Reasons to be cheerful, part one: ‘On Tensions and Transition’

I’ve been thinking, a dangerous thing I know but 2011 has been the sort of year that could make anyone take stock. We have seen popular revolutions in North Africa, economic strife on a global scale and major environmental emergencies in America, Japan and Australia. It was also a year in which we made some substantial technological and scientific gains. I thought it would make a useful contribution of sorts to set down my interpretation of what’s been happening and what it might mean.

Last New Year I wrote a blog called Tomorrow’s World Today, Today’s World Tomorrow in which I explored the future we imagined and the one we ended up with. In closing I suggested that advances in digital technology and communications might lead to some fundamental social shifts.

Now, one year later, the global market economy has continued to unravel and we have learned some pretty ugly truths about the financial system. London’s August riots and the international Occupy movement have exposed a deep sense of mistrust and unfairness prevailing within even the most progressive societies. Meanwhile Russia’s semi-authoritarian state has begun to experience the emergence of a viable opposition movement and the Arab World has experienced a tumultuous political awakening.

I wouldn’t dare to claim that I predicted the convulsions that have beset the world over the past year but they have reinforced my feeling that we are in the midst of a transition. I’m not alone, in an excellent article for the Dachis Group Collaboatory titled ‘Everything is a Service‘ Dave Gray recently quoted the CEO of General Electric:

‘This economic crisis doesn’t represent a cycle. It represents a reset. It’s an emotional, raw social, economic reset. People who understand that will prosper. Those who don’t will be left behind.”

Gray’s article eloquently argues we are moving out of an industrial era toward one centred on services and knowledge. I would go one step further and suggest we are in a ‘post-institutional’ phase – a sort of interstitial period between ages.

It strikes me that today’s global political, economic and social infrastructure is woefully incapable of surviving this transitional period. It’s hard to say how long the status quo will last in its current form, or whether the adjustment will be gradual or calamitous in nature, but I am convinced that change is in progress. Here’s my thinking…

As it reaches its zenith the ‘modern age’ is still largely founded on social models that were conceived thousands of years ago. I think we have reached the point at which they can be judged incapable to meet the challenges we face.

Over time and in many different ways we humans chose to protect our communities from our own self-interest by creating religious and philosophical morals and endowing civil organisations with the authority to enforce and protect them. Our myriad cultures are now irrevocably shaped by concepts of religious ideology and defined by nation states who have spent the past few thousand years trying to prove that their way of doing things is best.

Scroll forward and that argument seems to have been won for the time being. Following communism’s eventual loss of credibility as a viable social system, consumerism and market economics seem to have emerged victorious as the unifying concepts guiding global thinking. However this is beginning to look like a pyrrhic victory; just as China becomes the last great power to jump on the bandwagon the engine is failing and the wheels are falling off.

In my opinion today’s world operates to a set of principles that are becoming increasingly deleterious to social progress, possibly even human survival. Given our increasingly limited resources the endless cycle of commoditisation and mass production required to support global consumption are simply unworkable and unsustainable.

Left to its own devices our consumerist economy will likely devour itself. Free market economics’ greatest advocate Adam Smith would be the first to agree that selfishness is necessary for a free market to function; but climate change is a telling example of how close to ruin the markets will allow us to get before ‘self interest’ kicks in to correct things. If you remain to be convinced of the selfishness of markets surely it cannot escape notice that the luxurious world of designer lifestyles and banker’s bonuses exists precisely because billions of people still live on or below the poverty line. In a free market there will always be winners and losers.

Enough ranting, it certainly seems to me that consumerism is no longer a viable option and that market economics are fundamentally flawed. I fear that the longer we hold onto established forms of social governance the more we career blindly toward catastrophe.
Recent (and not so recent) events suggest that the wheels of change are already in motion. It looks like the convergence of a challenging set of political, economic, social, environmental and technological dynamics is creating tensions within our social systems and this is causing social movements to manifest.

I think this is essentially a revolutionary process, after all real change is more likely to take place outside or on the fringes of existing social frameworks. Perhaps that’s why the protest theme is currently so prevalent in these social movements but revolution comes in many forms.

Whilst protest and conflict are the more obvious manifestations of change there are already countless examples of more meaningful and productive revolutions taking place. Rather than seeing this period of transition as something to be afraid of I think it offers us plenty of reasons to be cheerful. Next week I’m going to let my optimism out to play and propose how you, me, and everyone we know can seize this opportunity to shape a brighter future.

In the meantime, I wrote this to encourage debate and it’s not been subjected to any academic rigour so please feel free to applaud, correct or deride my post. I look forward to hearing what people think.