Tom asked: It’s the end of 2008, and it seems like we now have the new century’s first two huge events.
Looking back to the 20th Century, it is difficult to feel that our current one will provide quite the scale or frequency of turmoil. Even this year’s credit crunch, by comparison to the last century, seems tame.
In 1900, for example, a car was something that looked a bit like a huge, stinking grandfather clock, and went just about as fast. There were 4192 on the road in the US that year. Horses were over 5000 times as common. Computers weren’t even a dream.
Then there were the wars. If you lived in the first half of the century not only did you experience in some, probably direct, way, the 1st World War, and all of its futility and horror, but were also exposed to the madness of a second world war. This time the madness reached a pitch so vile and an expression so theatrical that, truly, any semblance of sanity had evaporated from the face of the planet.
Such fruits of the past century make our own, albeit little one, seem remarkably tame. The “credit crunch” does not register amongst such upheavals. I haven’t even mentioned, in the first half of the last century, the end of the British Empire, and the emergence of the United States in its place as top dog. Neither have I bothered to mention the Great Depression.
These are all events that turn things upside-down. If China assumes the mantle of the world, and we all have to march to their tune - that is such an event. Others, such as the revolution that the car has made, totally changing people’s conceptions of space and time probably more than Einstein did - change the world more stealthily. The automobile has been a game-changer.
For all the panic that the credit crunch has caused, it still does not register on the “upside-down” scale of world changing events…so far. It must also be said, that neither does Iraq or Afghanistan at the present time. As horrific as both circumstances may be, they are situations where the status quo is generally being upheld, rather than reversed.
So, if there doesn’t seem to be a “fast-burn” event so far this decade to equal a world war, a depression, or the collapse of an Empire - what else is there?
Arguably, the two “events” so far this century - those that look guaranteed to turn the world order upside down - are the Internet, and the environment. The first mentioned fro a present perspective, seems more certain to revolutionize, partly because it has reached a greater maturity, but also because of it seems unstoppable, even viral in its nature. In 2000, there were 361 million users, and now there are 1.5 billion. Chinese access has doubled in the last 4 years.
The environmental revolution is still in its infancy. It still has the capacity to be swept away and forgotten by further wars and aims of Empire - but if Nature insists, it too is an inevitable revolution in the making; possibly a greater one even than that of the Internet. At stake is our very place in the world. We might, promises the destruction of the natural world, learn to control our power. We might become something entirely different from mankind over the past centuries, or even millennia - since by becoming stewards of life, we must suddenly question our vicious ability to rape, murder and plunder - in short, our very ability to create and worship Empire.
Environmental catastrophe has the capacity to mean a sea-change whereby we must care for the Other. It is not good enough to be a personal, familial, or nation-state mafia, whereby what is “in” is “good”, and what is “out” is a resource. This has been the western model for centuries, and indeed is the very nature of Empire. Instead of a prospector standing atop a hill and declaring 500 hectares= $200000 of material, and ordering the clear-cut or strip-mine, he must see a living system, and so himself. He must care. He must ensure that devastation does not occur - where before, in the mafia-mind, it did not matter.
Both the Internet, and the (less fashionable) environment are revolutions of connection. The first promises global debate, information, trade and so on - the tendrils of human thought reaching out from everyone to everyone. The second promises a connection not only to the environment out there, but to our own natures too - and could indeed, in the best possible scenario, lead to us growing up into creatures who care for more than themselves and their mafia-ideal. On the other hand, of course, the raping and pillaging might very well continue, and leave the Internet as the only truly game-changing revolution of our time. Nature will let us know.
Carlos
Largest deficits in American history - You have got to be kidding when this man calls himself a conservative President. There is nothing conservative whatsoever about his spending policies. He has systematically outspent every one of his predecessors in history to the tune of trillions of dollars. He has not vetoed one Congressional spending act - first time in history. His prescription drug bill for seniors is costing almost $50 billion dollars per year more than it should because he included overpayments to drug companies, and created unnecessary giveaways to insurance companies to act as intermediaries in the program. Who would have believed that a Republican President would do such a thing?
