May 2000
‘Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.’ – ‘The Second Coming’ by William Butler Yeats
Shortly before Christmas, 1999, I was contacted by a reporter for a Dallas newspaper. His ‘beat’ was religion and spirituality, and he was doing an article on the future of morality. He’d seen some of the articles on my website, and an article written about me in a magazine, and called me to ask if I had any thoughts about the future of morality. As it happens, I’ve given this quite a bit of thought, and was able to reply right away that the future of morality was self-discipline.
He seemed surprised, both that I had a ready answer, and that it was something so simple as self-discipline, so I explained.
We are entering the first Era of Human Maturity, not because humans are mature, or behave in a mature fashion, but because we will have to become mature. The institutions that governed our lives since the beginning of civilization and before are losing their ability to dictate our behaviour. Churches are losing sway over moral behaviour. Professions are having a hard time setting and enforcing codes of behaviour, and especially unwritten rules of behaviour, being the customs and practices of the profession. Governments can still pass legislation, but the Eleventh Commandment – Thou shalt not get caught – is gaining more and more adherents (not that there was ever any lack).
Perversely, in a ‘global village’ of 6 billion people, when people are increasingly feeling that they are powerless, infinitesimal parts of an enormous, faceless, anonymous mass of humanity, the power of the individual has never been greater. This does not mean that every individual is powerful, only that every individual that works at becoming so can be powerful.
An individual with an idea can create an online business, and, if she is clever, careful, and lucky, produce a major global player that influences thousands or even millions of people. Conversely, someone can pick information off the Internet, build a bomb, and kill hundreds or thousands of people. Someone else can create a virus that brings to a halt the wheels of business and government, and disrupt the lives of tens of thousands of people from a remote corner of the world, as happened with the so-called ‘Love Bug.’
The ability to influence and affect the lives of millions of people is now available to almost anyone with an income in a developed or rapidly developing country. But the power to influence is also the power to disrupt or destroy as well, and our institutions are rapidly losing their ability to prevent such disruptions. Accordingly, our societies are going to be ruled by the least ruly among us, much as tens of millions of air travelers are forced to undergo security searches of increasing intrusiveness because of the actions or threatened actions of a few dozen or a few hundreds of people.
Moreover, what we are witnessing is the thin edge of the wedge. Technology is steadily increasing productivity, which means that each person can do more. This is equally true outside of a corporation as inside it, so that as technology continues to unfold, more and more people will have access to more and more power. This is not only the power to create, but also the power to disrupt. And the only effective restraint in such a world will be self-restraint. Governments, authorities, and corporations will chase around, trying to apprehend and clean up after freelance anarchists, but will be virtually powerless to prevent them from disrupting, destroying, looting, or killing.
So, how are we doing in our move towards racial maturity? Alas, not very well. Although it is necessary that we become more self-governing for such things as peace, order, and good governance, I fear we are actually moving in the other direction.
Without going into great detail, I would include the following influences:
- We have less and less to do with each other. In my grandparents’ day, entertainment came from other people, through reading aloud, word games, church socials, picnics, and so on. Today, we get our entertainment from distant professionals. It comes through the air and into a box. We are increasingly able to do things electronically and at a distance, with the result that we have less and less to do with each other, and relationships are diminished in importance in our lives. With less social intercourse, we tend to treat each other more as objects, we become less important to each other, and come to care less for each other. Add to this the steadily increasing pace of life, and you have a prescription for people caring less and less about what their actions do to other people. The result is a culture of doing whatever you can get away with in furtherance of your own narrow selfishness.
- The nuclear family, which was a very temporary structure in the modern era, coming between extended families and the present day panoply of family types, is rapidly disappearing. Single parent families comprise about one-quarter of all families in North America, and are rising steadily as a proportion of the total. Marital breakups are commonplace, which creates financial pressures on families, especially mothers who wind up with custody of children. The net result is an erosion of parental authority, and a gradual abdication of the difficult chore of teaching children discipline. As a result, fewer and fewer children learn discipline, and hence don’t learn self-discipline.
- The rise of the little emperors (and empresses). More and more families are single-child families. While not universally true, single-child families seem to me to be more likely to raise imperious, pampered children. (As an aside, what happens when two people from single-child families marry, and each expects to be the centre of attention? Probably a further increase in marital breakup.)
- The clash of cultures. A global village means that more people are exposed to more cultures, including practices that they object to. Try having, for instance, a dispassionate discussion of female circumcision, as practiced by some Muslim cultures, and you very quickly run into irreconcilable differences. This clash is producing more and more people who feel that they need to take the law (or the enforcement of morality) into their own hands, to teach those infidels how they should behave. Witness the ‘debate’ on abortion (if you can call it a debate when the extremes run to murder and bombings.)
But if all is not rosy in our future, neither is it all gloom. Increasingly governments and other groups are starting to realize that a global economy and an emerging global culture mean that we have to think globally on a social level as well. I believe that more and more people are starting to realize the need for self-restraint and self-discipline, much as improving ecological practices are slowly entering into our culture.
We may well end up in a world where people finally realize that they must be mature, for their own survival and for the survival of the cultures in which they live. We can only hope it is so, as otherwise we will have, in Yeats’ words, mere anarchy loosed upon the world.
by Richard Worzel, futurist
© Copyright, IF Research, May 2000.
