The following is the first of a series of lectures delivered in 1997 by a noted author and futurist.
Robert Theobald
Looking back over the most recent Massey Lectures is a sobering experience. One message dominates, expressed in a number of very different voices and styles. Societies everywhere, we’re told, are failing to cope with the challenges of our times. The possibility of political and financial collapse is very real, because our institutions are obsessed with economic issues rather than dealing with social, cultural and environmental challenges.
A few sentences from three recent Lectures will give you a sense of the overall message:
Ursula Franklin said in 1990: “It is my conviction that nothing short of a global reformulation of major social forces and of the social contract can end this historical period of profound and violent transformations, and give a manner of security to the world and its citizens. Such a development will require the redefinition of rights and responsibilities, and the setting of limits to power and control.”
Conor Cruise O’Brian said in 1994, “It seems to me that an alarmingly high proportion of communicators, on the eve of the millennium, are suffering from some sort of cognitive degeneration. … The picture of the world that we are receiving is a curious mixture of fact and fiction. The facts, very often in the form of pictures, are very often horrifying. The fiction comes into the commentary and interpretation, heavily charged with wishful fantasy, unwarranted reassurances and intimations of quick fixes.”
And in his 1995 lectures, John Ralston Saul said, “There is a general sense that our civilization is in a long-term crisis. It can be seen from its political or social or economic aspect. From each angle, the same crisis can be seen differently… we have drifted further out into a cold, unfriendly, confusing sea. The new certitude of those in positions of authority—those out of the water—is that the certain answer is to cut away the life preservers.”
On the other hand, this past spring, Gwynne Dyer put forward a very different view in his CBC radio series called “Millennium.” Dyer argued that we were moving inexorably into far better times. He said, “I think that in the end the principles of equality and individualism will produce democratic societies almost everywhere, and much more humane societies at that.”
I share both the hopes and the fears. Tom Atlee, a close colleague and author, catches current realities in his statement: “Things are getting better and better and worse and worse faster and faster.” Those who are bleakly pessimistic about the future deny the proven capacity of human beings to be creative in their own communities. That’s why I’m hopeful. I also believe Gwynne Dyer is far too optimistic because, as a rational analyst, I know the difficulties of making fundamental changes. Current systems have enormous inertia. We live inside them, and so we continue to act in old-fashioned ways we think will ensure short-run survival. They won’t.
There is one certainty at the current time. There will be huge changes in the next decades. George Land caught the issue with his book title: “Breakdown or Breakthrough.” As you will discover, I believe that the probable future is negative. But there is no reason we have to accept this result. We can co-create a more positive future.
My experience shows that people are ready for new opportunities. Think about how avalanches start. When conditions are ripe, the immediate cause can be very minor. The same is true for cultural shifts. The real challenge today is learn how to act as though what we do can make a difference. As the anthropologist Margaret Mead said: “Never doubt that a small group of committed people can change the world. Indeed it is the only thing which ever has.”
The issues we face have been defined for decades and people have been coming to grips with them over this time period. Thirty-two years ago, in 1964, a group of us sent a report to American President Johnson that set out the nature of the challenge, and the language still sounds remarkably up to date. We called our report “The Triple Revolution” and in it we talked about cybernation—a word used at that time to describe the combined impact of computers and robots.
Here’s what we said: “Cybernation is manifesting the characteristics of a revolution in production. These include the development of radically different techniques and the subsequent appearance of novel principles of the organization of production; a basic reordering of man’s relationship to his environment, and a dramatic increase in total available and potential energy.
“The major difference between the agricultural, industrial and cybernation revolutions is the speed at which they developed. The agricultural revolution began several thousand years ago in the Middle East. Centuries passed in the shift from a subsistence base of hunting and gathering to settled agriculture.
“In contrast, it has been less than 200 years since the emergence of the industrial revolution, and direct and accurate knowledge of the new productive techniques has reached most of mankind. …
“The fundamental problem posed by the cybernation revolution is that it invalidates the general mechanism so far used to undergird people’s rights as consumers. Up to this time economic resources have been distributed on the basis of contributions to production, with machines and men competing for employment on somewhat equal terms. In the developing cybernated system, potentially unlimited output can be achieved by systems of machines which will require little cooperation from human beings. As machines take over production from men, they absorb an increasing proportion of resources while the men who are displaced become dependent on minimal and unrelated government measures—unemployment insurance, social security and welfare payments.
“These measures are less and less able to disguise a historic paradox: that a substantial proportion of the population is subsisting on minimum incomes, often below the poverty line, at a time when sufficient productive potential is available to supply the needs of everyone.”
I have quoted from this 1964 report at length for two reasons. First, I think it is important to realize that today’s developing crises were visible at least thirty years ago, and the negative consequences we see around us could therefore have been palliated. Second, it leads me into a primary topic of these lectures. I want to examine the failure of our societies to provide opportunity and income on the one hand, and social services on the other, to an ever-growing number of people. The situation is worse in the United States and many of the poor countries than in Canada and Europe, but government cutbacks clearly threaten the safety nets in nations in these areas as well.
A great many people in government do not seem to make the connection between the budget cuts they administer and the consequences on the ground. The reduced services, which seem separate in accounting terms, actually affect individuals, families and whole communities in ways which compound exponentially.
This problem is no secret. Economic inequality and rising unemployment have been front-page news lately. An extraordinary series of articles in the Canadian Globe and Mail this past spring challenged many current myths. The most remarkable piece, to my mind, was one which showed the different experiences of three generations in one family. The parents had a radically easier time than the grandparents. But the children, who were mainly in their twenties, were once again struggling as their grandparents had. They saw their prospects getting worse, not better.
Worries exist throughout the developed world: There has been a brief period of euphoric prosperity which has already ended. The picture is equally bleak as one examines the experiences of the developing areas of the world. United Nations figures show that in 70 countries, citizens are on average poorer than they were in 1980. In 43 countries, they are poorer than they were in 1970.
According to Victor Keegan, writing in the British newspaper The Guardian, the richest 20 percent of the world’s population increased their share of total global wealth from 70 percent to 85 percent, while the poorest lost ground moving down from 2.3 percent to 1.4 percent. The wealth of Bill Gates, the richest man in the world with $18-billion US, founder of Microsoft the world’s premier software company, is greater by itself than that of half a dozen poor countries according to Keegan.
I want to look further at our failure to use knowledge three decades ago. If we knew so much back then, an awkward question emerges. What had I, and all of us, been doing for the past three decades? Why were we still going over ground which we had defined quite well so long ago, again and again and again? How had we failed to realize the dangers which would inevitably emerge as jobs were taken over by computers and the employment which did remain became less well-paid.
At the end of the 1960s, I was employed by the United Nations to visit the heads of their organizations and to discuss the future. I talked to several people in the International Labour Organization, whose responsibility it was to deal with employment policy. I argued that, given emerging technological developments, full employment could not be achieved. They did not argue whether I was right or not—they simply maintained that it “had” to be possible because their mandate demanded that this approach be maintained
Despite the now overwhelming evidence, governments still remain unwilling to face the implications of rising unemployment and inequality for work patterns and the way we distribute resources. Indeed, this is just one area in which we refuse to look at the urgent issues now confronting us. I hope in these lectures to open up this taboo issue, as well as others, so we can discuss them creatively.
The public agenda can be changed on the basis of a well placed effort—and a healthy dose of luck. The reason I am convinced that ideas can bring about real change emerges from one of my critical life-experiences which I have already mentioned: the publication of “The Triple Revolution.”
The attention paid to it was a fluke. We got front-page coverage in the New York Times. Among other things, The Triple Revolution proposed Basic Economic Security for all—one version of the guaranteed annual income, a national program which would have provided everybody with minimal resources. This idea seemed outrageous to many editorial writers, but their attack on this one aspect drew attention to the central thesis of the document: that computers and robots, modern weaponry, and the drive toward human rights would inevitably change the world in ways which would surprise us all. The proposal for Basic Economic Security was vigorously argued in Canada as well as in the United States. It gave me the pleasure of working with a wide range of Canadian groups in the sixties and seventies.
The process by which The Triple Revolution was created taught me many lessons and, as I’ll be doing throughout these lectures, I’ll use my own experience to illustrate more general points. A group of us had been exchanging drafts of The Triple Revolution for a long time. Just before Christmas 1963, a new draft came in. Disgusted with our failure to make any significant progress, I tossed it into the wastebasket. My wife Jeanne-Marie Scott pulled it out, forced me to work on it with her, and together we discovered the wordings that made the document newsworthy.
The Triple Revolution was successful because it was the right document at the right time in the right style. Is there a similar cusp point at this moment in history. I believe that there is. I think that people are more and more dismayed by the direction in which our societies are moving and are hungry for opportunities to think and work with each other to achieve new directions. I think they are tired of the divisions between left and right, management and labor, young and old, men and women and want to start working with each other across current boundaries.
Jacques Ellul’s 1964 book, La Technique, (The Technological Society), is a good place to start looking for an understanding of what has gone wrong. He showed us how economics and technology force us to search for “the one best way”. Ellul perceived how this drive, if it were permitted to continue, would destroy the spontaneity of life and our ability to make choices. This danger is visible every time a politician, businessman or academic announces that we “must” move in a particular direction because there are “no choices.”
We all have our own horror stories about the assumed compulsion toward efficiency regardless of its impact on people, communities or the environment. Mine centre on the Chief Executive Officers and top managers who announce they “have no choice” but to fire hundreds, or thousands, of workers. Why is there so little effective resistance to the idea that firing workers is the way to increase profits, I wonder? And my anger increases when I discover that the CEOs feel they “have no choice” but to increase dramatically their own salaries at the same time.
A recent American poll showed that I am not alone in these feelings. Large majorities see corporate behavior as a “serious national problem.” When asked if reduced benefits (health care and pensions) are a “serious problem” or not, 82% say yes. Large layoffs during times of profitability are regarded as a “serious problem” by 81%; huge CEO salaries (which are now 200 times as large as the average worker’s pay) are a “serious problem” for 79%, and stagnant wages (wages that don’t keep up with the rising cost of living) are a “serious problem” for 76%.
People do not buy the explanation that recent corporate behavior is required by a competitive global economy. Only 22% of those surveyed said they thought competitiveness motivated corporate behavior; 70% said they thought greed was the motivating factor (while 7% said they didn’t know). This view –that greed is what motivates corporations, not competitiveness –crosses all age groups, all races, all educational backgrounds, and all incomes. It even crosses political parties: 79% of Democrats, and 63% of Republicans said they thought corporate greed explains downsizing, stagnant wages, and reduced job benefits.
The “no choice” rhetoric is no longer acceptable to more and more people. This is, of course, just as well for if we accept that there are “no choices,” thinking inevitably stops. There is little point in dialogue if the outcome is foreordained and unchangeable. One primary challenge today is to show that the existing dominant viewpoint is not the only way to view the world—that there are several possible approaches to our moment in history.
Getting away from the idea that economics and technology override everything else is not going to be easy. After all, it’s not easy to change any conventional view. When somebody warns: “Look out. Those ideas and attitudes you’ve held so long and so firmly are not good for you,” the common reaction is to retreat into a psychic bunker and deny responsibility. All too many of us decide that there’s nothing useful we can do about the enormous problems that loom over us, ignoring the evidence that the actions of individuals and groups have made a difference in the past and can continue to do so into the future.
In 1897 the French sociologist Emile Durkheim coined the term “anomie” to describe the psychological problems he observed in many individuals. Literally meaning “without a name”, anomie described the state of a person who was “normless”, who could not find a role in the society that had grown up around them. We therefore coined another word “amondie”, meaning “without a world”, which described the sense people have today that events no longer make sense, and the world they once inhabited has apparently disappeared.
I often take a poll at the beginning of my lectures. My last questions are: “Do you read science fiction?” “Do you not read science fiction?” “Do you know if you read science fiction.” The last question always gets a laugh. I go on to say that my minimal goal is for people to recognize just how bizarre many of the stories they read every day are.
The conditions in which we currently live have been created because we have failed to challenge so-called economic and technological imperatives. These are driving us toward efficiency and away from a common recognition of our complex and diverse humanity and the globe’s fragility. If we are to develop a higher quality of life, the first step is to recognize that there are many ways to deal with all issues.
It is not true that we must continually crank up the economic machine, starve the poor, and work ourselves to death. Believe me about this: I was trained as an economist! The challenge is to set imagination and creativity loose, to think outside the box, to see the opportunities which lie beyond the problems. We can only resolve today’s questions by opening up new approaches and seeing new connections. Fortunately a broad and general move away from obsessive problem-solving and toward a search for new opportunities is already underway.
Here’s a current example. It seems that the issue of abortion hopelessly divides public opinion. And yet there is a way of restating the issue. Angry activists who have come together in some American communities have found that one thing they all want is to decrease the number of unwelcome pregnancies. Rethinking the abortion issue also leads to an agreement on the need for better contraceptive techniques. If it’s true that as many as 50% of births are still unplanned, surely it’s time that we made contraceptive development one of our highest research priorities. Recognition of the potential of this kind of common ground on a wider scale would bring about a new kind of political dialogue.
This is one example of the work of common ground advocates, who search for ways to bring opponents together. This approach is fortunately gathering force around the world. It assumes that we all have part of the truth. This was a painful learning experience for me as you will learn from the following story. A few years ago, I was asked to speak at a convention of Methodist religious educators. They’d looked back at their history and found out I was a speaker at their first meeting and now they wanted me to come to their twentieth. I saw the invitation as a chance to see how people would react to my changed thinking.
After my speech, I waited around to find out what issues people might want to raise with me. An older woman came up and said, “I really appreciated your message today, it was very meaningful.” I thanked her. She went on: “You really were an arrogant man when you talked to us twenty years ago.”
She was right. Twenty years before, which was at the end of the sixties, I was reasonably sure I knew where the culture needed to go. Today, I think I can define some of the questions we must address if we are to take advantage of the extraordinary possibilities which now exist. I am certain, however, that neither I, nor anybody else, knows enough to prescribe directions. We need to listen and learn from each other if we are to avoid following the historical pattern which condemns us to cultural collapse.
The historical pattern is clear. Cultures rise and fall. They fail to change their success criteria as conditions alter around then. They therefore decline and new societies took their place. Success has burdened cultures many times in the past. The collapses have sometimes been ecological. Successful cultures have seen their populations grow: This has stressed the capacity of the local ecosystems to provide food and eventually bad weather or bad planning destroyed previously flourishing cultures. This pattern is clearly visible in the anthropological record. Much of the Middle East was ravaged in earlier millennia by overgrazing and overuse of soils: Green and pleasant lands became deserts.
Cultures throughout history have also collapsed when citizens were unable to find roles within a changing socioeconomy, while others benefited and enjoyed increased affluence. In Roman times, it was government policy that Italian Romans should remain in the homeland, supported by food and other supplies from a huge empire which was defended against the so-called barbarians by troops recruited from within the conquered territories. The isolated, purposeless, well-fed inhabitants of Rome were entertained by increasingly bizarre and violent exhibitions in the arenas. Roman society was dominated by the provision of “bread and circuses.” Citizenship declined, leadership failed, social structures broke down, and eventually the Empire was overwhelmed by more organized and energetic external enemies.
Our challenge is to avoid this recurrent pattern for two reasons. First, the collapse of cultures is not pleasant for those who live within them. Second, we now live within a global culture and if industrial era patterns break down, they will have profoundly destructive consequences throughout the world and not just in a specific area or nation.
Copyright © 1997 Robert Theobald and Transformational Learning Community
Reworking Success–Chapter 1