Global Emergency — why we don’t face it

The unsustainable condition of the human and the humanly impaired natural world constitutes a global emergency, and it calls for global-level cooperation to avert a global-level breakdown.

Global-level cooperation is a new requirement in the history of humanity, and it’s not surprising that we are not prepared for it. Our institutions and organizations were designed to protect their own interests in competition with others; the need for them to join together in the shared interest has been limited to territorial aspirations and defense, and to economic gain in selected domains. Preparedness for globally cooperative action that subordinates immediate self-interests to the vital interests of the community is lacking both in contemporary nation-states, and in business enterprises.

Globally coordinated emergency action could produce positive results. The world lacks neither the financial nor the human resources for effective emergency action. Abject forms of poverty could be eliminated, energy- and resource-efficient technologies could be made widely available, water could be recycled and seawater desalinized, and sustainable forms of agriculture could be adopted. We could muster the energies to implement such action, and we have the technologies. Even a modest increment in the effective use of the solar radiation reaching the planet could supply the necessary energies, and the reassignment of but a fraction of the funds currently devoted to destructive purposes could finance the principal projects. The reason for the lack of globally coordinated effective action doesn’t lie in the condition of humanity relative to the condition of the planet, but in the lack of will and preparedness of the people and institutions of the human world to ensure their survival on the planet.

A number of persistent beliefs and assumptions prevent the bulk of humanity from perceiving the current condition of global emergency and acting on it.  For example:

It’s still widely held (although now less and less voiced) that the planetary environment is practically infinite. It’s an inexhaustible source of resources and an inexhaustible sink of wastes. This tacit belief obstructs the recognition that we are vastly overusing the planet’s resources and overloading nature’s regenerative capacites.

Another dominant belief is that matter is passive and inert, and can be engineered to suit our wishes. The belief that with our sophisticated technologies we can manipulate the world around us to respond to our personal, national, and economic objectives produces a plethora of unforeseen side-effects, such as the destruction of ecological balances and the massive extinction of living species.

It’s also widely held that life is a struggle where only the fittest survive. This arbitrary application of Darwin’s theory of natural selection to human society justifies no-holds barred competition and creates a growing gap between an ever shrinking group of economic and political power-elites and the marginalized mainstream of the people.

The still dominant economic wisdom is that competition is good, for the free market (governed by what Adam Smith called the “invisible hand”) distributes wealth. When one does do well for oneself, one also does well for one’s fellows in the community. Yet the penury of nearly half of the world’s population offers clear testimony that this tenet doesn’t hold in today’s world, where the skewed distribution of power and wealth distorts the operations of the market.

Numerous personal values and beliefs hamper the will to engage in globally cooperative emergency action. The ethos that characterizes the modern world puts the individual on a pedestal, holding him or her to be unique and above nature. In the words of Francis Bacon, the superior status of modern man justifies “wrenching nature’s secrets from her bosom” for his own benefit.

Last but not least there is a persistent belief that the selfishness and egocentricity that characterizes modern people are unalterable expressions of human nature; they cannot and therefore will not change. People were always pursuing their own interests and always will, mitigated at the most by the interests of their immediate family, enterprise, or ethnic or national community.

Given the persistence of such beliefs, the failure of both nation-states and business enterprises to join together in global projects is by no means surprising.

The silver lining on these ominous clouds is the growing openness of young and sensitive people toward adopting new and more responsible ways of thinking and acting. The “alternative cultures” are growing rapidly, but they are yet to produce the globally coordinated action needed to cope with the global emergency. Bringing them together to form a critical mass that has sufficient economic and political weight to implement the “worldshift” that would transform the structures and operations of society and re-stabilize the cycles and balances of nature is conceivably the most urgent and important project of our time.

Tagged as: competition, Darwin, economics, egotism, Francis Bacon