by Al Gore
At the beginning of the Renaissance, the rediscovery of the Aristotelian branch of ancient Greek philosophy—which had been preserved in Alexandria in Arabic and reintroduced to Europe in Al-Andalus—contributed to a fascination with the physical as well as the philosophical legacies of both Athens and Rome. The legacies of that recovered past nourished dreams that would find fruition in the Enlightenment, when a strong consensus emerged that secular progress is the dominant pattern in human history.
The discoveries of Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, and the others who launched the Scientific Revolution helped to ignite a belief that, whatever God’s role or plan, the growth of knowledge made progress in human societies inevitable. Francis Bacon, who more than any other emphasized the word “progress” in describing humanity’s journey into the future, was also among the first to write about human progress with a special emphasis on subduing, dominating, and controlling nature—as if we were as separate from nature as Descartes believed the mind was separate from the body.
Centuries later, this philosophical mistake is still in need of correction. By tacitly assuming our own separateness from the ecological system of the planet, we are frequently surprised by phenomena that emerge from our inextricable connections to it. And as the power of our civilization grows exponentially, these surprises are becoming increasingly unpleasant.
The cultural legacy that still influences the scientific method is reductionist—that is, by dividing and endlessly subdividing the objects of our research and analysis, we separate interconnected phenomena and processes to develop specialized expertise. But the focusing of attention on ever narrower slices of the whole often comes at the expense of attention to the whole, which can cause us to miss the significance of emergent phenomena that spring unpredictably from the interconnections and interactions among multiple processes and networks. That is one reason why linear projections of the future are so often wrong.
A NEW VISION OF THE PAST AND THE FUTURE
The invention of powerful new tools and the development of potent new insights—and the discovery of rich new continents—led to exciting new ways of seeing the world and expansive optimism about the future. In the seventeenth century, the father of microbiology, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, fashioned new lenses for the microscope (which itself had been invented in Holland less than a century earlier), and by looking through them discovered cells and bacteria. Simultaneously, his close friend in Delft, Johannes Vermeer, revolutionized portraiture with the use (most art historians agree) of the camera obscura, made possible by the new understanding of optics.
As the Scientific Revolution accelerated and the Industrial Revolution began, the idea of progress shaped prevailing conceptions of the future. In the years before his death, Thomas Jefferson wrote about the progress he had witnessed in his life and noted, “And where this progress will stop no one can say. Barbarism has, in the meantime, been receding before the steady step of amelioration, and will in time, I trust, disappear from the earth.”
Four years after Jefferson’s death, the publication by Charles Lyell of his masterwork, Principles of Geology, in 1830, profoundly disrupted the long prevailing view of humanity’s relationship to time. In the Judeo-Christian world especially, most had assumed that the Earth was only a few thousand years old, and that humans were created not long after the planet itself, but Lyell amply proved that the Earth was not thousands, but at the very least millions of years old (4.5 billion, we now know). In reshaping the past, he also reshaped the idea of the future. And he provided the temporal context for the discovery by Charles Darwin of the principles of evolution. Indeed, as a young man Darwin took Lyell’s books with him during his voyage on the Beagle.
The previously unimaginable longevity of the past revealed by Lyell inspired symmetrical dreams of distant futures in which the progress of man might reach limitless heights. In the generation that followed Lyell, Jules Verne conjured a future with rockets landing on the moon, a submarine traversing the oceans’ depths, and men traveling to the center of the Earth.
The exuberant optimism of the nineteenth century was dampened for many by the excesses of the Second Industrial Revolution, but was revivified during the first decade of the twentieth century with the birth of a political movement based on the belief that progress required governmental policy interventions and social changes in order to ameliorate the problems accompanying industrialization and consolidate its obvious benefits. As the scientific and technological revolution brought some of the visions conjured by Verne and his successors into reality, optimism about the future gained further momentum.
But the balance of the twentieth century brought two world wars and the murder of millions by totalitarian dictators of the left and right to serve their own twisted conceptions of progress—and our view of the future began to change. The malignant nightmare of the Thousand Year Reich, the Holocaust, and the cruelties of Stalin and Mao came to be emblematic of the potential for emergent evil emanating from the use of any means, however horrific, in an effort to impose grand designs for the future of humanity that conformed to the visions of twisted men with too much power.
In the aftermath of World War II, the lingering dismay at the way totalitarian governments had used the wondrous new communications technologies of radio and film to persuade millions to suppress their better instincts and conform their lives to an evil design—coupled with the deep emotional and spiritual impact of the atomic sword of Damocles that the emergence of the nuclear arms race left hanging over civilization—reawakened concerns that new inventions might be double-edged. The uneasiness in the popular mind that powerful technologies—whatever their benefits—might also magnify the innate human vulnerability to hubris deepened for many the loss of their confidence that progress was a reliable guiding star.
The prophecies of Jules Verne were replaced by those of Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and H. G. Wells, and popular movies about destructive monsters from the ancient past—awakened by nuclear testing or dangerous creatures modified by genetic engineering gone awry—and malevolent robots from the distant future or distant planets, all seemingly bent on ravaging humanity’s future.
AND NOW MANY wonder: who are we? Aristotle wrote that the end of a thing defines its essential nature. If we are forced to contemplate the possibility that we might become the architects of our own demise as a civilization, then there are necessarily implications for how we answer the question: what is our essential nature as a species? As a scientist once reframed the question: is the combination of an opposable thumb and a neocortex viable as a sustainable form of life on Earth?
Our natural and healthy preference for optimism about the future is difficult to reconcile with the gnawing concerns expressed by many that all is not well, and that left to its own devices the future may be unfolding in ways that threaten some of the human values we most cherish. The future, in other words, now casts a shadow upon the present. It may be comforting, but of little practical use, to say, “I am an optimist!” Optimism is a form of prayer. Prayer does, in my personal view, have genuine spiritual power. But I also believe, in the words of the old African saying, “When you pray, move your feet.” Prayer without action, like optimism without engagement, is passive aggression toward the future.
Even those who understand the different dangers we are facing and are committed to taking action often feel stymied by a sense of powerlessness. On the issue of climate, for example, they change their own behaviors and habits, reduce their impact on the environment, speak out and vote, but still feel they are having precious little impact, because the powerful momentum of the global machine we have built to give us progress seems almost independent of human control. Where are the levers to pull, the buttons to push? Is there a steering mechanism? Do our hands have enough strength to operate the controls?
More than a decade before writing Faust, Goethe wrote his well-known poem “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” about a young trainee who, left to his own devices, dare
d to use one of his master’s magic spells in order to bring to life the broom he was supposed to be using to clean the workshop. But once animated, the broom could not be stopped. Growing desperate to halt the broom’s increasing frenzy of activity, the apprentice split the broom with an axe—which caused it to self-replicate, with each half growing into another new animated broom. Only when the master returned was the process brought back under control.
DEMOCRATIC CAPITALISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS
The idea of making truly meaningful collective decisions in democracy that are aimed at steering the global machinery we have set in motion is naïve, even silly, according to those who have long since placed their faith in the future not in human hands, but in the invisible hand of the marketplace. As more of the power to make decisions about the future flows from political systems to markets, and as ever more powerful technologies magnify the strength of the invisible hand, the muscles of self-governance have atrophied.
That is actually a welcome outcome for some who have found ways to accumulate great fortunes from the unrestrained operations of this global machinery. Indeed, many of them have used their wealth to reinforce the idea that self-governance is futile at best and, when it works at all, leads to dangerous meddling that interferes with both markets and technological determinism. The ideological condominium formed in the alliance between capitalism and representative democracy that has been so fruitful in expanding the potential for freedom, peace, and prosperity has been split asunder by the encroachment of concentrated wealth from the market sphere into the democracy sphere.
Though markets have no peer in collecting, processing, and utilizing massive flows of information to allocate resources and balance supply with demand, the information in markets is of a particularly granular variety. It is devoid of opinion, character, personality, feeling, love, or faith. It’s just numbers. Democracy, on the other hand, when it operates in a healthy pattern, produces from the interactions of people with different perspectives, predispositions, and life experiences emergent wisdom and creativity that is on a completely different plane. It carries dreams and hopes for the future. By tolerating the routine use of wealth to distort, degrade, and corrupt the process of democracy, we are depriving ourselves of the opportunity to use the “last best hope” to find a sustainable path for humanity through the most disruptive and chaotic changes civilization has ever confronted.
In the United States, many have cheered the withering of self-governance and have celebrated the notion that we should no longer even try to control our own destiny through democratic decision making. Some have recommended, only half in jest, that government should be diminished to the point where it can be “drowned in the bathtub.” They have enlisted politicians in the effort to paralyze the ability of government to serve any interests other than those of the global machine, recruited a fifth column in the Fourth Estate, and hired legions of lobbyists to block any collective decisions about the future that serve the public interest. They even seem to sincerely believe, as many have often written, that there is no such thing as “the public interest.”
The new self-organized pattern of the Congress serves the special interests that are providing most of the campaign money with which candidates—incumbents and challengers alike—purchase television commercials. It no longer responds to any but the most emotional concerns of the American people. Its members are still “representatives,” but the vast majority of them now represent the people and corporations who donate money, not the people who actually vote in their congressional districts.
The world’s need for intelligent, clear, values-based leadership from the United States is greater now than ever before—and the absence of any suitable alternative is clearer now than ever before. Unfortunately, the decline of U.S. democracy has degraded its capacity for clear collective thinking, led to a series of remarkably poor policy decisions on crucially significant issues, and left the global community rudderless as it faces the necessity of responding intelligently and quickly to the implications of the six emergent changes described in this book. The restoration of U.S. democracy, or the emergence of leadership elsewhere in the world, is essential to understanding and responding to these changes in order to shape the future.
One of the six drivers of change described in this book—the emergence of a digital network connecting the thoughts and feelings of most people in every country of the world—offers the greatest source of hope that the healthy functioning of democratic deliberation and collective decision making can be restored in time to reclaim humanity’s capacity to reason together and chart a safe course into the future.
Capitalism—if reformed and made sustainable—can serve the world better than any other economic system in making the difficult but necessary changes to the relationship between the human enterprise and the ecological and biological systems of the Earth. Together, sustainable capitalism and healthy democratic decision making can empower us to save the future. So we have to think clearly about how both of these essential tools can be repaired and reformed.
The structure of these decision-making systems and the ways in which we measure progress—or the lack thereof—toward the goals we decide are important have a profound influence on the future we actually create. By making economic choices in favor of “growth,” it matters a lot which definition of growth we use. If the impact of pollution is systematically removed from the measurement of what we call “progress,” then we start to ignore it and should not be surprised when much of our progress is accompanied by lots of pollution.
If the systems we use for recognizing and measuring profit are based on a narrow definition—for example, quarterly projections of earnings per share, or quarterly unemployment statistics that don’t include people who have given up looking for work, those who have been forced to take large pay cuts in order to continue working, or those who are flipping hamburgers instead of using higher-value skills hard won with education or prior experience—then what we are seeing is an imperfect and partial representation of a much larger reality. When we become accustomed to making important choices about the future on the basis of distorted and misleading information, the results of those decisions are more likely to fall short of our expectations.
Psychologists and neuroscientists have studied a phenomenon called selective attention—a tendency on the part of people who are so determined to focus intensely on particular images that they become oblivious to other images that are present in the field of vision.
We select the things to which we pay attention not only by curiosity, preference, and habit, but also through our selection of the observational tools, technologies, and systems we rely on in making choices. And these tools implicitly mark some things as significant and obscure others to the point that we completely ignore them. In other words, the tools we use can have their own selective attention distortions.
For example, the system of economic value measurement known as gross domestic product, or GDP, includes some values and arbitrarily excludes others. So when we use GDP as a lens through which to observe economic activity, we pay attention to that which is measured and tend to become oblivious to those things that are not measured at all. British mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead called the obsession with measurements “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.”
Here is a metaphor to illustrate the point: the electromagnetic spectrum is often portrayed as a long thin horizontal rectangle divided into differently colored segments that represent the different wavelengths of electromagnetic energy—usually ranging from very low frequency wavelengths like those used for radio on the left, extending through microwaves, infrared, ultraviolet, X-rays, and the like, to extreme high frequency gamma radiation at the right end of the rectangle.
Somewhere near the middle of this rectangle is a very thin section representing visible light—which is, of course, the only part of the entire spectrum that can be seen with the human eye. But since the human eye is normally the onl
y “instrument” with which most of us attempt to “see” the world around us, we are naturally oblivious to all of the information contained in the 99.9 percent of the spectrum that is invisible to us.
By supplementing our natural vision with instruments capable of “seeing” the rest of the spectrum, however, we are able to enhance our understanding of the world around us by collecting and interpreting much more information. During the eight years I worked in the White House, I started every day, six days a week, with a lengthy briefing from the intelligence community on all the issues affecting national security and vital U.S. interests, and it routinely contained information collected from almost all parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. It was, as a result, a much more complete and accurate picture of a very complex reality.
One of the current realities in the business world that has been most surprising to me is the near consensus that markets are “short on long and long on short”—that is, there is an unhealthy focus on very short-term goals, to the exclusion of long-term goals. If the incentives routinely provided for business leaders—and political leaders—are focused on extremely short-term horizons, then no one should be surprised if the decisions they make in pursuit of the rewards to be gained are also focused on the short term—at the expense of any consideration of the future. Compensation and incentive structures reinforce these biases and penalize most CEOs and businesses that dare to focus on more sustainable longer-term strategies. “Short-termism” has long since become a frequently used buzzword in business circles. In both business and politics, short-term decision making is dominant.
“Quarterly capitalism” is a phrase some use to describe the prevailing practice of managing businesses from one three-month period to the next, and focusing budgets and strategies on the constant effort to ensure that each quarter’s earnings per share report never fails to meet projections or the market’s expectations. When investors and CEOs focus on a definition of “growth” that excludes the health and well-being of the communities where businesses are located, the health of the employees who do most of the work, and the impact of the businesses’ operations on the environment, they are tacitly choosing to ignore material facts with the potential to make real growth unsustainable.
