Until the last century, only a few imperial powers had to concern themselves with issues beyond their own borders. If the weather was off, and there had been no rain, there might be a shaman or an astrologer called in, but it was usually assumed he or she could only influence or predict matters, not command the gods to produce the necessary precipitation.
This week’s consensus on the environment (subject to change next week, of course) is that while global warming is happening, and human activity is influencing it, it won’t be that intolerable. Not, anyway, unless you live in the Arctic, in which case your votes are too few to count, so here are our sympathies and nothing more. And polar bears don’t vote at all.
That said, this is the first time in a couple of millennia of western history that our rulers have to consider how they might change the weather. They also have to form policies regarding the distant emerging empires (China, India and probably Russia), develop a multi-purpose military that can deter such empires as well as terrorist factions (an impossible task, of course), manage huge, huge trading patterns, and, somewhere amid all that, maintain a justice system and certain social services.
The response is sure to be that certain issues will receive attention, and others will be allowed to drift. The Clinton administration attempted to address health-care, an Al Gore administration would have focussed on the environment, and the Bush administration ... what, exactly, did it intend to accomplish at the beginning, before 9/11? I forget. Maybe it had no significant plans, other than tax-cuts. It has certainly failed utterly to address the sectarian, nationalist and radical movements it lumps together as ‘terrorism’. Had it presented a mere hiatus in societal progress, that would have been one thing, but the next administration has a serious situation to fix in the Middle East, which may be beyond any fixing in less than a decade or two. A wholly new approach is needed there that, given the conditions of U.S. domestic politics, cannot yet be debated publicly.
A view I often return to is that no government can, in fact, set the world to rights. China cannot rectify corruption or its levels of carbon emissions and other pollutants, Russia cannot establish an open society that can produce prosperity, and India cannot eliminate its caste system. Or maybe they can, but not in the next twenty years. All have tried these things, and failed to develop the political momentum to effect lasting change.
This all means that some form of global polity must address them, however much that idea is derided in a time when we are all constantly instructed to be increasingly paranoid and hate-filled. And such a polity, while it might manifest in certain movements or groupings, can only use such entities provisionally. Environmentalist groups, for example, are starting to find themselves out of step and hopelessly antiquated, right at the time they should be celebrating a moral victory, their fading scientific credibility caught hopelessly amid their 1970s ideologies. They might talk about partnerships with industry, but that is like old communists adopting free-market mercantilism because it works better. Just because something is more viable, doesn’t mean the staunch advocates of the previous viewpoint can really accept it.
My hunch is that the eventual answer might be even more anarchistic than this, and involve one-on-one dialogues across borders: the kind you see happening in connection with some blogs and other on-line activities. . No-one in such a situation will have a very clear perspective on what is developing, but collectively, our desire to live together in something approaching functional harmony, backed up by a deeper sense of spiritual unity, would be the deciding factor. This cannot be advocated, for the simple reason that anyone who consciously espouses such as perspective is bound to get it wrong. Too many personal factors and anxieties will intrude, and yet another unwieldy power-structure would emerge. The thing will be conducted, not on a subconscious level, but on a superconscious one, with its surface manifestations often seeming more disruptive than helpful. This tendency, I’m convinced, is what has kept us from nuclear war for six decades. Yes, we’ve done a lot of dreadful things. but we’ve not gone over the brink, despite our worst fears, or the worst hopes of those who long for Armageddon and Judgement Day.
It will be odd, and seemingly aimless, and it will occur in the face of further pressure to conform from the ‘official’ political and social structures. But it will subvert these things, and bring us to ... well, if we knew that, it would spoil this bizarre story we’re telling ourselves.