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While mapping the future is a risky undertaking, perhaps the only thing riskier is doing nothing.
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Al Gore's alarming new guide to what needs to change in world politics is essential reading
John Gray
The Guardian, Thursday 31 January 2013 / http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/jan/31/the-future-al-gore-review
According to reliable reports, the new leadership in Beijing has been reading Alexis de Tocqueville. It's not hard to see why China's elite might look for guidance to the aristocratic French thinker. In his classic text The Ancien Regime and the Revolution (1856), de Tocqueville wrote that the danger of revolution is not greatest in the depths of poverty and despair but when conditions have been improving – especially if some are benefiting far more than others. The relevance of this for China is obvious. The implications for policy are rather less so, since de Tocqueville also warned that for a bad government, the moment of greatest danger comes when it starts to reform. In such circumstances, repression might be a more prudent course of action. This troubling ambiguity could explain why Chinese readers, struggling to decipher the intentions of their rulers, made de Tocqueville's book a national bestseller.
From a parochial British perspective, what might be most significant is the fact that China's rulers are reading de Tocqueville at all. It is difficult to imagine David Cameron devoting any time to a 19th-century thinker. Along with much of the political class, the prime minister seems resistant to the notion that history has anything to teach, and looks for guidance to writers who extol the wisdom of crowds, explain the momentous importance of tipping points or pass on the revelation that humans are social animals – the fleeting nostrums of the airport bookstore. But if our rulers will not read the classics then they must read Al Gore, who, after eight years of reading and thinking, has produced a guide for the politically perplexed that will surely endure.
Gore starts with six drivers of change, which together make the world fundamentally different from the way it was even a few decades ago: a more globalised economy, planet-wide electronic communications and developments in robotics, a new political economy in which influence and initiative is shifting from west to east, unsustainable population growth and resource depletion, advances in biological, biochemical and materials science that enable human beings to reshape the fabric of life as never before, and a radically unstable relationship between human civilisation and the earth's ecological systems, particularly its atmosphere and climate. The question is whether our thinking can keep up with the pace of these closely interconnected and mutually reinforcing changes.
Gore tells us that the astrologers of ancient Babylon used a double clock – one for measuring the timescale of human affairs and another for tracking the celestial movements they believed shaped earthly events. Today the timescales of planetary change and human events are coming together, he believes, and unless we change our intellectual habits the outcome will be disastrous. Interestingly and plausibly, one of the obstacles to new thinking he singles out is a mechanistic understanding of science. Warning against "prideful overconfidence in the completeness of one's own understanding", he writes: "Nor is the posture of fundamentalism unique to the religious. Reductionism – the belief that scientific understanding is usually best pursued by breaking down phenomena into their component parts and subparts – has sometimes led to a form of selective attention that can cause the observer to overlook emerging phenomena that arise in complex systems, and in their interaction with other complex systems." These are wise words. Among many examples that could be cited, the attempt of economists to emulate a simplified version of natural science led not only to a failure to predict the financial crisis but also an inability to recognise that such a crisis was a realistic possibility.
Applying a formidable mix of history, science and common experience, Gore has produced a luminously intelligent analysis that is packed with arresting ideas and facts. The peaking of global conventional oil production that occurred some 30 or more years ago, the risks to fresh water supplies posed by fracking, the rapid ongoing evolution of cyber-warfare, the dangers and potential benefits of biotechnology and the possibility of genetic engineering of human brains are only a few of the facts, likely developments and possibilities that the former American vice-president explores. Summarising this rich and ambitious book in any detail is impossible. You simply have no alternative to reading it.
Some themes stand out as being especially salient. Unlike those – pious bien-pensants as much as religious bigots – who fume and splutter whenever the subject of population is mentioned, Gore recognises the increase of human numbers as one of the world's largest challenges. "During the last century alone, we quadrupled the human population. By way of perspective, it took 200,000 years for our species to reach the one billion mark, yet we have added that many people in just the first thirteen years of this century." With unchecked population growth and worldwide industrialisation, humankind has embarked on "an unplanned experiment with the planet".
Despite the incessant machinations of climate deniers, there is no scientific basis for doubt as to the reality of anthropogenic climate change. Some who accept the evidence suggest that rather than attempting to halt the activities that result in global warming we should adapt to the process as it goes along; but in Gore's view, muddling through is not an option. "Our world is at stake. Not the planet itself; it would survive quite nicely without human civilisation, albeit in an altered state."
Gore believes this nemesis can be avoided as long as America can find the inner resources to renew its standing in the world. "The best chance for success in shaping a positive future and avoiding catastrophe," he writes, "is the re-establishment of a transcendent capacity for global leadership by the United States." He seems confident that the paralysing divisions of recent years can be overcome, and events do seem to be moving in that direction. Having faced down the right and avoided the fiscal cliff, Obama might prevail again over the raising of the debt ceiling. In that case, American government will be reinvigorated, although politics would still be more deeply polarised than in any other major state. But there is a larger difficulty in America's reclaiming its former pre-eminence. American decline is not a self-induced process that can be reversed by an act of national will. What has altered America's position irrevocably is globalisation – the emergence of China, India and other countries on to the world stage.
This isn't just a question of economics. Gore believes a planetary civilisation is emerging, but the idea that the spread of global markets and worldwide communications works to dissolve cultural barriers is merely an ideological assumption. One of the more striking developments of the past years has been the re-assertion by Chinese and Russian leaders of the distinct separateness of their cultures. Of course this is partly an attempt to salvage the authoritarian systems over which these leaders currently preside. But the re-assertion of differences is more than a dubious political stratagem. In Europe, toxic forms of nationalism are re-emerging alongside the push to greater integration. Far from economic liberalisation promoting universalism, the result may be a revival of old divisions.
Despite all that he writes of the forces that are altering the world, Gore seems to believe that history will continue on much the same trajectory that it has followed since the storming of the Bastille and the American founding. Here the contrast with China's leaders is striking. For them, the French revolution appears to have importance chiefly as a warning – hence their interest in the writings of de Tocqueville. Seeing history in terms of dynasties and epochs, China's rulers attach no special significance to the revolutions of the past few centuries. It is an attitude that time may well vindicate. But even these devotees of the long view will have much to learn from Gore's book, a tour de force that no government can afford to ignore.
• John Gray's The Silence of Animals is published by Penguin later this month.
‘The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change,’ by Al Gore
By MICHAEL LIND
Published: February 8, 2013 in The New York Times / http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/books/review/the-future-six-drivers-of-global-change-by-al-gore.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
In a little more than a decade, since he won the popular vote but lost the presidential election to George W. Bush in 2000, the former vice president and Tennessee senator Al Gore has been a best-selling author; starred in an Oscar-winning documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth” (2006); won the Nobel Peace Prize, in 2007, for his environmental activism; and made a fortune some have estimated to be bigger than Mitt Romney’s, thanks in part to the recent sale of his stake in the Current TV network to Al Jazeera. In “The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change,” Gore takes on a subject whose scale matches that of his achievements and ambition.
Gore’s “six drivers of global change” are divided among corresponding chapters primarily related to technology and the material world — “Outgrowth,” “The Reinvention of Life and Death” and “The Edge” — and those involving the transformation of politics and society by technology — “Earth Inc.,” “The Global Mind” and “Power in the Balance.” In the discussion of his first three topics, Gore presents a mostly grim picture of environmental degradation as a result of human population growth and rising consumption. So he tells us not only about global warming caused by fossil fuels, but also about topsoil depletion, fishery depletion and the depletion of critical minerals. Gore’s warnings about global warming have made him controversial in some circles, but he pre-empts accusations of overstatement by writing: “In the parable of the boy who cried wolf, warnings of danger that turned out to be false bred complacency to the point where a subsequent warning of a danger that was all too real was ignored.”
Still, the faults of “The Future” have less to do with Gore’s particular approach to his material than with the shortcomings of the genre itself; futurist polemics tend to alternate between exposition and exhortation. When the alternation is too rapid, we get passages like the following. “There are already several reckless practices that should be immediately stopped: the sale of deadly weapons to groups throughout the world; the use of antibiotics as a livestock growth stimulant; drilling for oil in the vulnerable Arctic Ocean; the dominance of stock market trading by supercomputers with algorithms optimized for high-speed, high-frequency trades that create volatility and risk of market disruptions; and utterly insane proposals for blocking sunlight from reaching the Earth as a strategy to offset the trappings of heat by ever-mounting levels of global warming pollution.”
At his best, Gore is an articulate, engaging and imaginative polymath, capable of discussing both contemporary globalization and flows of trade a millennium ago or pointing to the use of invisible ink in the Middle Ages as a precursor to modern cryptography. He shows a willingness to rethink positions and admit errors that is as rare among prophets and pundits as among politicians. In speaking, for example, about the possibility of adapting to global warming even while trying to minimize it, he writes: “For my own part, I used to argue many years ago that resources and effort put into adaptation would divert attention from the all-out push that is necessary to mitigate global warming and quickly build the political will to sharply reduce emissions of global warming pollution. I was wrong — not wrong that deniers would propose adaptation as an alternative to mitigation, but wrong in not immediately grasping the moral imperative of pursuing both policies simultaneously, in spite of the difficulty that poses.”
Of greater interest to many readers than the largely technical debates over species diversity and the side effects of fracking will be Gore’s view of the influence of technological innovation on politics. Drawing on H. G. Wells’s notion of a “world brain,” Gore proposes that a virtual “Global Mind” is being created by the Internet and other technologies, even as transnational corporations and supply chains are creating a globalized Earth Inc. While Gore’s language is often fresh and arresting — “Democracy and capitalism have both been hacked” — his treatment of globalization as an almost irresistible force, for good or evil, has been the conventional wisdom at Davos, Aspen and other gatherings of the policy-making jet set since the 1990s.
In the chapter entitled “Power in the Balance,” Gore defends the thesis that the nation-state, while still the dominant form of political organization, is losing authority and power to “multinational corporations, networked entrepreneurs and billions of individuals in the global middle class.” He acknowledges the role of what he calls “state-guided capitalism” in the economic rise of China and other East Asian countries, but maintains without much argument that “the emergence of Earth Inc. is more responsible for this phenomenon.”
While his discussion of state capitalism is perfunctory, his discussion of political nationalism, like many such arguments, is bedeviled by terminology. He writes: “From Kurdistan to Catalonia to Scotland, from Syria to Chechnya to South Sudan, from indigenous communities in the Andean nations to tribal communities in sub-Saharan Africa, many people are shifting their primary political identities away from the nation-states in which they lived for many generations.” But it’s important to distinguish between multinational states like the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia or Sudan and nation-states with clear ethnic majorities: the major geopolitical trend of our time has surely been the peaceful or violent replacement of multinational states by smaller, more homogeneous nation-states like Kazakhstan, Slovenia and South Sudan, a trend that represents a renaissance, not a withering away, of nationalism.
Gore insists that “because nation-states retain the exclusive power to negotiate policies and implement them globally, the only practical way to reclaim control of our destiny is to seek a global consensus within the community of nations to secure the implementation of policies that protect human values.” His somewhat Malthusian anxiety about the sustainability of human population and economic growth is matched by an optimism about the power of global public opinion reminiscent of Woodrow Wilson and other progressives from a century ago.
Nonetheless, even the most skeptical realist must concede Gore’s point that there have been “many examples” of an international consensus advancing human rights long before the arrival of the Internet. “The abolition movement, the anti-apartheid movement, the promotion of women’s rights, restrictions on child labor, the anti-whaling movement, the Geneva Conventions against torture, the rapid spread of anticolonialism in the 1960s, the ban on atmospheric nuclear testing and successive waves of the democracy movement — all gained momentum from the sharing of ideas and ideals among groups of committed individuals in multiple countries who pressured their governments to cooperate in the design of laws and treaties that led to broad-based change in much of the world.”
Gore concludes: “The outcome of the struggle to shape humanity’s future that is now beginning will be determined by a contest between the Global Mind and Earth Inc. In a million theaters of battle, the reform of rules and incentives in markets, political systems, institutions and societies will succeed or fail depending upon how quickly individuals and groups committed to a sustainable future gain sufficient strength, skill and resolve by connecting with one another to express and achieve their hopes and dreams for a better world.” Whether the forces of enlightened public opinion will prevail over clashing values and conflicting interests remains to be seen.
Michael Lind is a co-founder of the New America Foundation and the author of “Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States.
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