Yes, Pete Vincent is right when he writes:
I suggest that we will be getting a "steady state" or probably more accurately declining state world soon enough whether anyone likes it or not. Oil production has certainly peaked, barring absurd and ill advised heroic efforts, and the knock on effects will mean all economic activity must start to constrict very soon. Prices will rise as the advancing societies of the developing world try to buy in to the remaining energy supplies for their nascent mobile infrastructures - China may have the sobering experience of an automobile culture which rises, flourishes, and is strangled, all within ten years. We will all be learning in this decade how cheap food was dependent on cheap oil for both machinery and fertilizer. Universal austerity will be visited upon us for our past sins of profligacy. It is probable that the current level of affluence will not be seen again for perhaps two centuries, in a very different world.
But I think Pete is hoping for too much when he writes:
The best we can hope for is that the slide will be ridden with dignity, grace, tolerance and cooperation. Not an unreasonable expectation, as this situation will be an opportunity for people to bring forward all their best qualities to meet the challenges ahead.
I don't know what our "best qualities" are, other than being vague abstractions such as patience or honesty or intelligence which are usually noticeable by their absence in times of stress. Instead, in any attempt at futurology, I would sooner rely on highlighting strong genetic predispositions which have been shaped by our environment for millions of years and which are now being increasingly clarified by evolutionary biologists. I speak of such human universal traits such as pecking-order (and opportunism), in-group out-groupism (and intra-species aggression), herdism (ideological stupefaction and obedience among the majority) and short-termism (mainly of one's own lifetime and maybe one;'s children at the most). All these had been necessary survival behaviours along our own particular branch of evolution from social mammalia through the primates and through to scavenger-gatherer-hunter groups on the open savanna. We have only been civilized for 1/600th of the time since the Homo line broke away from the apes. Behaviours appropriate to modern times have not yet been selected and consolidated in our genes.
Also, these universal predispositions are not in balance at any one time. Each of them come to the fore or recede according to particular circumstances. Our actual behaviour can switch about dramatically from one predominant performance to another. Until evolutionary biology came along to describe (and measure) these volte faces more precisely (very recently indeed), they were described in philosophical, religious or political abstractions -- love-hate, good-evil, greed-generosity, trade-war, etc. But these are far too blunt to be analytical tools which can usefully describe where we have got to now and where we might be going.
If I had to choose one particular universal trait which seems to be coming to the fore right now I would choose pecking order. Hitherto confined to small groups, then tribal regions, then nation-states (to compress history somewhat!) it's now international. I see the emergence of what I call a "meta-class" -- an trans-world extension of what used to be called the upper-middle class, or the rich, or the establishment in any one country. It is a growing minority of the population of specialized international networks which have more loyalty to themselves and opportunities anywhere rather than to their birth countries.
This meta-class is (to my mind) becoming more well-defined in current times and is beginning express itself in polarities which can be clearly seen and seem to be growing larger and more distinct. For example: bifurcation of education in advanced countries; banks and financiers versus governments; divergence of two distinct income levels in advanced countries; increasing gulf between advanced world and Third World; science versus anti-Darwinism; hour-glass shape of job structure in advanced countries; consumer goods (now pretty well complete for most, even the poor, in advanced countries) versus softer positional goods (second or multiple homes in nice locations); secularism versus traditional religionism; urban living versus an increasingly empty industrialised countryside; interesting jobs versus dumbed down jobs that even monkeys could do, and so on.
Keith Keith Hudson, Saltford, England
_______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
