Visions for the 21st Century

This book is a mixed bag of twenty essays, some serious, some very light-weight, by Robert Muller, James Roberston, Vaclav Havel, Francis Kinsman, Richard Slaughter, Willis Harman and other futurists. Most seem almost impossibly optimistic - but may their visions prove true.

As usual though, Beelzebub has all the best tunes, writing James Robertson's piece for him, the infernal strategy on this occasion being one of encouraging humans to continue on their present catastrophic course.

John Dakin pinpoints one of the two elements that seem most likely to save humanity: the new enthusiasm for direct spiritual experience: 'New psychic energy will be released - and without a new flow of psychic energy we cannot possibly make the next jump.'

'Decentralisation through computers and "narrow-casting" (as opposed to broadcasting) in pursuit of the sublime'

The other vital element is - as regular readers of Social Inventions will have guessed - decentralisation, and it appears as one of James Ogilvy's themes, in the guise of decentralisation through computers and 'narrow-casting' (as opposed to broadcasting) in pursuit of the sublime. To summarise his argument: 'According to the economics of the sublime, there can be enough for all. I know of no law of the constant conservation of laughter, or any limitation on joy. I see no reason to limit our sense of what is possible for the distribution of delight. The preoccupation with difference over identity will encourage differentiation and experimentation, if not transgression - I see the origin of evil in the play of innocents, in the horsing around that got too rough, in the joke that went wrong . But there will not be one best way of being human, rather a rich ecology of species in the gardens of the sublime.'

James Burke - in an article in Byte magazine (Dec. '92; monitored for the Institute by Roger Knights) makes the point more specifically about the way that new technology will shatter our world:

The technology isn't bringing us together; it's forcing us apart. Politically, people are breaking loose from the old, centralised monolithic way of doing things. We had a word for it in the last century, when the Austro-Hungarian Empire broke down: Balkanisation. Ironically, th word has come back to haunt us in today's ex-Yugoslavia. And it's also happening in Scotland, Quebec, Nagaland, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Czechoslovakia and too many other places to name.

This fragmentation is not only political. Minority groups everywhere are staking claim to their cultural heritage and their patch of territory. As the comfortable certainties of the Cold War recede, is the place falling apart? No. We're seeing the first flowers of the information age. Throughout history, information surges have always geneerated burst of innovation that brought into existence new entities, new kinds of people, new ways to live. The present information surge is immeasurably more complex than anything that went before.

And complexity, ecological as well as human, makes life safer. The more heterogeneous an ecosystem, the more novelty it generates. In nature, where novelty is expressed in the variety of species, complexity enhances the likelihood of a species' survival in the event of radical environmental change.

The same process operates to protect human society. Information surge makes it possible to bring more ideas together in novel ways. When that happens, the result is always more than the sum of the parts. An example from history: gasoline + perfume spray = carburetor.

The complexifying of knowledge (from a couple of sciences 500 years ago to 20,000 specialist disciplines today) has enhanced our chances of survival and is responsible for generating the information technology that will take us to the next stage in our social evolution.