Can you see the future? The overall arc of the 21st century? How does it appear to you?
Do you see the glass half empty, with suffering caused by resource shortages, killer storms, crop failures, pandemics, economic turmoil, political unrest, and the like?
Or is the glass half full, with new technologies coming online just in time to thwart climate change, to feed all the hungry, and to bring an end to aging?
(If you’re an engineer, you might argue that the glass is twice the size it needs to be.)
An Empathic Revolution
Perhaps you agree with Jeremy Rifkin that humanity is on the verge of a new age, a new beginning—a time when, as he claims has happened before, “new energy regimes converge with new communications revolutions, creating new economic eras”—and that we are now about to witness and to partake in a dramatic positive shift:
What is required now is nothing less than a leap to global empathic consciousness and in less than a generation if we are to resurrect the global economy and revitalize the biosphere. The question becomes this: what is the mechanism that allows empathic sensitivity to mature and consciousness to expand through history?
Rifkin goes on to say:
Today, we are on the cusp of another historic convergence of energy and communication—a third industrial revolution—that could extend empathic sensibility to the biosphere itself and all of life on Earth. The distributed Internet revolution is coming together with distributed renewable energies, making possible a sustainable, post-carbon economy that is both globally connected and locally managed.
In the 21st century, hundreds of millions—and eventually billions—of human beings will transform their buildings into power plants to harvest renewable energies on site, store those energies in the form of hydrogen and share electricity, peer-to-peer, across local, regional, national and continental inter-grids that act much like the Internet. The open source sharing of energy, like open source sharing of information, will give rise to collaborative energy spaces—not unlike the collaborative social spaces that currently exist on the Internet.
When every family and business comes to take responsibility for its own small swath of the biosphere by harnessing renewable energy and sharing it with millions of others on smart power grids that stretch across continents, we become intimately interconnected at the most basic level of earthly existence by jointly stewarding the energy that bathes the planet and sustains all of life.
The new distributed communication revolution not only organizes distributed renewable energies, but also changes human consciousness. The information communication technologies (ICT) revolution is quickly extending the central nervous system of billions of human beings and connecting the human race across time and space, allowing empathy to flourish on a global scale, for the first time in history. . .
If we can harness our empathic sensibility to establish a new global ethic that recognizes and acts to harmonize the many relationships that make up the life-sustaining forces of the planet, we will have moved beyond the detached, self-interested and utilitarian philosophical assumptions that accompanied national markets and nation state governance and into a new era of biosphere consciousness. We leave the old world of geopolitics behind and enter into a new world of biosphere politics, with new forms of governance emerging to accompany our new biosphere awareness.
Does that hopeful description sound like reality (or potential reality) to you? Or does it seem overly optimistic, more like a fairy tale than like the real world we live in?
Fantasy vs. Science Fiction
It turns out that how you see the future, and how you picture the past, may have a lot to do with your reading preferences. Over at Daily Kos, a diarist compellingly theorizes that if you like to read science fiction as opposed to fantasy, you’re most likely a political progressive. But if your tastes run more to novels about elves and dragons, you’re probably a conservative:
Fantasy looks for its answers in the past. That’s when civilization was at its peak, when there was more magic and mystery in the world, when great deeds were done and heros lived. Science fiction looks to the future, when new knowledge and shifts in both technology and society will create fresh wonders.
In many ways, this break between science fiction and fantasy also defines our political parties.
Clearly conservatives have created a fantasy not only when it comes to how they define their take on religion, but when it comes to the foundations of America. They look backward to a mythic time when people’s behavior was defined equally by Leave it to Beaver and Stagecoach, one in which markets were free, women were passive, and all the colorful elves knew their place. It’s not hard to imagine them setting off down rivers flanked by giant stone statues of a grinning Reagan on one side and a scowling Joe McCarthy on the other, past temples to Ayn Rand. Like the ancient Babylonians, conservative utopia only existed in some mythic period outside of normal time, but they are determined to endlessly circle that stagnant goal.
Progressives tend to have more of a science fiction outlook. Sure, we may want our Star Trek uniforms made from organically grown fibers, but who doesn’t long for the time when we can discard old prejudices and break the stale roles that confine our lives? An end to war. An end to hunger. A world where the condition of your parents doesn’t restrict the possibility of your life. There’s a reason that the word “progress” is bound up in progressive (and no, it’s not meant to be ironic). Progressives are about making changes, moving forward, creating a world that’s unlike the one we see around us with—hopefully—fewer of the flaws we face today.
Religion, Politics, Death, and Hope
The 21st century struggle over ideas might be not only political (or literary), but also spiritual. In part 3 of his continuing series on the problems of transhumanism, IEET Executive Director James Hughes lays out some of the parameters of that debate taking place within our small movement:
The dominant trajectory of Enlightenment thought over the last three hundred years has been towards atheism. Most transhumanists are atheists. But some transhumanists, like many of the original Enlightenment thinkers, are attempting to reconcile naturalism and their religious traditions. Some transhumanists even believe that the transcendent potentials of intelligence argue for a new form of scientific theology.
Whether historians in the year 2100 will look back at our current century as a time of new religion or no religion is still unclear. And it’s also unclear whether our internal ruminations will have much impact on a broader scale, where religious disagreements all too often lead to bloody disputes and even war.
Spirituality, religion, politics, science, technology… so much to think about and discuss.
But in the meantime, while intellectuals ponder and ideologues pontificate, life goes on—and death does too.
We’re all aware of the horrific disaster taking place in Haiti right now. I urge you to take a moment and donate whatever you can to one of the reputable charities providing aid and relief.
When something so terrible happens, it’s a reminder of just how lucky those of us are who can spend our time thinking and writing instead of struggling just to survive. And I hope it also can be a trigger for us to recognize the urgency of supplying practical answers for the difficult challenges of today.
That’s when I will really be impressed with the power of emerging technologies: when all those sensational new tools that supposedly are being rapidly developed are put to use in creating effective humanitarian solutions to the very real problems of suffering and death that daily beset so many of our fellow inhabitants of Earth.
Sure, you can label me a stereotypical SWPL leftist if that makes you happy, but I’m not about to apologize for placing an emphasis on developing real solutions that help real people in the here and now instead of focusing all our attention on dreamy possibilities of a better world to come. Many of the worst religions encourage that approach, and we, as technoprogressives, must be on guard against the same tendency.
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