Final Reflections on the Human Prospect
WHAT IS NEEDED NOW is a summing up of the human prospect, some last reflections on its implications for the present and future alike.
The external challenges can be succinctly reviewed. We are entering a period in which rapid population growth, the presence of obliterative weapons, and dwindling resources will bring international tensions to dangerous levels for an extended period. Indeed, there seems no reason for these levels of danger to subside unless population equilibrium is achieved and some rough measure of equity reached in the distribution of wealth among nations, either by great increases in the output of the underdeveloped world or by a massive redistribution of wealth from the richer to the poorer lands.
Whether such an equitable arrangement can be reached—at least within the next several generations—is open to serious doubt. Transfers of adequate magnitude imply a willingness to redistribute income internationally on a more generous scale than the advanced nations have evidenced within their own domains. The required increases in output in the backward regions would necessitate gargantuan applications of energy merely to extract the needed resources. It is uncertain whether the requisite energy-producing technology exists, and, more serious, possible that its application would bring us to the threshold of an irreversible change in climate as a consequence of the enormous addition of man-made heat to the atmosphere.
It is this last problem that poses the most demanding and difficult of the challenges. The existing pace of industrial growth, with no allowance for increased industrialization to repair global poverty, holds out the risk of entering the danger zone of climatic change in as little as three or four generations. If that trajectory is in fact pursued, industrial growth will then have to come to an immediate halt, for another generation or two along that path would literally consume human, perhaps all, life. That terrifying outcome can be postponed only to the extent that the wastage of heat can be reduced, or that technologies that do not add to the atmospheric heat burden—for example, the use of solar energy—can be utilized. The outlook can also be mitigated by redirecting output away from heat-creating material outputs into the production of “services” that add only trivially to heat.
All these considerations make the designation of a timetable for industrial deceleration difficult to construct. Yet, under any and all assumptions, one irrefutable conclusion remains. The industrial growth process, so central to the economic and social life of capitalism and Western socialism alike, will be forced to slow down, in all likelihood within a generation or two, and will probably have to give way to decline thereafter. To repeat the words of the text, “whether we are unable to sustain growth or unable to tolerate it,” the long era of industrial expansion is now entering its final stages, and we must anticipate the commencement of a new era of stationary total output and (if population growth continues or an equitable sharing among nations has not yet been attained) declining material output per head in the advanced nations.
These challenges also point to a certain time frame within which different aspects of the human prospect will assume different levels of importance. In the short run, by which we may speak of the decade immediately ahead, no doubt the most pressing questions will be those of the use and abuse of national power, the vicissitudes of the narrative of political history, perhaps the short-run vagaries of the economic process, about which we have virtually no predictive capability whatsoever. From our vantage point today, another crisis in the Middle East, further Vietnams or Czechoslovakias, inflation, severe economic malfunction—or their avoidance—are sure to exercise the primary influence over the quality of existence, or even over the possibilities for existence.
In a somewhat longer time frame—extending perhaps for a period of a half century—the main shaping force of the future takes on a different aspect. Assuming that the day-to-day, year-to-year crises are surmounted in relative safety, the issue of the relative resilience and adaptive capabilities of the two great socio-economic systems comes to the fore as the decisive question. Here the properties of industrial socialism and capitalism as ideal types seem likely to provide the parameters within which and by which the prospect for man will be formed. We have already indicated what general tendencies seem characteristic of each of these systems, and the advantages that may accrue to socialist—that is, planned and probably authoritarian social orders—during this era of adjustment.
In the long run, stretching a century or more ahead, still a different facet of the human prospect appears critical. This is the transformational problem, centered in the reconstruction of the material basis of civilization itself. In this period, as indefinite in its boundaries but as unmistakable in its mighty dimensions as a vast storm visible on the horizon, the challenge devolves upon those deep-lying capabilities for political change whose roots in “human nature” have been the subject of our last chapter.
It is the challenges of the middle and the long run that command our attention when we speculate about the human prospect, if only because those of the short run defy our prognostic grasp entirely. It seems unnecessary to add more than a word to underline the magnitude of these still distant problems. No developing country has fully confronted the implications of becoming a “modern” nation-state whose industrial development must be severely limited, or considered the strategy for such a state in a world in which the Western nations, capitalist and socialist both, will continue for a long period to enjoy the material advantages of their early start. Within the advanced nations, in turn, the difficulties of adjustment are no less severe. No capitalist nation has as yet imagined the extent of the alterations it must undergo to attain a viable stationary socio-economic structure, and no socialist state has evidenced the needed willingness to subordinate its national interests to supra-national ones.
To these obstacles we must add certain elements of the political propensities in “human nature” that stand in the way of a rational, orderly adaptation of the industrial mode in the directions that will become increasingly urgent as the distant future comes closer. There seems no hope for rapid changes in the human character traits that would have to be modified to bring about a peaceful, organized reorientation of life styles. Men and women, much as they are today, will set the pace and determine the necessary means for the social changes that will eventually have to be made. The drift toward the strong exercise of political power—a movement given its initial momentum by the need to exercise a much wider and deeper administration of both production and consumption—is likely to attain added support from the psychological insecurity that will be sharpened in a period of unrest and uncertainty. The bonds of national identity are certain to exert their powerful force, mobilizing men for the collective efforts needed but inhibiting the international sharing of burdens and wealth. The myopia that confines the present vision of men to the short-term future is not likely to disappear overnight, rendering still more difficult a planned and orderly retrenchment and redivision of output.
Therefore the outlook is for what we may call “convulsive change”—change forced upon us by external events rather than by conscious choice, by catastrophe rather than by calculation. As with Malthus’s much derided but all too prescient forecasts, nature will provide the checks, if foresight and “morality” do not. One such check could be the outbreak of wars arising from the explosive tensions of the coming period, which might reduce the growth rates of the surviving nation-states and thereby defer the danger of industrial asphyxiation for a period. Alternatively, nature may rescue us from ourselves by what John Piatt has called a “storm of crisis problems.”1 As we breach now this, now that edge of environmental tolerance, local disasters—large-scale fatal urban temperature inversions, massive crop failures, resource shortages—may also slow down economic growth and give a necessary impetus to the piecemeal construction of an ecologically and socially viable social system.
Such negative feedbacks are likely to exercise an all-important dampening effect on a crisis that would otherwise in all probability overwhelm the slender human capabilities for planned adjustment to the future. However brutal these feedbacks, they are apt to prove effective in changing our attitudes as well as our actions, unlike appeals to our collective foresight, such as the exhortations of the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth, or the manifesto of a group of British scientists calling for an immediate halt to growth.2 The problem is that the challenge to survival still lies sufficiently far in the future, and the inertial momentum of the present industrial order is still so great, that no substantial voluntary diminution of growth, much less a planned reorganization of society, is today even remotely imaginable. What leader of an underdeveloped nation, particularly one caught up in the exhilaration of a revolutionary restructuring of society, would call a halt to industrial activity in his impoverished land? What capitalist or socialist nation would put a ceiling on material output, limiting its citizens to the well-being obtainable from its present volume of production?
Thus, however admirable in intent, impassioned polemics against growth are exercises in futility today. Worse, they may even point in the wrong direction. Paradoxically, perhaps, the priorities for the present lie in the temporary encouragement of the very process of industrial advance that is ultimately the mortal enemy. In the backward areas, the acute misery that is the potential source of so much international disruption can be remedied only to the extent that rapid improvements are introduced, including that minimal infrastructure needed to support a modern system of health services, education, transportation, fertilizer production, and the like. In the developed nations, what is required at the moment is the encouragement of technical advances that will permit the extraction of new resources to replace depleted reserves of scarce minerals, new sources of energy to stave off the collapse that would occur if present energy reservoirs were exhausted before substitutes were discovered, and, above all, new techniques for the generation of energy that will minimize the associated generation of heat.
Thus there is a short period left during which we can safely continue on the present trajectory. It is possible that during this period a new direction will be struck that will greatly ease the otherwise inescapable adjustments. The underdeveloped nations, making a virtue of necessity, may redefine “development” in ways that minimize the need for the accumulation of capital, stressing instead the education and vitality of their citizens. The possibilities of such an historic step would be much enhanced were the advanced nations to lead the way by a major effort to curtail the enormous wastefulness of industrial production as it is used today. If these changes took place, we might even look forward to a still more desirable redirection of history in a diminution of scale, a reduction in the size of the human community from the dangerous level of immense nation-states toward the “polis” that defined the appropriate reach of political power for the ancient Greeks.
All these are possibilities, but certainly not probabilities. The revitalization of the polis is hardly likely to take place during a period in which an orderly response to social and physical challenges will require an increase of centralized power and the encouragement of national rather than communal attitudes. The voluntary abandonment of the industrial mode of production would require a degree of self-abnegation on the part of its beneficiaries—managers and consumers alike—that would be without parallel in history. The redefinition of development on the part of the poorer nations would require a prodigious effort of will in the face of the envy and fear that Western industrial power and “affluence” will arouse.
Thus in all likelihood we must brace ourselves for the consequences of which we have spoken—the risk of “wars of redistribution” or of “preemptive seizure,” the rise of social tensions in the industrialized nations over the division of an ever more slow-growing or even diminishing product, and the prospect of a far more coercive exercise of national power as the means by which we will attempt to bring these disruptive processes under control.
From that period of harsh adjustment, I can see no realistic escape. Rationalize as we will, stretch the figures as favorably as honesty will permit, we cannot reconcile the requirements for a lengthy continuation of the present rate of industrialization of the globe with the capacity of existing resources or the fragile biosphere to permit or to tolerate the effects of that industrialization. Nor is it easy to foresee a willing acquiescence of humankind, individually or through its existing social organizations, in the alterations of life ways that foresight would dictate. If then, by the question “Is there hope for man?” we ask whether it is possible to meet the challenges of the future without the payment of a fearful price, the answer must be: No, there is no such hope.
At this final stage of our inquiry, with the full spectacle of the human prospect before us, the spirit quails and the will falters. We find ourselves pressed to the very limit of our personal capacities, not alone in summoning up the courage to look squarely at the dimensions of the impending predicament, but in finding words that can offer some plausible relief in a situation so bleak. There is now nowhere to turn other than to those private beliefs and disbeliefs that guide each of us through life, and whose disconcerting presence was the first problem with which we had to deal in appraising the prospect before us. I shall therefore speak my mind without any pretense that the words I am about to write have any basis other than those subjective promptings from which I was forced to begin and in which I must now discover whatever consolation I can offer after the analysis to which they have driven me.
At this late juncture I have no intention of sounding a call for moral awakening or for social action on some unrealistic scale. Yet, I do not intend to condone, much less to urge, an attitude of passive resignation, or a relegation of the human prospect to the realm of things we choose not to think about. Avoidable evil remains, as it always will, an enemy that can be defeated; and the fact that the collective destiny of man portends unavoidable travail is no reason, and cannot be tolerated as an excuse, for doing nothing. This general admonition applies in particular to the intellectual elements of Western nations whose privileged role as sentries for society takes on a special importance in the face of things as we now see them. It is their task not only to prepare their fellow citizens for the sacrifices that will be required of them but to take the lead in seeking to redefine the legitimate boundaries of power and the permissible sanctuaries of freedom, for a future in which the exercise of power must inevitably increase and many present areas of freedom, especially in economic life, be curtailed.
Let me therefore put these last words in a somewhat more “positive” frame, offsetting to some degree the bleakness of our prospect, without violating the facts or spirit of our inquiry. Here I must begin by stressing for one last time an essential fact. The human prospect is not an irrevocable death sentence. It is not an inevitable doomsday toward which we are headed, although the risk of enormous catastrophes exists. The prospect is better viewed as a formidable array of challenges that must be overcome before human survival is assured, before we can move beyond doomsday. These challenges can be overcome—by the saving intervention of nature if not by the wisdom and foresight of man. The death sentence is therefore better viewed as a contingent life sentence—one that will permit the continuance of human society, but only on a basis very different from that of the present, and probably only after much suffering during the period of transition.
What sort of society might eventually emerge? As I have said more than once, I believe the long-term solution requires nothing less than the gradual abandonment of the lethal techniques, the uncongenial life-ways, and the dangerous mentality of industrial civilization itself. The dimensions of such a transformation into a “post-industrial” society have already been touched upon, and cannot be greatly elaborated here: in all probability the extent and ramifications of change are as unforeseeable from our contemporary vantage point as present-day society would have been unimaginable to a speculative observer a thousand years ago.
Yet I think a few elements of the society of the post-industrial era can be discerned. Although we cannot know on what technical foundation it will rest, we can be certain that many of the accompaniments of an industrial order must be absent. To repeat once again what we have already said, the societal view of production and consumption must stress parsimonious, not prodigal, attitudes. Resource-consuming and heat-generating processes must be regarded as necessary evils, not as social triumphs, to be relegated to as small a portion of economic life as possible. This implies a sweeping reorganization of the mode of production in ways that cannot be foretold, but that would seem to imply the end of the giant factory, the huge office, perhaps of the urban complex.
What values and ways of thought would be congenial to such a radical reordering of things we also cannot know, but it is likely that the ethos of “science,” so intimately linked with industrial application, would play a much reduced role. In the same way, it seems probable that a true post-industrial society would witness the waning of the work ethic that is also intimately entwined with our industrial society. As one critic has pointed out, even Marx, despite his bitter denunciation of the alienating effects of labor in a capitalist milieu, placed his faith in the presumed “liberating” effects of labor in a socialist society, and did not consider a “terrible secret”—that even the most creative work may be only “a neurotic activity that diverts the mind from the diminution of time and the approach of death.”3
It is therefore possible that a post-industrial society would also turn in the direction of many pre-industrial societies—toward the exploration of inner states of experience rather than the outer world of fact and material accomplishment. Tradition and ritual, the pillars of life in virtually all societies other than those of an industrial character, would probably once again assert their ancient claims as the guide to and solace for life. The struggle for individual achievement, especially for material ends, is likely to give way to the acceptance of communally organized and ordained roles.
This is by no means an effort to portray a future Utopia. On the contrary, many of these possible attributes of a post-industrial society are deeply repugnant to my twentieth-century temper as well as incompatible with my most treasured privileges. The search for scientific knowledge, the delight in intellectual heresy, the freedom to order one’s life as one pleases, are not likely to be easily contained within the tradition-oriented, static society I have depicted. To a very great degree, the public must take precedence over the private—an aim to which it is easy to give lip service in the abstract but difficult for someone used to the pleasures of political, social, and intellectual freedom to accept in fact.
These are all necessarily prophetic speculations, offered more in the spirit of providing some vision of the future, however misty, than as a set of predictions to be “rigorously” examined. In these half-blind gropings there is, however, one element in which we can place credence, although it offers uncertainty as well as hope. This is our knowledge that some human societies have existed for millennia, and that others can probably exist for future millennia, in a continuous rhythm of birth and coming of age and death, without pressing toward those dangerous ecological limits, or engendering those dangerous social tensions, that threaten present-day “advanced” societies. In our discovery of “primitive” cultures, living out their timeless histories, we may have found the single most important object lesson for future man.
What we do not know, but can only hope, is that future man can rediscover the self-renewing vitality of primitive culture without reverting to its levels of ignorance and cruel anxiety. It may be the sad lesson of the future that no civilization is without its pervasive “malaise,” each expressing in its own way the ineradicable fears of the only animal that contemplates its own
Such a view is by no means the expression of only a few perverse minds. On the contrary, it is the application to the future of the prevailing attitudes with which our age regards the present. When men can generally acquiesce in, even relish, the destruction of their living contemporaries, when they can regard with indifference or irritation the fate of those who live in slums, rot in prison, or starve in lands that have meaning only insofar as they are vacation resorts, why should they be expected to take the painful actions needed to prevent the destruction of future generations whose faces they will never live to see? Worse yet, will they not curse these future generations whose claims to life can be honored only by sacrificing present enjoyments; and will they not, if it comes to a choice, condemn them to nonexistence by choosing the present over the future?
The question, then, is how we are to summon up the will to survive—not perhaps in the distant future, where survival will call on those deep sources of imagined human unity, but in the present and near-term future, while we still enjoy and struggle with the heritage of our personal liberties, our atomistic existences.
At this last moment of reflection another figure from Greek mythology comes to mind. It is that of Atlas, bearing with endless perseverance the weight of the heavens in his hands. If mankind is to rescue life, it must first preserve the very will to live, and thereby rescue the future from the angry condemnation of the present. The spirit of conquest and aspiration will not provide the inspiration it needs for this task. It is the example of Atlas, resolutely bearing his burden, that provides the strength we seek. If, within us, the spirit of Atlas falters, there perishes the determination to preserve humanity at all cost and any cost, forever.
But Atlas is, of course, no other but ourselves. Myths have their magic power because they cast on the screen of our imaginations, like the figures of the heavenly constellations, immense projections of our own hopes and capabilities. We do not know with certainty that humanity will survive, but it is a comfort to know that there exist within us the elements of fortitude and will from which the image of Atlas springs.
1. John Piatt, “What We Must Do,” Science, Nov.28, 1969, p.1115.
2. “Blueprint for Survival,” The Ecologist, Jan. 1972.
3. John Diggins, “Thoreau, Marx, and the Riddle of Alienation,” Social Research, Winter 1973, p. 573.
THERE IS a fearful question posed at the conclusion of this chapter: Will mankind have the fortitude to undertake Atlas’s task? That is a question I shall postpone to the Postscript that follows. Instead, I would like to begin this last reconsideration by posing a much more down-to-earth problem. It is whether we can gain a better reading of the timetable of events than when I wrote this chapter originally.
I believe we can today divide the fairly near-term future into two periods, the first marked by its continued emphasis on growth and on “business as usual,” the second by its awareness of the dangers of growth and its conscious search for a new framework of socio-economic organization. Moreover, I think we can locate with a fair degree of plausibility where the zone of demarcation lies. Three separate indicators point to a period roughly twenty-five years ahead—about the span we call a generation—that separates the first from the second.
The first of these three indicators is provided by the outlook for petroleum prices. The price of oil today is not set by a free market, but by the action of the OPEC cartel. Although the price is very high by historic standards, it is the prop of supply, rather than the pull of demand, that essentially establishes the level of prices. Nonetheless, demand is steadily increasing as the world uses ever more oil, and at some date in the future oil prices will begin steadily to rise, not because of OPEC’s actions, but because demand will be outrunning supply. From that time on, oil will become a truly “scarce” resource, not one whose scarcity is the consequence of the monopoly power of its suppliers.
The date of this “cross-over” of demand and supply will depend, of course, on the rates at which we consume oil and at which we discover new reservoirs of it. But what is surprising is how little difference it makes whether we apply optimistic or pessimistic estimates to these determining factors. This is because we continue to increase our consumption of oil at exponential rates, and all exponentially growing processes use up resources at bewildering speeds, as we saw in the Afterword to Chapter Two. According to the present estimates of the exponential growth in the use of oil and the availability of oil reserves, we will have reached cross-over by the mid 1980s under pessimistic assumptions and by the late 1990s under optimistic ones. Thus only fifteen years separates the best case from the worst one.1 If we arbitrarily add another ten years to the best case, we would put the date of cross-over in the middle of the first decade of the next century, just twenty-five years ahead.
The point, of course, is not to try to fix the exact year in which cross-over will occur. It is rather to use cross-over, with its prospect of ever-rising prices thereafter, to establish a plausible time frame for the period available to the industrial world for a shift away from a petroleum-based technology to a coal, nuclear, and solar-based one. A period of twenty-five years seems like a realistic estimate of the period during which we must make the transition from the present structure of production to another, as yet undeveloped.
A second independent estimate stems from a study of the world’s interlocked needs and requirements conducted by Nobelist Wassily Leontief for the United Nations. Leontief’s study of the world economy was undertaken to inquire whether it was possible to anticipate another twenty-five years of growth at rates similar to those of the previous decades. Leontief’s answer was a very cautious yes. It was cautious because it made clear the staggering requirements for such a continued rate of global expansion—food outputs quadrupled and mineral tonnages quintupled—and because it recognized that the scale of investments—fertilizers, irrigation, transportation networks, energy—to attain these goals would place an unprecedented strain on both rich and poor nations. Investment requirements for the underdeveloped world were estimated to range up to 40 percent of their gross national products, levels that have been reached only under the most extreme warlike conditions.2
Thus Leontief’s study allows us to imagine a world continuing its present growth path for twenty-five years, if it can marshal the political and social will to do so. What that implies by way of a drift toward authoritarian regimes is itself sobering enough. But the relevant consideration for our study is something else. What happens after the twenty-fifth year? How is the growth trajectory to be maintained, if it will take such exhausting efforts to sustain it during the next quarter century?
The plain answer, I believe, is that it will not be maintained, and that Leontief’s study allows us to picture the greatest possible attainment of the world’s productive capacity, not the attainment it will most likely achieve. I am prepared to hope that world output will continue to grow for another twenty-five years, but it seems clear that the growth rate at the end of the period will be much lower than at the beginning. These twenty-five years of slowing growth will give us roughly one more doubling of output per capita. Another doubling seems very difficult to imagine.
Third, there is the benchmark provided by warning signals about our intervention into the biosphere, a matter we have looked into in the Afterword to Chapter II. There we saw that we are already invading the life support system of the green-blue film of water and air to the point where we threaten its indispensable life support capacities. And the scale of intervention steadily grows, partly as the result of the sheer accumulation of the mass of industrial effluents; partly because technology itself becomes ever more powerful and potentially hazardous, nuclear energy being, of course, the primary instance.
These warning signals do not in themselves establish any datelines—perhaps we could continue to skate on thin ice indefinitely. But they suggest that the ice is already creaking ominously, and that the time before it cracks cannot be indefinitely postponed. It is no more than a guess that the environment also establishes a twenty-five year warning period, but I do not think it is a groundless, or irresponsible guess.
And so I think a somewhat clearer timetable of change can be projected into the medium-term future. For roughly twenty-five years, the industrialized capitalist and socialist worlds can probably continue along their present growth paths, although energy constraints and environmental dangers will no doubt be enforcing a gradual slowing down of growth rates. Thereafter, I think we can expect not only a much more pronounced braking of growth, but a general recognition that the possibilities for expansion are limited, and that social and economic life must be maintained within fixed, rather than outward-moving, material boundaries.
But the real problem to be faced in this final assessment is not that of establishing a timetable for resource or environmental frictions. It is taking the measure of the institutional and attitudinal changes that will be required of future generations, and of weighing the various means by which society can enforce whatever adaptational or transformational changes will be necessary for survival.
Here I have little to add to the discussions of previous chapters, except to warn that the problems of tomorrow must be solved before we can address ourselves to those of the day after tomorrow. This has special relevance to those whose impulse, when confronted with the severe demands of the human prospect, is to seek immediately to junk our present way of life and to establish those small-scale, self-sufficient communities that beckon to us as a radically different, and far preferable, alternative to present day industrial civilization.
Perhaps some day these visions can be realized. But first humanity must be rescued from its exposed and dangerous plight. This requires action on the grand scale, not on the small scale. Mankind lives in immense urban complexes and these must be sustained and provisioned for a long time. Structures of production blocks long and months deep cannot be quickly broken down into pocket-sized miniatures, and can only be abandoned at the risk of social collapse. Dangerous military stores must be guarded. Hospitals must be maintained. The network of communication cannot be allowed to come apart. All this will necessitate central authority as the condition for survival. Pockets of small-scale communities may be established, but they will be parasitic to, not genuine alternatives for, the centralized regime that will be struggling to redesign society.
Given this mighty task, we must think of alternatives to the present order in terms of a system that will offer a necessary degree of social order as well as a different set of motives and objectives. The order that comes to my mind as most likely to satisfy these requirements is one that blends a “religious” orientation with a “military” discipline. Such a monastic organization of society may be repugnant to us, but I suspect it offers the greatest promise of making those enormous transformations needed to reach a new stable socio-economic basis.3
No part of my book has aroused more dismay that this prognosis. Here I can offer only one softening suggestion. The line between coercion and cooperation, or between necessity and freedom, is not an easy one to draw; there are armies of conscripts and armies of volunteers; churches built on dogma and churches that rest on a consensus of freely expressed beliefs. The degree of harsh authority, in other words, depends on the extent of willing self-discipline. This offers the possibility that beyond the inflection point a generation ahead we may find a variety of responses similar to those that followed the fall of the Roman Empire. Some nation-states, endowed with strong traditions of social unity, or blessed with the good fortune of political genius, may make their adaptations and transformations with a minimum of repressive force. Others may stagger from disaster to disaster, lurching from the pole of totalitarianism to that of anarchy.
It would be a disservice to the very chances of democracy to pretend that its institutions have an easy chance of piloting us through the protracted trials ahead. But it would be equally wrong to toss aside the possibility altogether. This is simply a question that will have to be left for the future. Our task will be to practice and strengthen the democratic way in the relatively easy years ahead. That may prove difficult enough.
There remains one last area in which “second thoughts” seem appropriate. This is the question raised at the beginning of this book, when I discussed the difficulties of putting ourselves at a sufficient distance from the long-term perspective that the human prospect forces upon us. More specifically, it concerns the attitude of stoical disengagement, of rueful but removed commentary, with which I discuss matters whose advent fills me with dismay. Is this a responsible attitude to take? Is there not a more activist philosophy that would still be appropriate to the diagnosis of the text?
I must confess that I have worried over this aspect of The Human Prospect more than over any of its premises or conclusions. I have been concerned lest my attitude lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy of defeat, to a cowardly passivity, to an unbearable conflict of hopes and fears. Yet after much self-search I find that I have not changed my mind on this central point, and in these last pages I must defend my position as best I can.
Let me begin by freely acknowledging the deep contradictions that my attitude seems to involve me in. As I examine the prospect ahead, I not only predict but I prescribe a centralization of power as the only means by which our threatened and dangerous civilization will make way for its successor. Yet I live at a time when I am profoundly suspicious of the further gathering of political power. So, too, my analysis leads me to place my hopes for the long-term survival of man on his susceptibility to appeals to national identity and to his willingness to accept authority. But my own beliefs incline me strongly in the opposite direction, detesting the claims of patriotism and mystical national unity, averse to hierarchies of sub- and superordination. Or take finally my judgments with respect to industrial civilization itself. Am I not the child and beneficiary of this civilization? Can I discuss its death throes unaware that I am talking about my own demise?
These and other contradictions are inextricably lodged in the human prospect as I have outlined it. Yet, curiously, I do not find myself unduly weighed down or paralyzed by these conflicts. Perhaps this is because the human prospect involves us in considerations affecting the fairly distant future, and these considerations, both for better and for worse, do not greatly influence the decisions by which we live our daily lives. If this myopia weakens our ability to prepare for the future, it also saves us the agony of seeking to reconcile present behavior with future requirement. For in my daily life I find that I do not have much difficulty in knowing what course to follow. As Thornton Wilder has written, I know that every good thing stands at the razor edge of danger and must be fought for at every moment. Within the scope of my daily life, I have few doubts as to what these good things are, or what steps I must take to preserve them from danger. (Let me add, only in passing, that I generally favor policies that would be called “democratic socialist.”)
It is only when I look to the future and ask whether I can reconcile my daily life with the prospect ahead that I face the moral and existential problems I have described. For then indeed I experience the hollow recognition that perhaps no such reconciliation is possible and that I may live in a time in which no congruence can be established between the good things of the present and the necessary things of the future.
Such a point of view strikes us as “defeatist,” intolerable, almost wicked. Is it? Let us take a moment to compare the period of the disintegration of the Roman Empire with ours. Certain analogues and correspondences are obvious. Then, as now, we find order giving way to disorder; self-confidence to self-doubt; moral certitude to moral disquiet. There are resemblances in the breakdowns of cumbersome economic systems, in the intransigence of privileged minorities. One is tempted to ask if revolutionary socialism is our Christianity; China and North Vietnam our Goths and Visigoths; the Soviet Union our Byzantium; the corporation and ministries our latifundia?
But the deeper parallel is encountered when we ask what consistent moral stance we could recommend to a person of good will who found himself or herself in the fourth century A.D. Would we urge that he or she join the Christian sect, particularly if we had foreknowledge of the toll that Christianity would exact in lives and free spirit? Would we urge the defense of the intellectual heritage of Greece or republican Rome, when it was clear beyond doubt that these ideas had run their course and no longer had the power to conjure up belief and command action? Would we recommend a futile rearguard effort to persuade a dissolute upper class to carry out long overdue reforms? And, finally, could we expect a cultivated citizen of Rome to go over to the barbarians?
To ask such questions is to confront the fact that there are periods in history in which it is not possible to reconcile the hopes of the moment and the needs of the future, when a congruence between our personal lives and the collective direction of all mankind cannot be established without doing violence either to our existence or our understanding. I believe that the present is such a time and that we must learn to live with its irreconcilable conflicts and contradictions. These conflicts and contradictions fill me with discomfort, but less so than any simpler or more consistent alternative that I can construct for myself.
This is the conclusion to which my analysis of the human prospect drove me eight years ago, and it remains the conclusion to which it drives me today. I may complain at this state of affairs, but I cannot change it, just as Atlas, too, complained unendingly at the task that had been thrust upon him, but could not change that. To accept the limitation of our abilities, both as individuals and as a collectivity, seems to be the most difficult idea that Promethean man must learn. But learn it he must and learn it he will. The only question is whether the teacher will be history or ourselves.
* * *
Is it possible to give a clearer time table of approaching danger than that given in the present Afterword? I think not. Specific predictions, estimates, and measurements have all changed, but only marginally. The basic assessment remains. With them also remains the demanding, uncomfortable, despairing—but not defeatist—prospect for humanity. Atlas is still the figure to whom we must look for a model.
However, I would like to introduce a very odd companion to Atlas—a bewigged absent-minded philosopher—the first of the “worldly” philosophers. It is Adam Smith, whose name is a great deal more familiar than his writings. Smith has things to say that also make the human prospect more bearable. I append them in the Postscript that follows.
1. See Flower, op. cit., and Issawi, op. cit.
2. Wassily Leontief, The Future of the World Economy (Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 4, 5, 11.
3. These last pages of this Afterword are taken, with a few emendations, from “Second Thoughts on the Human Prospect,” an essay written about a year after publication.