CLUES TO OUR COMMON FUTURE

by Harlan Cleveland

Harlan Cleveland, former US Ambassador to NATO, is president of the World Academy of Art and Science and founding dean of the University of Minnesota's Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs.

With jarring suddenness, millions of people in dozens of countries are becoming awareof global changes that are liable to affect them personally. What people do half a worldaway is now relayed through sensitive and complex webs of atmospheric chemistry, oceancurrents, and human communication to our very doorsteps. Magazine covers and TV and radionewscasts give capsule metaphors like rape of the forests, famine alert, global warming,acid rain, the drugged generation, the AIDS epidemic, the population bomb. In the spiritof our branches-and-twigs mode of learning, we study these problems in differentdisciplines, read and hear about them in separate stories, allocate them to specializedagencies (or "czars") -- and act on them with less-than-global perspective.Wouldn't it be useful, for a change, to think about them all at once?

discount hotels in NaplesTwo assertions can be made about these fundamentally similar "problems." Theyare global; they require people everywhere to widen to world scale what they worryabout and try to do something about. They are behavioral: global change is producedby what we (humanity) have been doing; its pace and direction can be changed by what wedo, or stop doing, next. That's a new way of thinking about evolution: Evolution is notwhat happens to us, it's what we (humanity as a whole) decide to do next.

On this first day of the rest of our lives, it may be useful to raise our periscope fora 360-degree look around. My sweep of the horizon shows 10 worldwide revolutions that havetransformed our world since the last surge of international creativity, in the late 1940sand early 1950s. All these revolutions seem to be the consequence of spreading awarenessof four kinds of knowledge -- "know-what" (science), "know-how"(technology), "know-why" (conscious values, conflicting values), and"know-who" (organization, persuasion and authority). The revolutions of our timeare concurrent but not parallel; rather, they are intermixed, interwoven, interactive.

hotel near airport Rimini1. The sudden increase in explosive power has clamped a lid on the scale of warfare.The invention of weapons too big to use has converted much of military strategy into anexpensive information game.

2. Biotechnology, made possible by deciphering the information in our genes, presentshumankind with a vast range of new ethical and political puzzles. Human cloning, which nowcaptures the headlines, is only one of them.

3. Computers, prosthetic extensions of our brainpower, are replacing much of therepetitious drudgery people have always had to do. (They bring in their train a new kindof problem called "technological unemployment" -- but the elimination ofdrudgery can't be bad news for humanity in the longer run.)

4. Our growing capacity, with the help of computers linked to telecommunications, tomodel and simulate vast systems (such as the global atmosphere) has sensitized us to theconsequences of what we the people do to our natural environment.

5. The widening spread of knowledge is creating a revolution in the technology oforganization: pyramids and command-and-control are out, consultation and consensus are in.

These five revolutions are driven quite directly by scientific discovery andtechnological innovation. The other five are facilitated, even intensified, by science andtechnology, but are driven by universal aspirations of the human spirit -- by a sense ofentitlement to "enough" (the fulfillment of basic human needs), and beyond thatby human desires for a sense of achievement, justice, solidarity and participation.

6. The idea of human rights for everyone has become the world's first truly universalidea-system. It has come to mean rights not only for political prisoners and the poorestof the poor, but for women, children and the aging, racial and religious minorities,immigrants, and all manner of untouchables.

7. A global fairness revolution is spreading as the spread of knowledge shows thedisadvantaged in every society what they are missing -- and provides them with newpolitical tools to express their rising resentments and help them "overcome."

8. Fierce loyalties to cultural identity with less-than-global communities -- bonded bynationhood, ethnicity, religion, ideology, and even occupation -- are colliding everywherewith the homogenizing cultures of "modernization."

9. An emerging ethic of ecology is producing a revolution in human self-control --based not on "limits to growth" but on limits to thoughtlessness, unfairness andconflict. (The resulting international cooperation can, if we try, produce a "growthof limits.")

10. Openness, market incentives, and the practice of pluralism are currently on displayin some of the unlikeliest places. Authoritarian and totalitarian systems are simplyunable to cope or compete with looser systems that "go with the flow" in theglobal flood of knowledge.

ERROR MSGNone of these trends is brand new. But all of them are enhanced by the widespread andcontinuous feedback of knowledge -- and especially by the power of ever-faster computershitched to ever-more-reliable telecommunications. We are heirs nowadays to problems of anew kind: we have to be able to imagine them well before they slap us in the face. Fromglobal warming to the urban homeless, they require leaders and followers to developstrategies before the alarm sounds, to think and act in concert without waiting forsomething dramatic to happen, because then it may be too late to change course.