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Michael Gordy
Happy New Year, everyone. Here below is a copy of the short speech I was asked to give at my Carleton 50th reunion last June. The topic was supposed to be "Facing an uncertain future", and the audience seemed to find what I had to say provocative. I'm sending it on because I think it may be helpful as we are forced to step away from the comforting assurances with which we have lived for most of our lives.
50th Reunion Talk
Carleton College, 16 June 2016
The subject of our meeting here is ‘facing the uncertain future’, which seems to imply that the uncertainty of the future is something new. But the future has always been uncertain, and if that really is a problem, it is a perennial one. A newer problem, and one that may be unprecedented, is the way that the future of humanity seems to have become increasingly certain over the past forty years or so. I’ve had a few thoughts about this that I’d like to share with you.
First of all, uncertainty about the future is the foundation of hope. No matter how bad things look, uncertainty allows us to believe that the future might hold some pleasant surprises, if not for us as finite, mortal individuals, then for the human race as a whole. Second, some people try to relativize current problems by pointing out, for example, how dark things looked in the Western world in the 14th century, and how nonetheless humanity struggled through that time and eventually experienced a Renaissance. In that instance, of course, the Arab world and the Middle Kingdom conveniently kept the flames of culture and civilized behaviour alive, even though our current punditry and Western-oriented scholars often don’t seem to think that this counts for much. So the West survived and now aspires to rule the world, or so it seems.
We have arrived at a stage of history where virtually the whole world is organized around a Western-originated system whose internal contradictions and material self- destructiveness are seemingly out of control, and where according to the system’s own logic it is unsustainable. In terms of human survival, that self-destructiveness is dragging us towards collective suicide.
Most of us who contemplate this are terrified, for we have been raised to think of the system as having a life of its own. We overlook the obvious fact that all social systems are the dynamic product of human interaction and that people acting together can in principle change all social relations. If we forget this fact, we become paralyzed, ensuring that a future that is still somewhat uncertain becomes certain. That seems to be what has been happening, but I think that things are starting to change. Before getting to this, however, let’s have brief look at several important features of our present reality. Two aspects of our current condition present particular terrors.
First is the economic system. Seen from the perspective of private monetary accumulation, which is the only metric that seems to count in capitalism, it is immensely more ‘profitable’ to speculate than it is to produce anything or to render any kind of non-financial service. Even sections of the business community recognize that this is unsustainable, but there are few serious ideas being put forth in that world about what to do about it. The inherent individualism and competitiveness of business practice makes a concerted, collective response from the top extremely improbable and, for most people, hardly imaginable. Everyone at the highest levels of the financial and corporate elite seems to be scrambling to grab as much as they can for themselves before the inevitable collapse occurs.
Second is the environment. Can we preserve a minimal physical environment that will allow humans to survive? The private accumulation of monetary profit makes that goal a fool’s errand. Any effective, widespread action just does not make “business sense”. For the past five years I’ve consulted with the World Meteorological Organization about the economic and political barriers to meaningful responses to climate change. This has led me to the brink of despair. I have concluded that “business sense”, like “business ethics”, is an oxymoron when applied to human survival.
The inescapable connection between what we call ‘our way of life’ and the rapid acceleration of all forms of environmental degradation should be obvious to any one of us who opens his or her eyes to the world and remembers what our physical environment was like when we were kids. The explosion of consumerism fuelled by the post-war
boom that many of us Americans enjoyed was expressed ideologically as the worship of ‘growth’, with little thought about what growth means, both environmentally and socially, when it is not subordinated to the need all of us have for a peaceful, healthy, equitable, and just life.
The boom times of our youth spoiled us and gave many of us a rather superficial sense of hopefulness. After all, we lived in a country that was the most powerful in the world, both economically and militarily. Ours was a life of possibility, especially if we attended an elite school like Carleton. Environmental degradation was not part of the dominant discourse then, nor did most of us have any idea of the effects our boom times had on so many parts of the rest of the world. So the subsequent disintegration of what we had felt was the normal course of things has come as a shock, shaking our sense of the uncertain future that I said was a foundation of hope. That is why, as the future begins to look terrifyingly certain, we mistakenly think of it as increasingly uncertain.
We grow old, and the hopefulness of our youth has passed into history along with the boom times. We worry about the future because, although we are near the end of the line, there are people we will leave behind whom we care about. And we sense that finding meaning in the present is pretty much impossible if we really believe there is no future for the human race. So what can we do?
The first thing we can do is to think about what is happening from new perspectives, opening ourselves to a more systemic and historical understanding of what is happening to us as a species. We can all do this by talking with each other and by expanding our conversations to include people who may not be part of our usual circle of interlocutors. If we really are people capable of making “critical and independent judgments” as claimed in the Carleton catalogue of our youth, and if we are capable of critical self-reflection as well, then what I’m suggesting is already part of our lives.
The second thing we can do is to recognize that piecemeal changes and tinkering simply will not do the job, and that a
far-reaching transformation of the way we produce, distribute, and consume on this planet is everyone’s most urgent task. If we do not do whatever we can to contribute to this, according to our present capacities, then that transformation will occur anyway but without our participation, and it will most likely have characteristics we will abhor. Without such a transformation we will be facing either a complete monetary breakdown, with all the suffering that this implies, or, if we continue on the path we are on, the destruction of the environmental basis of human life.
The first alternative is the more hopeful one, since if money loses its value, as would occur in a global monetary collapse, this will not mean that there won’t still be things to do, materials to do them with, and people who know how to do them. What it will mean is that the world’s social relations, insofar as they are based on money, will collapse. The things people do for money they will no longer do, and relationships based on the amount of money one has will be finished. New social relationships, if they have a chance to emerge, will do so rapidly and will be based on two values that have little place in the present system except as pious hopes, namely, cooperation and sharing. Must we await a global economic disaster to take steps in a positive direction? Or can we contribute to moving these values to the forefront now, even though we are in our dotage?
One of the more hopeful signs these days is that a great many people on the planet are beginning recognize the necessity for thoroughgoing change and starting to resist the direction in which we are headed. This resistance is opening up a space for people to think together about ways to stop the machine-like march towards human extinction. We need to enter that space. We need not only to think from the perspectives I mentioned earlier but also to seek openings to encourage and contribute in practical ways to this hopeful dynamic.
I am well aware that what I’m suggesting does not constitute an answer. I’ve tried, however, to indicate first steps that people here can take. We know that ideas are powerful, and we must join together to contribute to ideas that offer at least the possibility of returning us to the uncertainty of the future. But we are also obliged to do what we can to help implement those ideas. We must not allow a ‘certain’ future to overwhelm us. We are not permitted to ‘retire’.
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