Ed,
At 20:47 29/08/2010 -0400, you wrote:
The topic makes me think of movies. And movies make me think of how we
can possibly even think we know. "A Space Odyssey" had us flying about
in space with a truly marvellous computer in 2001. "Soylent Green" saw
New York with a hugely unemployed population of 40 million and food
requirements met by converting the dead into food by 2020.
Ah, now that's a film! I don't think I've ever willingly since a film more
than once -- except Soylent Green, and I think I've seen this about four
times. It had a great deal of an authentic ring about it than not. The
recycling of bodies is very far from being far-fetched either. In some
parts of China during Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward millions were
starving so badly that parents were selling their young children to other
parents for food, while the latter, in turn, were selling their own
children. Soylent Green is far less shocking than that. The scene of Roth
"going home" is especially memorable.
But if there's one thing that can be said with absolute certainty about 500
years into the future it is that status will still be all-important driver
of human behaviour after basic needs have been met. The genetic propensity
to status is the means by which every single group of people becomes
stabilized. Status means that every single group or organization produces
one leader with, at the most, only a small group of confidants around him
(or her, much more rarely).
This applies whether we are talking of a dictatorship or a democracy,
left-wing governments or right-wing, the local knitting circle or the
Indian Railway (supposedly the largest employer in the world). The fact of
status is so strong that theonly possible outcome in any collectivity is
that one person is forced to the top or one person finagles his way to the
top.
And once there his power is enormous. The reverse side of the coin is our
propensity to deference. Once status is sorted out and once a leader
emerges then almost everybody else becomes biddable. (There are always a
few mavericks but they're usually individuals who are so charged with
ambition themselves that they cannot avoid being nuisances.)
Deference to leadership meant that thousands of Germans took part in the
extermination of millions of Jews and Gypsies in WW2 with hardly a murmur
and not a single protest. Deference to leadership meant that President
Bush, with no more than three supporters) could decide to invade Iraq with
most of the population going along with it. In the UK the status-deference
syndrome meant that only Prime Minister Tony Blair and Foreign Secretary
Jack Straw needed to decide to support Bush, and the rest of the Cabinet
lamely agreed. It only took an absurd lie by Tony Blair (that Saddam
Hussein could attack the UK with "weapons of mass destruction" at 45
minutes' notice) for the House of Commons and then most of the rest of the
country to agree.
What is less certain about the next 500 years is whether evolutionary
biology will be taught widely enough so people will be more vigilant in
whom they select as their leaders of this or that. Furthermore, that they
will design all their organizations, large or small such that leaders are
always much more accessible to be pulled down from power whenever necessary.
Keith
"Blade Runner" saw us making humanoid robots in some not distant future
and shipping them off to far off places in the universe and then making
sure they didn't come back to Earth.
Five hundred years ago, in 1510, the new world had just been
discovered. Very little of the great ruination that took place as a
result had as yet happened and Christian Europe was still trying to
recover from Islamic invasion (so what's new?). There was as yet no
industrial or scientific revolution even if the seeds were there. Could
anyone then have predicted what the world would be like in 500 years?
Ed
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