family. Also many more women are not having children at all. In contrast, leaders in the developed world are urging women to produce more children, Japan is even trying to convince the salaryman to spend more time at home, play with the children, make his wife’s life easier, so she will have more children. While this does not mean patriarchy in Japan is under any threat – structural changes are unlikely – it does mean women’s value will be enhanced.

Iceberg ahead

The population pyramid is reversing. Populations are declining, especially in rich nations. Populations are like supertankers, it takes forever to turn them around, but when they do, the changes are dramatic. Europeans have not noticed the population decline because of immigration, high fertility in the past and declines in mortality, but in reality birth rates are plunging in reverse. Pete Peterson in his book, Gray Dawn, describes global ageing as an iceberg. While it is easy to sea above the waterline, it is far more difficult to prepare for the wrenching costs … that promise to bankrupt even the greatest powers … making today’s crisis look like child’s play.”[8] One solution for the West is immigration. Already California is set to become a majority minority state. The USA will become the second largest spanish speaking nation in 2020. But there are danger signs as generally older Californians will be caucasian and rich, while younger one’s will be hispanic and poorer. The question is not will California secede but which California will secede? Writes, Pete Pederson:

“Perhaps the most predictable consequence of the gap in fertility and population growth rates between developed and developing countries will be the rising demand for immigrant workers in older and wealthier societies facing labor shortages. Immigrants are typically young and tend to bring with them the family practices of their native culture – including higher fertility rates. In many European countries, non-European foreigners already make up roughly 10 percent of the population. This includes 10 million to 13 million Muslims, nearly all of whom are working-age or younger. In Germany, foreigners will make up 30 percent of the total population by 2030, and over half the population of major cities like Munich and Frankfurt. Global aging and attendant labor shortages will therefore ensure that immigration remains a major issue in developed countries for decades to come. Culture wars could erupt over the balkanization of language and religion … electorates could divide along ethnic lines.”[9]

Higher Productivity

A second solution is increasing productivity, working smarter. While the convergence of computing and telecommunications have not shown immediate gains, it is early days yet. The problem of fewer young people working will not be a problem since they will be able to produce more wealth. And even if the Internet revolution does not lead to higher productivity, the real explosion may come from the convergence of genetics research and computing/telecommunications. Productivity could be enhanced through first, genetic prevention, second, genetic enhancement (of “intelligence” “typing speed” “language ability”) and finally, genetic recreation. It is the latter that is is the bet for the right wing in developed nations as this guarantees the survival of a shrinking “white” population (not caucasian since south asians are counted as caucasians in Western statistics), keeps their place as dominant caste. Genetics with nano-technology could go a step further, ending scarcity, and at the same time, ending economic advantage and one of the primary reasons immigrants leave their home nations in any case.

The agequake is predictable since projecting the future age structure of a population can be done with a great deal of certainty (barring asteroids, pandemics, etc). Demographics also can predict changes in behavior since one is more likely to migrate in one’s 20s, one is more likely to vote conservative in one’s 50s (when one has property to conserve, and when one is concerned more with crime and order and less with freedom and social justice). Wallace also points out that membership in one’s generation is significant in determining one’s life chances, but not in the ways one thinks. For example, if you are born in a baby boom year there will be more competition throughout your life, while if you are born in a baby-bust year there will be less competition for work, marriage partners and houses.

Surviving the agequake

How can one personally survive the agequake? Firs, it is crucial to think in the long term, the very long term. Second, it is important to buy and sell in products and services that are based on ageing. Equally crucial is to think in terms of products which baby boomers will be eager to purchase so as to remember their youth – the nostalgia factor .Third, the future will be multicultural, rainbow societies with diverse identities. Already the buying power of latinos in the US is larger than Mexico’s economy.[10] Just as internet stocks took off, in the not too distant future, ageing-related stocks might as well. Retirement homes for retiring babyboomers in developing countries will probably also do well as they will want to move to places where their strong currencies buy more, and where the idea of community still flourishes. It is unlikely that virtual communities will provide the feeling of belonging that elders will need.

Which countries will be the winners and which the losers? Because of immigration the US will retain its power as will England. Because of its relatively young population, Ireland will also do well. However, Gemany and Japan will be losers because of “falling working-age populations.” Indeed, the crisis that Japan is emersed in is partly a crisis of ageing, it no longer has a favorable demographic structure for economic growth.[11]

All this – coupled with advances in genetics, life extension – may lead to a new age. However, not all see ageing as so rosy. Once they make it to old age, currently few people escape long-term health problems. Beth J. Soldo and Emily M. Agree of the American Population Reference Bureau argue that in developed nations such as Canada and the US, as the elderly population grows due to life expectancy gains and the ageing of the huge baby-boom generation, there will be many more sick and disabled old people.[12] The average person is sick or disabled for nearly 80 percent of the extra years of life he or she gains as life expectancy rises. Health expenditure for Australians over 65 is already four times higher than for the rest of the population.

The World Health Organization estimates that by 2020 depression will be the leading cause of “disability adjusted life years“ dramatically increasing the demands for psychiatric health services for young and old.[13] The aged, particularly those removed from family and community, will be especially prone to mental illnesses. In Queensland, Australia the porportion of those over 60 years will increase from 15% in 1995 to 23% in 2031. Already 25% of those over 65 demonstrate functional psychiatric disorders.[14] For ageing to be a bright future not only will society’s economic and social structure have to change but medical developments in life extension will have to materialise, otherwise we will live in a future where the elderly will be sick and marginalized, used on television ads to raise money for charities, just as Third World children are today.

At a macroeconomic level, immigration will solve some of the West’s problems but in-take will have to increase by ten times the current amount and be sustained for the West to survive the the burden of taking care of an older population. In the long run, India, Brazil and other slow-ageing societies will do the best. Worse off will be Russia – and others parts of the former USSR – which is in the midst of a demographic crisis as Russian men are dying in middle age. Russia does not have generations of prosperity to soften the shock of the agequake. However, Russia could take advantage of the new modern information technologies especially as the current generation is being born without the mental blocks of the Soviet era. But for this to happen, mafia-ecomomics will have to end, and a predictable future for investment and shared distribution created.

As the developing world becomes more important, international organizations will, to survive, have to include memberships from these nations There will thus be a new world order, in which an “ageing, sluggish West is ringed by more youthful and economically buoyant countries,“ says Wallace.[15] The UN security council, international finance agencies, security alliances are all likely to see their memberships change. Alternatively Western nations and institutions could decide to go it on their own creating a Fortress/Castle West with “high gates and big dogs.“

Asians will have to change as well, becoming more multicultural. As the age pyramid bulges at the top, filial piety will be one of the first values to go. Young people will want their due since they will be scarce, and there will be too many of the elderly to take care of. The elderly will probably use religion or the state – gerontocracies – to maintain power, while the young will search for new symbols (the Net) and new social movements (alternative modernities, neither West nor East) to lay their claim on the future.

Old versus young

Generational wars is the likely future especially in those nations where pension schemes have not been reformed. In the West, writes Wallace, “The old will use their voting power to insist that younger workers fork out to pay for their pensions. But the young will resist with their economic power by pushing up real wages for services that the old have to pay and evading contributions wherever possible, so that the gap between the legitimate and the black economy grows even wider.”[16] Medicare will continue to be severely challenged. Non-essential medical services will be shifted away from the https://j-galt.com/klonopin-1mg/ State. In the long run, there might be a return to childrearing as patriotic duty, of course.

Reforms will be needed. Reforms will have to tackle the fundamental mismatch between people’s desired mix of work and leisure and what is actually on offer in the workplace. The present system crams work into people’s middle years, making children even more of a burden – so helping to create the agequake – while creating a surfeit of leisure in later years. Women are heavily penalized if they want to work part-time to enable them to look after their children, while older workers are not usually offered a reduction of working hours in their fifties and sixties. For their part, older workers are not generally prepared to accept lower earnings, even if this reflects the reality of their declining productivity.[17] We are accustomed to the elderly increasing in stature, in wisdom, since historically so few have survived, but with this about to turn over, wealth and wisdom is unlike to correlate with ageing.

While some policymakers are beginning to consider the future needs of the aged – housing, transport (the aged like youth tend to have more accidents), healthcare – recognizing that most likely these systems will be severely taxed, few have begun to understand that the entire current economic and cultural system has been based on young people working, on a normal population pyramid, on a growth-oriented economic system. We have never seen a society where the pyramid is flipped. Will immigration save the day, or will technology, the Net, Genetics or Nano (making labour far less important)?

To survive the agequake, our basic structures of work/leisure/family structures will have to change. The old pattern of student, work, retirement, death will have to transform, more flexible patterns will have to be set up to combine work and play, and the rearing of children, that is with taking care of society’s demographic future. While this will be one aspect of the needed change, in fact, the entire (endless growth) capitalist system will have transform, nothing less will be able to adequately resolve the tensions ahead.

We have historically lived in a world where the average population was young. This is about to reverse itself. The entire industrial and postindustrial system has been built on certain demographic assumptions of when we work, when we reproduce, when we retire; this is all changing, and we are not prepared.

____________________

Sohail Inayatullah recently turned 42 He is a political scientist/futurist, co-editor of the Journal of Futures Studies and New Renaissance and author/co-editor of ten or so books. In 1999, he is professor, International Management Centres, Unesco Chair, University of Trier, and Tamkang Chair, Tamkang University. He is currently editing a book titled Youth Futures – s.inayatullah@qut.edu.au.

[1] See, for example, www.overpopulation.com or
[2] For a review of some ageing scenarios, see: Edward Schneider, “Aging in the Third Millennium,” Science, (Feb 5, 1999 v283, 5403), 796.
[3] Paul Wallace, Agequake, Riding the Demographic Rollercoaster Shaking Business, Finance and Our World. London, Nicholas Brealey, 1999. From the preface.
[4] Ibid., 3.
[5] Ibid., 4.
[6] Ibid., 20.
[7] Ibid., 5.
[8] Peter Peterson, Gray Dawn. New York, Random House, 1999. Also see: http://webhome.idirect.com/~carcare/thoughts/aging.htm. Peterson writes: A little understood global hazard – the greying of the developed world’s population – may actually do more to reshape our collective future than deadly superviruses, extreme climate change or the proliferation of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.
[9] Peter Peterson, “Gray Dawn: The Global Aging Crisis,” Foreign Affairs, January/February 1999, 42-55.
[10] Wallace, Agequake, 10. Also see, The Economist, America’s Latinos. 25 April 1998.
[11] Ibid., 172-180.
[12] Beth J. Soldo and Emily M. Agree quoted from the USA Population Reference Bureau’s bulletin, American’s Elderly in Cheryl Russell, American Demographics, March 1989 v11 n3 p2(1).
[13] See, WHO, See as well: The Global Movement for Active Ageing. http://www.who.org/ageing/global_movement/index.html
[14] See Ivana Milojevic,
[15] Ibid., 204
[16] Ibid., 211.

[17] Ibid., 218.

Will Our Children Have Jobs in the Future? (1999)

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Youths have no future, but there are ways in which we can create jobs and hope with them, says Sohail Inayatullah.

“Why should I care about the future,” says Mark Stuart. While only 25, he has seen most of his childhood friends killed off from heroin and violence.  Most, especially the males remain  underemployed  and work, if at all, in the informal economy.

But while the death certificate might say heroin, others such as Richard Eckersley, of the CSIRO and editor of Measuring Progress , believe that it is because Australian youth have lost hope in the future that they are dying off. Eckersley writes that most young people believe that the 21st century will be even worse than the 20th.  Few believe that life in the next century will be better for Australians. Jenny Gidley, a social psychologist at Tweed and co-editor of book on the future of the university, concurs. She says: ” The majority of young Australians researched over the last decade about their views of the future are pessimistic and fearful and furthermore most are disempowered by their lack of hope”.

Francis Hutchinson, senior lecturer at the University of Western Sydney, Hawkesbury in his research of Australian teenagers found that: “negative imagery of the future ranged from perceptions of intensifying pressure and competition in schools in the twenty-first century to worsening trends in physical violence and war, joblessness and poverty.”

Failing the Young

Paul Wildman, a former Queensland Department of Labor director, now working in the area of   pprenticeships and traineeships believes our government has failed them.  We, as a society, have not been able to give them hope.

Wildman, however, is not a bleeding heart liberal. He sees Australia in need of ‘comfort terrorists’ those who can draw us our from the complacency of baby boomer middle age and help us see there is life than fast food, the GST, football and a new 4WD.  He wants the state to be responsible for improving our childrens’ life options so that they can empower themselves. He wants shared responsibility for our youth’s futures by government, community, family and the youths themselves.

Merely giving the future to young people does not work. As faulty, however, are market driven programs which do not provide training or real job prospects to them, warehouses our youth merely giving them the illusion of making money yet not giving them an opportunity to make their future mean anything.

Rescuing the future

Wildman and others suggest the following that need to be done to rescue our youth’s future. They are:

  • Electors must take responsibility to hold Government to a comprehensive ‘youth job compact’ response to unemployment that goes beyond training and offers all school leavers a chance to make a positive future for themselves through an options of  employment: private, community, public, self or study.   A compact goes beyond, yet includes, training.  It is two- way agreement that includes rights and responsibilities and not a handout or ‘sit down money’.
  • An end to duplication in training and employment bureaucracies and jurisdictions between the state and commonwealth so  that an apprenticeship in the Kimberleys means the same as an apprenticeship in Hobart.  Monies saved could be directed into ‘job compact’.
  • Getting beyond ‘inquiry-led’ initiatives.  The inquiry waits till the system breaks down then costs millions of dollars and produces myriad of conclusions and recommendations which need the very bureaucracy that caused the problem in the first place to execute the changes. Indeed, the inquiry often frames the problem in limited legalistic language, never working with young people and employers to create a conversation about meaningful futures. Since the inquiry is bureaucrat let, no change results.
  • Use the ‘Self help’ model. Assist young people to generate their own future including employment opportunities, for example, building their own sustainable housing/communities and group businesses.  This is the thrust of the work of Katoomba community organizer Alex Bowman. He believes that instead of the dole, give young people a right to land. Let them grow food, and create self-reliance producer and consumer cooperatives on this land.
  • However, for those who prefer to stay in the city, we need an urban planning approach that sees employment designed into a suburb just as roads are today. Jobs must be part of the design process not as something that happens afterwards.  The Greenfields Model intended in the Gold Coast hopes to that.

However, Wildman says that  in “in the final analysis we also need to realise not everyone will get jobs so as a society we need to use these initiatives to move away once and for all from seeing the only option for youth, and middle aged retrenchees, as full time work.”

What this means this means is realising that employment levels are likely to be much lower in the future and there simply wont be enough jobs to go around.  Says Wildman, “we need to move from ‘dole bludger’ to ‘multiployee’ where several part time jobs are matched with some public assistance to give the equivalent of a full time job and therefore a chance to make their future meaningful.

For Bowman, this can happen only when land becomes the base for rejuvenating the dreams of  young people. Land grounds young people in community, it connects them, and gives them power over their future.

“The key to a better future for youths, “says Wildman  “is shared responsibility. Otherwise, we’ll just create another bureaucracy, another iron cage.”

Currently, young people look to the future and see nothing.  Wildman wants them to see hope, work and the possibility of a fair-go. As Gidley says: “Recent research has also shown that when young people are encouraged to develop their imaginations and are educated with a positive values system and a sense of integration rather than fragmentation, then they are empowered by this”.  Without some of the changes outlined, Australia will continue to have the distinction of one of the world’s highest youth suicide rate.

The deeper problem

But there is a deeper problem that Jeremy Rifken in his classic book The End of Work has identified. Unless there is a sustained global depression, in the long run the most likely future is that of a jobless slow growth, where 20% work and 80% do something else.  Training, job compacts and other solutions while important for the next 20 years, offer little for the long term. In that horizon, the real challenge will be seeing ourselves as more than  workers. It is thinking of our futures in post-scarcity terms, discovering and creating that “something else.” Unless we can think of ourselves outside our historical work identities, we will enter a future world where the one thing that has defined us, not just the job, but work itself, won’t be available.

Are our identities flexible enough to survive? Can we work with youth to create futures that are meaningful for them, can we create a new history for future generations? Jenny Gidley, social psychologist and youth futures researcher, believes we can. She says that it is not just jobs at issue but the failure of imagination. What is need are visions workshops, as part of a new educational system, to help transform negative images to positive images.

The Cyber Butterfly Effect Nets Political Change (1999)

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By Sohail Inayatullah

Lobbying is normally associated with shady back-room deals, with lobbyists waiting outside the halls of power, hoping to get a minister or legislator to listen to their position.

However, this process can now become more transparent and can empower those who previously felt they were merely subject to the decisions of their governments.

Cyberlobbying is taking place around the world – in Romania, the Minister of Education threatens to close down an award-winning alternative school because its lunch diet is vegetarian.

The school teacher, understanding that the community and children love her school, but that the community and parents association was not strong enough to take on the Minister, starts a net campaign.

While she previously might have just given into whims of the Ministry, armed with a PC and a modem, she sends out e-mails to the world vegetarian association, to Ananda Marga net (a social and spiritual organisation which has many vegetarian schools), as well as others.

She asks them to send faxes and call the Ministry. They do. Within a few weeks, the Minister reverses his decision.

International pressure plus more information on vegetarianism shows him that it is not weird to be vegetarian and not against Romanian culture.

What are the lessons here? First, the person acted. While she worked through the net, she was careful to use other media as well — phone and fax.

In another example, Munawar Anees, a scholar and editor of Periodica Islamica, is arrested by Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir. He is tortured while in jail and, from the beatings and bad conditions, has a heart attack.

His colleagues begin a free Munawar Anees campaign. A web site (www.dranees.org) is set up. A listserve (friends@dranees.com) is also set up. It acts as a clearing house for thousands of people around the world.

No administrative staff is needed for the office since there is no need for an office.

Faxes are sent daily to Dr Mahathir. Eventually, Amnesty International adopts Anees as a political prisoner.

Alvin Toffler, a close friend of Anees, becomes involved, calls Dr Mahathir and asks him to release Mr Anees. Dr Mahathir refuses. International pressure continues. Toffler threatens to end his support for the multimedia superhighway corridor in Kuala Lumpur’s Klang Valley.

He makes sure to remind Dr Mahathir that becoming a post-industrial nation can only occur when citizens are not in fear of the government. Eventually, the international pressure ensures that Mr Anees gets a fair trial.

With the world gaze on them, the government drops charges. Dr Mahathir is, of course, recalcitrant when it comes to international pressure on human rights but with the nation’s future at stake, he had to rein in the police.

He did, however, put government warnings on Anwar Ibrahim’s website stating that it was biased and did not reflect the Government’s position. (Dr Munawar Anees was accused of letting Anwar sodomise him.)

What are the lessons from this episode? In this case, a group of people acted, used multimedia — fax, phone, website, listserve. The only cost was that of setting up the website, otherwise a momentous campaign was orchestrated without any administrative staff.

Instead of huge mailouts, individuals were told to go to Anees’s website for the details of his detainment.

A third example involved not one or two individuals, but thousands. It, too, uses the net but augments it with other media and involves the 1996/97 Belgrade student revolution.

With Prime Minister Milosevic controlling the media –the State-run media — the alternative media reported on the thousands of people in the streets, demanding that the winners of the election for the mayorship of Belgrade and Novi Sad be installed.

Mr Milosevic closed down the press, but he could not close down the net. Thousands of overseas Yugoslavs and international press used it for their newsfeeds, as did students in Serbia.

A few student activists kept the information coming and what Milosevic had hoped would be a minor event came to be a global happening.

As with the other examples, multimedia was used. The Belgrade protests remained non-violent, partly because the students did not want the police to kill them, and also they knew that, just as the world’s eyes were on Mr Milosevic, they were on them as well.

The net forced both to be transparent.

There are numerous other examples as well – the Zapatista have used the web as a information clearing house and as an advocacy centre, and as a place to list abuses. (Kathleen Grassel has written on this in New Renaissance: www.ru.org.)

And in Suva, Fiji, working visas of journalism lecturers were threatened because of differences with government media policy. However, international pressure, again orchestrated through the web, forced the Fijian Government to grant the visas.

One person cyberlobbying changes normal politics because it can be done by one person.

It is the cyber butterfly effect. One person, or a small group of persons, can undercut traditional structures of power. There are some safeguards on cyberlobbying as one still needs many people acting to make it work – a lone mad person will quickly lose legitimacy for his or her cause.

It makes all politics more transparent. However, cyberlobbying does not replace traditional politics; rather it augments it.

It must be part of an overall campaign that includes face to face, fax, telephone, direct political action, voting, street demonstration.

Cyberlobbying also leads to the beginning of global politics. World opinion becomes a factor in every nation’s and corporation’s politics. While some presidents have understood that getting on CNN is more important than a hearing at the United Nations, they still have not understood the power of web sites, and the ability of the small to change the big.

For governments being lobbied, the worst thing to do is to put warnings on other’s web sites. The best defence is more openness, is inclusion of other perspectives, deep consultation with others. If they don’t, the cyber butterfly will make sure that in the long run they do.

Sohail Inayatullah is a political scientist. His recently completed book is Transforming Communication. He is co-director of the Institute for the Future, and in 1999 was UNESCO chair at the University of Trier.