June 11, 2006
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strange thoughts
I used to think that by creating freedom of exchange of ideas on the internet you could pretty much have the most substantive effect on the future of humanity. The idea was simple, I trusted that people generally know what is right, that the collective can do more good than harm and that with absolutely free access everyone’s ideas could be heard equally. One person can’t “shout louder” online than anyone else. In a massive pool of competing opinions, people would be drawn more to the facts and the truth as a way out of the chaos. People would grow smarter and wiser for having experiences more differing opinions, for having expressed themselves sometimes wrongly and sometimes rightly and learning from their mistakes. Access to ideas and media online would drive everyone to different view of the world.They would see more and find it ever more increasingly impossible to ignore the plight of others. In the end, by stressing freedom through a globally equal network you create a new kind of democracy that trascends anything we’ve seen before. Suddenly, your worth isn’t determined by where you live or where you were born or how much money you have or your skin color, or your gender, or you sexual orientation. It’s your ideas that matter. Your ability to express yourself in what could be a completely neutral arena of debate. The real world ultimately driven by the lightspeed transfer and spread of ideas and the infinitely fast growth of creative potential.
So of course, thinking that, I advocated always policies stressing a free internet, completely unfettered by the shackles of the physical world. I believed in arguing to build a different kind of political and media world online, one in which everyone can contribute from the poorest to the most wealthy. I’ve always believed in things like network neutrality and never believed in allowing the hindrances of excessive copyright law and crazy patent laws weaken the potential of humanity to grow in this new world medium. I thought this was the fight that mattered. I thought this was what people needed to care about right now.
Now I see there’s one glaring problem with my logic here that is now so obvious I can’t believe I didn’t see it before. The one thing I am assuming above all else, is that humanity will *inevitably* be able to figure things out, that we’ll *eventually* be able to get it right provided we focus on the right things. But what if… just what if…. we just don’t have that much time?
I’m not a conspiracy theorest though I sometimes come up with some crazy cospiracy theories. I’m not a doomsayer though many things seem pretty darn dark to me. I don’t generally spend much time attacking people for their views or their actions, instead I try to understand them. I don’t generally assume that people are evil, I just think that this human existence is far too complex to be boiled down to such simplistic terms. But above all, even if I believed that there were many many actually evil people in the world doing truly evil things, I have always tended to assume that humanity is capable of figuring things out, that we are capable of getting it right, “over time”, “eventually”.
But what if time is running out? What if the clock is ticking not just for our families or our nation or our way of life, but for our entire civilization? What if we are on the verge of extinction and what if it may already be too late?
Surely then whether our internet is more commercially driven or more individually driven is an irrelevancy. Surely then whether you can copy a CD to your hard drive or not doesn’t even register microscopally on a scale of what is important right now. Surely then what job I choose to have, how much money I am making and what kind of computer I have running are absolutely trivial indeed. Surely then maybe it isn’t that important whether the situation in Iraq is actually a civil war or just a pretty bad situation where lots of people are dying every day is a distinction that doesn’t really need for us to waste our time on. Maybe whether we allow homosexuals to be “married” or simply have “civil unions” isn’t all that important. Maybe whether we heavily tax the wealthy in order to expand social aid or leave them untaxed in favor of hoping that they will reinvest their money in the economy isn’t so overwhelmingly essential a question as we thought it was. Maybe violence in video games and television and malpractice law suits and joblessness and whether or not it is legal to share music online aren’t the things we should be seriously focusing on.
I’m not saying these things aren’t important. Many of them clearly are. I’m saying that concerns of the present might just have to be put on hold for now, there might be a very good reason to stop all of our focus on building toward our own personal ideal of what the perfect future will be and open our eyes to the very real fact that there might not BE any such future. For any of us.
What is a crisis? Surely if the word means anything it means a situation that forcefully pushes aside other concerns and demands an immediate and overwhelming dedicated response. If Katrina and 9/11 were Crisis such that they demanded the concern of our entire national infrastructure, how much more substantive is a crisis that threatens to result in human extinction? What on earth possibly couldn’t be put aside in favor of a focus on that? What on earth wouldn’t be more important? IF we have to simply cease all electral consumption? Who really cares. If we have to simply stop driving, tomorrow, simply give it up and not do it any more, wouldn’t it be worth it? What if we can’t have as many children? What if we are required to recycle? Who cares if we are thrown back into a technological stone age compared to our current level? Isn’t that better than ceasing to exist? Isn’t it more important than letting our civilization vanish as if it never was?
As I said, I’ve never been a doomsayer. I don’t usually spread despair and fear, but in this one case I am myself quite a bit afraid. I remember hearing a story about a group of people who were too afraid to fight for their lives in a situation that was very dire, a group of people who didn’t know what they should do and weren’t sure what was their best course of action and so chose to do nothing except hope and pray.Comes to turn out that had they simply fought, had they simply tried they might have survived but by doing nothing they doomed themselves to certain death. We know that looking back in hindsight. But how, could they have known for sure though? They couldn’t predict the future. They didn’t know what was going to happen. It’s quite possible that not doing anything might have been their only way to survive. People told me that and I tell myself that everytime I think about the story, but I just can’t help feeling extremely angry at them. I rage at them as I replay the story in my mind. Why didn’t they just try? Why didn’t they take a chance? Isn’t it better to struggle with life than mearly sit and wait and hope? I think I was angry because I see myself in them. I could see myself just waiting, not striving, telling myself that the chances of survival are equally good either way but in truth not striving because I’m lazy and afraid, more afraid of trying and failing then of dying through inaction. My natural inclinations are in favor of when I don’t know something for certain, doing nothing at all, and I hate that aspect of myself.
And that’s the way we are with climate change. We’d rather wait and see than do. It’s like we’re more terrified of fighting are hardest to stop this global threat and failing or worse finding out we were deceived and our actions did more harm than good than we are of sitting back and doing nothing until we are destroyed by our hesitation. Certainty would break us of our lethargy. If you see the gunman, you’re more likely to run for it or take cover or try to stop the gunner than you are if you don’t know if what you are hearing is really gunfire. But unfortunately our society has mastered obfuscation, we’ve turned it into the greatest art of the modern era. Now it’s unclear what if any body of evidence would be enough to convince us that something is real. And so we will wait and see quite content in our self knowledge that we’d rather die unknowing and unacting than act under even the slightest probability of deception and fail to do any good. We’ll wait until it becomes ‘obvious’. We’ll wait until we know for ‘sure’. And who knows how many countless lives will be lost because we hesitated. This time it might well be all of us.
Not more than a few months ago I was contemplating our nation’s recent reputation problem. The United States varies from being mildly tolerated as an arrogant bully but sometimes well meaning big brother, to being despised as a miltant totalitarian outsider with no moral character whatsoever. How do you fight that? The reputation has grown and grown over the years and now is at a point where it’s unclear whether anything we do in any of these countries will ever be seen in a good light. Our actions to help will be seen as a P.R. campaign. Anything that goes wrong anywhere we are present and many places we are not will be assumed to be some sinister C.I.A. plot whether or not there is any conceivable motive. Many Americans have come to just assume that we’ll always be hated around the rest of the world no matter what we do so we should just not worry about what others think at all and do what we believe or know to be right.
I don’t believe that. If we shut ourselves off from the opinions of others we lose the good as well as the bad. We only have our own insulated self judgement to guide our decisions and no moral agent can be perfectly moral by themselves. With out reflecting on the insight and observation of those outside of ourselves we’ll never grow. What’s more I don’t believe our being liked an respected by those outside agents is anywhere near a lost cause. People’s opinions change, sometimes at a drop of a hat sometimes gradually over time. But there is no doubt that prevailing sentiment can shift and the other nation’s citizens of the world can start to see us with eyes of respect rather than hate and fear.
To start this process, I thought that what we really needed was a symbol of some sort. Symbols have driven the greatest changes in human society. We need some way of showing our commitment to being moral responsible world citizens. We need some way of showing people that look we know we’ve done things that you don’t like in the past but that doesn’t mean we aren’t well meaning and that doesn’t mean we don’t care about you or what you think. It matters to us what the rest of the world thinks. It matters to us the conditions of people’s throughout the world. We WANT to make life better for everyone, we’re not just about profit we’re about right.
Toppling dictators and building infrastructures clearly isn’t enough of a symbol. Spreading our media content throughout the world and facing down potential nuclear powers clearly isn’t as symbolically impressive as we wish it was. Don’t get me started on how collassally bad a symbol closing our borders, sending marines and building a wall on our southern border is from the perspective of the rest of the world. It’s clear that the things we are doing now aren’t enough and it isn’t clear that anything we’ve done in the past if we were to do it again will have any kind of meaningful impact on our global image as a nation.
And so for a long time I’ve been trying to think of something that would be big enough and undeniable enough for us to do to show our commitment to the world community. Would we have to solve world hunger? Would we need to stop every humanitarian crisis in the world all on one foul swoop? Would we have to be above board in our response to the spread of the Avian flu and stop it from having a devastating impact on the world’s population? Would we need to completely disarm our nuclear arsenal and allow inspecters from every major power to verify it? I wondered for a while.
Now I’m convinced that what we should do, right now is become immediately the one single nation utterly and totally devoted to doing everything within our power to completely eliminating global warning as a threat to the species. This is the perfect symbol because it effects everyone but most of all because the sacrifices that would have to be made would be mostly ours, because the tough choices we’d have to make would be harder than any other nation in the world would have to make. We’d have to do more than anyone and faster than anyone and better than ayone else AND we’d have to do everything in our power to help every other country in the world do as much or more than we are. And everyone in the entire world would reap the very real benefits not just us. And in response to this people can’t argue that we only did it for ourselves because it is inherently obvious that we did it for ourselves and we wouldn’t be denying it. Sometimes doing the right thing for everyone IS doing the right thing for yourself. But in this case it would be such an extreme turn about from our previous behavior and such a vastly important improvement for the world as a whole that perhaps people would see it as a symbol of the start of a new era of global coorperation wherein the United States is one of many good citizens of a broader global community.
