
Our species is facing the interconnected global crises of global warming, mass species extinction, and exhaustion of the earth. Global warming is evident and needs no further proof that it is real. If you are in doubt, you can easily find all sorts of science-based descriptions of this crisis. Widespread species extinctions are also reported around the world. Global capitalism is exhausting the agricultural resources of the planet. Extracting the petrochemicals and minerals required to support our lifestyle is becoming more and more expensive and destructive. The search for minerals specific to our high-tech industries has now invaded the bottom of the oceans with unknown side effects.
Our economic system—global capitalism—requires endless pollution and resource extraction. It is incapable of existing as a steady-state system; it requires continuous growth. Global marketing drives ever-increasing demand for more and more “stuff” while leaving much of the world’s population in poverty with poor housing, food, healthcare, and declining community resources.
Our global political system is built on nation-states, and achieving a global consensus on any matter is unthinkable. For example, the United Nations Charter explicitly states that the UN cannot interfere in the internal affairs of any nation-state. Increasingly, these states are driven by the desires of the rich and corporations. Public law and policy are broadly determined to satisfy the needs of these elites. The activities of the global petrochemical industry demonstrate this. Efforts to reduce the consumption of petrochemicals have not produced any positive results.
What We Need To Do?
We need to build a global government and a global culture that interconnects everyone on the planet. We need to act in unison on major issues related to how we live on this planet, the only one we have. Second, we need to replace capitalism with a new form of economy capable of stable, sustainable, and equitable production for our species.
How Long Have Major Changes In Our Culture Taken?
Let’s examine the pace of change in our history across three domains.
In human culture – As a species, our present human culture evolved over some 300,000 years. Even our present mass societies have taken 10,000 years to evolve. By culture, I mean: “…… behavior peculiar to Homo sapiens, together with material objects used as an integral part of this behavior. Thus, culture includes language, ideas, beliefs, customs, codes, institutions, tools, techniques, works of art, rituals, and ceremonies, among other elements.”1Though research is underway to detail the mechanisms that enliven cultural change, little is known. At least not enough to give a view about how to promote solutions to our global scale problems along a timeline with sufficient speed to actually avert the disasters literally only decades away.
Let us return to the history of the nation-state. Most histories of the development of the nation-state as a form of human organization date the initial phases to the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 in Europe. By the beginning of the 20th century, the nation-state had become sufficiently widespread as an organizational form to drive two world wars. Today, there are 193 nation-state members of the UN. So, the nation-state has been evolving for more than 375 years.
Capitalism has been evolving for roughly 250 years (its beginnings were marked by the publication of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations in 1776). Even the most recent phase of capitalism, global capitalism, has taken over forty years to reach its present form.
This suggests something about the speed with which human culture changes.
From this vantage point,
the way forward
is very gloomy…..