The Future as a Guide to the Present

Traditionally, we try to understand our situation by examining the past for cognates otherwise known as lessons of the past. However, as our future as a species becomes clearer, e.g. global warming, water and food shortage, etc. we may, I believe, profitably use the future that is increasingly being laid out before us, to understand the present. We can determine what our options are, what humans are likely to do if an option is exercised (history as well as our psychological and sociological knowledge can be helpful here) and therefore what we should do.

I ended my last column with the question " What next--George Orwell's 1984 followed by Aldous Huxley's Brave New World?" Both of these novels are depictions of how society may end up. 1984 describes a world in constant conflict and in particular a dictatorial society controlled by pervasive fear and lack of privacy.
Brave New World depicts a society in which citizens are biologically bred from selected embryos to optimally perform the tasks for which they are intended and therefore to be perfectly happy in carrying out their tasks. In the event they become overstressed and perhaps a source of societal discontent they may take a drug soma to induce pleasure and restore satisfaction.

In 1962 Huxley delivered an address titled The Ultimate Revolution at the University of California, Berkeley. A transcript of the talk may be found at http://www.infowars.com/articles/nwo/huxley_ultimate_revolution_032062.htmh/ In this lecture Huxley argued that the ultimate fate of human social/political organization favors the Brave New World scenario. While he greatly admired Orwell's work, he nonetheless believed that the cost of continuous control by the threat, fear and violence of 1984, when comared with that of breeding compliant humans in the first place, will eventually be too high for continued social survival. In either case, as I see it, the result would be dehumanizing as we now consider that term.

Both these scenarios of the future may appear far-fetched, although Orwell's may be much less so. However,they may be instructive as we attempt to gage our future as a species, assuming following blind emotion does not end us first. We have a plethora of precursors of Orwell's 1984. Its basic mode of operation is control through fear of violence and the intense surveillance of individual lives. The Stasi in East Germany, prior to the fall of its master the Soviet Union, was notorious for the pervasive spying on citizens by citizens, indeed parent by child. The autocratic regimes of North Africa and the Middle East practice this kind of domestic control. However, as we now see in those countries, people eventually rebel against such anti-social practices and, at the risk of death, rise in protest. The lesson here, I believe, is that humans can endure the internal stress of fear only so long before they erupt. In his lecture Huxley, citing Pavlov's experiments, notes that periodic release of this stress sinks deep into the human psyche and that doing this is why some dictatorships can be made to last longer than others.

In support of his own thesis Huxley notes the advances that had been made at the time of his lecture over 45 years ago, in both biological and psychological understanding of human beings. Today, especially with the advent of DNA understanding, people now talk of designer children, that is human beings bred to the parent's specifications by manipulating human cells at the DNA level. The lesson here is that we are at the point in which we are about to take charge of our own biological destiny. This, given what we know of the human tendency to self-aggrandizement and our socio/economic tendency to let that self-aggrandizement rise to power through our free enterprise system, is scary indeed.

While there is currently substantial resistance to modifying the human genome, as population wars continue, (for example, Catholics and Muslims trying to dominate through population majorities) some form of genetic or psychological modification may be necessary to eliminate this ancient form of rivalry and keep human population within earth's carrying capacity. In any event, if humans can do it, history demonstrates they will do it.

My last column was concerned substantially with modifying the human mind through psychology. That process will, in my judgment, favor Huxley's scenario for the same reason that his biologically managed society will prevail in the long run, namely, it is more economical to target the human brain than the human body.

With all the evidence that the world prefigured by Huxley is well underway in fact and even more so in potential and taking note of the abundant occasions for conflict latent in major global trends, it becomes relatively clear that human social organization is in its most perilous state since the last ice age.

Having seen in these last two posts how unprepared human emotions are for dealing with the huge, unprecedented, problems we face, the importance of our thinking ability becomes clear. If we are to survive the future with any semblance of what we now regard as human, we must think our way through. We have several hundred years of applied reason in science. We know the power of the reasoning brain. The current tragedy, however, is that when we most need to apply our powers of thought and investigation, we are rejecting thinking for feeling. We willingly substitute the fantasy of creationism for evolution. Our energy corporations, their political henchmen, and media servants, convince millions of our citizens that multiple and well-documented evidence of global warming due to our continuing uses of fossil fuels is a fable concocted to scare people into doing with less. This rejection of the most reliable source of information mankind has ever devised in favor of feel-good fantasy is, to my mind, the ultimate tragedy of the scientific revolution.

In this dire situation all that our species has going for it is its intellect. Those who care for the continued existence of our species have to make science and critical thinking the focus of a vigorous political effort because, unfortunately, truth itself cam no longer prevail against the massive self-deception that pervades this society and the massive amounts of wealth and power determined to keep it that way.

At a personal level we can exercise this faculty with the discipline it requires to take evidence seriously and revise our beliefs and actions as intelligence and evidence requires.

In what I have written in this and my previous column I have been hard on the emotions. The emotions obviously play a large role in what it means to be human. They provide us with some of the most fulfilling experiences of our lives. They make society possible. But we must always remember a basic prerequisite for mankind's continuing survival, namely, that thought validates emotion, not the other way around.

Bob Newhard