Future Perfect What next? And other impossible questions

9. The Future of Us – Our Last Century?

In the last days of the Commission for the Future, in 1998, we decided to do an experiment. We would invite a hundred young people from all over Australia to spend four days talking about their hopes and dreams. To our delight a bank (the National Australia Bank) agreed to fund the event and Macquarie University to host it. Speakers were lined up, including the Prime Minister, John Button, me and lots of others.

The day arrived. So did the kids-high school seniors from the bush, posh schools, state schools, rugger buggers, nerds. At first they thought it was all a laugh, a chance to skive and play. Some stayed out late and looked trashed on Day 2. Then they just sat there. By Day 3, something had changed. We had impressed upon them that it was their views we wanted and that, from John Howard downwards, we were taking them seriously. Suddenly the game was on. All their massive fears for the future and insecurities, their wild ideas and, yes, dreams flowed out. By Day 4 many said it was the most important experience of their lives. Afterwards they sent letters saying so. And all we’d done was listen.

Barry Jones had set up the Commission for the Future in the mid-1980s. Phillip Adams was the first chair. I succeeded him and then, as the Commission ran out of funds and became a virtual adjunct to Monash University, John Button, former (brilliant) Minister for Industry under Bob Hawke, took over. The Commission’s job, as Jones (then Minister for Science) saw it, was to lead a national debate on where Australia thought it was going. Paddy McGuinness, in an editorial in the Financial Review, called us ‘the Commission for Bullshit’. Many in the Opposition front bench thought much the same. I visited John Howard in his Sydney office (these were his wilderness years), and he listened politely but said nothing encouraging. The Commission got on with its work.

A major initiative was the Greenhouse Project. Its aim was to bring sound information about climate change to the public. This was twenty years ago! We felt that the science of climate change was looking startling and Australia could usefully prepare itself. We also gave attention to the effects of IT on the future of work, something pioneered intellectually by Barry Jones in his peerless work Sleepers Wake! We also introduced an exotic-looking Canadian called David Suzuki to Australia. Not a bad line-up when you consider it from the vantage of 2007. But the brickbats continued.

Not from the kids, though. The Commission died shortly after our Macquarie University bash, and John Button and I still feel bad about those excited letters asking us to do something more. Where are those letters now? What happened to the youngsters?

I remember one of them from a country town, dressed like a natty cowboy, trying to talk to a bunch of longhaired, nose-studded city sophisticates about the desirability of guns (this was in the aftermath of the Port Arthur massacre, in the first year of the Howard government). Jibes were followed by argument, and then came a genuine understanding of the different values and experience between town and country. It was delightful to watch.

The Commission did some good things. It was woefully underestimated-as an organisation but most of all as an idea. Paradoxically, it came before its time.

There were many attempts, as we approached the millennium, to look to what we could expect from the 21st century. Lots were replete with buzzwords, corporate-speak and hype, all of which faded to very little when you tried to tease out the content. The work I found most interesting was by a fellow I actually interviewed for the first-ever episode of the Science Show back in 1975. He was Herman Kahn, founder and director of the Hudson Institute.

I met Kahn at the Hyatt Hotel in Vancouver. He was sitting on his bed in his underwear eating grapes, looking like a gargantuan Jewish Nero at a kosher Roman banquet. He was casually polite but characteristically acute. When I asked him why the West needed enough nuclear bombs to blow up the world hundreds of times over, he retorted that we don’t look at machine-gun belts and assume each bullet will kill a man. He was casually, analytically precise. His book, Thinking the Unthinkable, had explored this theme.

Two years later, in 1977, came his book on the future, The Next 200 Years. It was outrageously ambitious, but typical of Kahn the number cruncher, the physicist, the conservative sceptic. When read today, exactly 30 years after it was published and decades after his death, it is a revelation and worth re-examining to see how much he was on track.

He divided opinion into four categories. Do they apply today? They were: Convinced Neo-Malthusian, Guarded Pessimist, Guarded Optimist, Technology-and-Growth Enthusiast.

To elaborate:

Convinced Neo-Malthusian

Current estimates show we will be running out of many critical resources in the next 50 years… Because the pie shrinks over time, any economic growth that makes the rich richer can only make the poor poorer… Proposed technological solutions to problems of pollution or scarce resources are shortsighted or illusions… All signs point to catastrophe for the medium-and long-term future… Future economic growth will hasten and increase the tragedy… Prudence requires immediate restraint… Further industrialization of The Third World will be disastrous… The quality of life ruined…

You get the picture.

Guarded Pessimist

Excessive conservation poses small risks while excessive consumption will be tragic… If we don’t reform voluntarily, more painful political and economic changes may be imposed on us by the catastrophic events made inevitable by failure to act soon… A more cautious approach to growth seems clearly desirable… Unless we take drastic action soon, mankind may be overwhelmed by climate changes, destruction of ocean ecology, excessive pollution or other disasters.

Not bad for 1977!

Guarded Optimist

As the rich get richer the poor also benefit… Despite some dangers, only new technology and capital investment can increase production; protect and improve the environment… With rapid progress and good management generally, even higher economic levels and an outstanding quality of life become possible… There seems to be more than enough energy, resources and space for most populations, assuming that a relatively small number of people put forth the necessary efforts and others do not interfere.

Technology-and-Growth Enthusiast

The important resources are capital, technology and educated people… Man has always risen to the occasion and will do so in the future despite dire predictions from the perennial doomsayers who have always been scandalously wrong… There is little doubt that sufficient land and resources exist for continual progress on earth… We flatter ourselves that current issues are more important and difficult than ever. Actually there is nothing very special happening. Economics and technology can provide superb solutions. No obvious limits are apparent… Man is now entering the most creative and expansive period of his history. These trends will soon allow mankind to become the ‘master’ of the solar system.

ONWARDS!!

So which of the four did Kahn choose as most likely to fit the future? Again I quote:

We believe that plausible and realistic scenarios can be written consonant with a view that sees the world moving from C (Guarded Optimist) to D (Growth Enthusiast). We argue that there is both need and opportunity for growth, and that because America and the rest of the nations of the developed world do use resources so intensely, there will be stimulation, not depression, for the economies of less-developed countries.

But Kahn gave two qualifications, again insightful: ‘We would like to stress that in no sense do we wish to play down the importance of the issues raised by neo-Malthusians or to assert that there are no serious problems.’

One of the problems that is starkly apparent in 2007 is that, as Kahn predicted, America has become unevenly but spectacularly wealthy. As a result many Americans have forsaken their traditional values. It is worth quoting his exact words:

It is clear that the world of the immediate future will be confusing, complex and very difficult to cope with. Among the features cited in this short-term projection that concerns us most-and one to be considered a central issue for the transition, and possibly for the long term as well-is the erosion of the traditional societal levers and their replacement by other values, both transient and relatively permanent. It is primarily the upper middle class which has begun to experience this erosion at this point; perhaps three fourths of the American people still share traditional values. We believe, however, that erosion may eventually affect the rest of society… But if we are correct and traditional values cannot be restored, then Americans will have to import, invent and inculcate new values.

Other nations would look at them askance, see the avarice and indulgence, piety and vulgarity-and become antagonistic. What Kahn does not mention is the incendiary role of religion in this new standoff. He pictures his countrymen and women, instead, as victims of riches:

Americans are going to be enormously wealthy, so they must learn how to spend their wealth without becoming satiated, disappointed or fashionably antimaterialistic. They have to learn to take certain everyday affairs seriously (without becoming obsessed with them) in order to avoid boredom, and to compensate for the fact that they no longer have life and death struggles to engage their emotions. They have to learn to be gentlemen and ladies who pass their time doing difficult-if not useful-things well.

Remember, Kahn was writing before the fall of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, before anyone had heard of AIDS and before the enormous increase in disturbing knowledge about ‘ecology’. This was nine years after Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb and only five years after the transforming UN Environment Conference in Stockholm in 1972. He had the four ‘types’ taped, though, and could understand our complex need for both cautious optimism and wary concern.

The future will be determined by each of us being able to incorporate elements of all four types. I can imagine an enlightened businessperson, who understands how markets work best, setting up the choice of the new technologies to solve problems of production and remediation, all in cooperation with the most able of our conservationists looking sternly at the pitfalls.

It also worth mentioning that Kahn and the Hudson Institute, as well as other think tanks past and present, were reacting to the enormous impact of Limits to Growth, one of the first attempts to use models and computers to try to track past trends and future possibilities. The Club of Rome, which was associated with these exercises, was perfectly respectable and headed by Fiat’s chief, Aurelio Peccei (1908-84). Nonetheless, plenty of conservative doubters attacked the Club and Limits, carefully picking out one or two of their scenarios to ridicule while ignoring the rest. Paul Ehrlich told me he had the same experience with The Population Bomb, which also offered scenarios rather than cast-iron predictions. Kahn was not so unprofessional as to commit the same egregious error.

As for all four types melding into one-it is no longer wishful thinking. I took the trouble to call the heroine in my novel, 2007: A true story waiting to happen, Kate Schumpeter. For me she symbolised the way Kahn’s categories would have to merge this century if we are to survive. Kate is an innovator and an entrepreneur. She eventually becomes green as well. But there is not a scintilla of Malthusian gloom about her. You get the gist from the following cameo of Kate’s namesake-the great economist Joseph Schumpeter-given by Queensland University ’s Professor Mark Dodgson in January 2006 on ABC Radio National’s Ockham’s Razor.

Joseph Schumpeter was one of the most important economists of the twentieth century. In a world where technology and innovation are so important for us all, he was one of the first to examine their impact on the economy. He was quite a character. He was Austrian Finance Minister, a Harvard professor, and always proclaimed to have three rather immodest ambitions: to be the best economist in the world, the most skilful horseman in Austria, and the greatest lover in Vienna. On his deathbed, he glumly accepted that there was probably one person who’d always been better on a horse…

Schumpeter used wonderfully colourful and evocative language. He argued that innovation unleashed ‘the gales of creative destruction’. It arrives in great storms of revolutionary technologies like steam power and computers that fundamentally change and improve the economy. Innovation is creative and beneficial, bringing new industries, wealth and employment, and at the same time is destructive of some established firms, many products and jobs and the dreams of failed entrepreneurs. For Schumpeter, innovation offers the ‘carrot of spectacular reward or the stick of destitution’.

This eruption of a new kind of innovation is happening already. Amory and Hunter Lovins, of the Rocky Mountain Institute, have written Natural Capitalism, containing enough ideas to help us tackle the next 50 years. Dave Suzuki has covered similar ground in Good News for a Change. In London, the Forum for the Future, chaired by Jonathon Porritt, has a magazine called Green Futures, in which these ideas have been promoted for over ten years. It invites corporations to submit a £5000 joining fee and a statement about how they are, as organisations, facing the future. Promotion puffs written in the customary corporate way are unacceptable and immediately returned to sender. Only realistic grapplings with possibilities, good or bad, are accepted. Then there is the comprehensive The Natural Advantage of Nations, Business Opportunities, Innovation and Governance in the 21st Century, edited by Karlson Hargroves and Michael Smith, two Australians from the Natural Edge Project. Gradually business is learning that being green is a supremely serious venture, and profitable. Environment Business Australia is taking its own approach, successfully. It suggests that green enterprise in Oz will be worth $40-50 billion a year by 2010.

What Kahn did not foresee 30 years ago, I repeat, is that his four distinct types would soon morph into one on today’s world stage. The Australian Business Round Table was launched in 2006 by six magnificent CEOs (whose companies included Westpac, Visy Industries, I AG, Swiss Re, Origin Energy and BHP). Put them together with leaders such as Lord Oxburgh and Cathy Zoi (who now runs Al Gore’s office but promises to return to Australia) and you have the beginnings of lift-off.

I was born in January 1944. Hitler was still going strong. The atomic bomb had not yet been tested, nor dropped on two Japanese cities. Martha Gellhorn was yet to write about the hitherto unsuspected (by the public at least) outrage of the concentration camps. I arrived in a world not dissimilar to hell. So I know, as you do, how bad things can get. We also know how good they can be, some of us.

Today, like Tolstoy’s unhappy families, our bad things are bad in different ways. This is how our problem is posed by Martin Rees:

We are entering an era when a single person can, by one clandestine act, cause millions of deaths or render a city uninhabitable for years, and when a malfunction in cyberspace can cause havoc worldwide to a significant segment of the economy: air transport, power generation, or the financial system. Indeed disaster could be caused by someone who is merely incompetent rather than malign.

Martin Rees is a calm, immensely courteous Welshman. He is the last person on Earth to be inclined to histrionics. He is also one of the most distinguished scientists alive, combining, somehow, the positions of President of the Royal Society of London, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, member of the House of Lords and professor of astrophysics (he had to give up being Astronomer Royal!). Yet this sensible man was willing to have a wager on oblivion. In his book Our Final Century (note, no question mark!), he wrote:

I staked one thousand dollars on a bet: ‘That by the year 2020 an instance of bioerror or bioterror will have killed a million people.’

Of course, I fervently hope to lose this bet. But I honestly do not expect to. This forecast involved looking less than twenty years ahead. I believe the risk would be high even if there were a ‘freeze’ on new developments, and the potential perpetrators of such outrages or mega errors had continuing access only to present-day techniques. But of course, no subject is forging ahead faster than biotechnology, and its advances will intensify the risks and enhance their variety.

To Lord Rees’s nightmare add mad mullahs, myopically dim US presidents and a few million folk waiting and even wishing for Armageddon, and you have a mixture that even my contemporaries in 1944 might have found too dreadful to contemplate. At least back then you had some almost Utopian optimism about possible futures. One monster, Hitler, was about to be vanquished; another, Stalin, would last but another nine years. Little did we imagine that the end of the world would come, not through the agency of the Devil but by the actions of idiots. To misquote T.S. Eliot: ‘This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a blunder.’ The whimper comes afterwards.

In his book Last and First Men, published in 1930, Olaf Stapledon wrote a two-billion-year history of the human race. In his tale we grow wings and take to the sky and move from Earth to the outer reaches of our solar system-though we do not leave it. Stapledon was a philosopher trained, like Richard Dawkins, at Balliol College in Oxford, though he later went west to the University of Liverpool to lecture. His narrative is not enlivened by winsome or wicked characters or personal vignettes, but proceeds, almost like a formal history, to leap through the centuries and millennia. He was boldly optimistic that we have many millions of years ahead of us, even though we have managed only about 120,000 so far as modern humans and barely ten thousand years of civilisation.

My concern is for the next TWENTY years.

So, will we make it? I am afraid I can’t answer that.

It’s up to you.

The Hunches of Nostradamus

2008 Three American teens develop prehensile ears for mobile phone use.

2009 Shias and Sunnis in Iraq agree to put twenty children out in public each night to be shot by the other side-to save time.

2010 George W. Bush voted worst American President in history. Hides in a Texan retreat with remaining loyal buddies. Both of them.

2011 Climate change projections worse than expected. Nay-sayers claim they knew it was bad but didn’t want to frighten people.

2012 Evacuation of coastal zones rehearsed in Europe and Pacific.

2013 Robert Mugabe dies. International rejoicing.

2014 Only 127 great apes left in wild.

2015 Weather oscillates in extremes of hot, cold, drought, rain, terrifying winds. Storm surges wipe out several coastal communities on three continents.

2016 Earth summit. No agreement. Leaders wear peculiar costumes, enjoy banquet.

2017 Animals revolt, take over planet.

2018 Turmoil.

2019 United Nations emergency meeting.

2020…