These notes give a broad and general, albeit partial and preliminary, overview of what this working paper is about.
OUR SITUATION
1. The human community is facing extraordinary challenges. Key among these are the growth of economic inequality, the continuing threats to global ecological integrity and the development of profoundly powerful and destabilizing new technologies. These reinforce and feed back upon one another in ways that undermine the conditions necessary for human life to flourish.
2. The good news is that we likely have at least a century, and perhaps as long as two centuries, during which to complete a transition to a new mode of sustainable civilization. The bad news is that given the magnitude of the transition required, 100-200 years is not a long period of time.
3. Further, at present we have no credible, compelling vision of what a truly equitable, sustainable and technologically responsible human future might in fact be like, much less of how it might actually work. The absence of such a vision leaves us with no good guidelines as to how we should lead our lives today and how we might best prepare our children to lead their own lives tomorrow.
4. Further still, it will be difficult for us to develop such a vision. The mentality that we bring to the task of confronting the contradictions of our current trajectory developed over the past 300 years in part as a function of those same contradictions.
MODERNITY
1. Our prevailing political-economic system and ideology of secularist neoliberal techno-capitalism – for now, modernity – is the proximate source of the extraordinary challenges we face. It necessarily generates increasingly greater economic inequality, increasingly greater degradation of the earth’s ecological integrity and increasingly more powerful and dangerous technologies.
2. In addition, modernity denies and suppresses the spiritual, moral and communal realities that humans experience and draw upon to lead full and flourishing lives, to work harmoniously with one another and to engage challenges such as the three just noted above.
3. These four unhappy conditions are features, not bugs, of secularist neoliberal techno-capitalism. Modernity took the form it did in large part to enable, sanction, encourage and support their universal development.
4. As a consequence, the conventional sorts of reforms that have been looked to in all good faith and with reasonable success over the past century to keep the ship of secularist neoliberal techno-capitalism afloat and moving forward will prove increasingly more difficult to achieve and increasingly less successful in result.
WHAT IS TO BE DONE?
1. It is imperative that we come to an honest understanding of the nature and magnitude of the challenges we face, that we begin laying the groundwork for a shared understanding of the human condition that addresses those challenges, and that we begin taking collective action and leading our personal lives in ways that we believe are consistent with that understanding.
2. An important part of this work will need to focus on resolving, transcending or sufficiently minimizing social, political and ideological divides, and tensions among foundational worldviews, that have characterized human societies for decades, centuries and millennia. We will also need a new understanding of the relation between material wealth and human well-being. And we will need to reaffirm the spiritual, moral and communal dimensions of human experience.
3. None of this will be easy. We need a new story of the human past, present and future compelling enough to guide us in new directions both individually and collectively, yet patient and generous enough to accommodate uncertainties, disagreements and mistakes along the way.