UNITED OR DIE: “The Future Lies Ahead”

Comedian Mort Sahl’s ironic observation, many years ago, underscores the fact that, as he put it, “the future is not what it used to be”. 

Indeed, the future starts now, and our species is in serious peril.  We must urgently change our basic survival strategy.  As detailed in my 2023 book, Superorganism: Toward a New Social Contract for Our Endangered Species, the time has come for us to have global governance.  

Because we are now facing massive and prolonged environmental challenges that most countries cannot cope with alone (especially if they start preparing for them only after the disaster has occurred), we must act collectively to build a sustainable global superorganism – or else.  Ideally, we should mobilize the needed resources, management systems, organizational capabilities, and trained workers before these crises occur, and we must have an “all-hands-man-your-battle-stations” response when they do. 

The idea of “world government” is, of course, hardly new.  It is an enduring dream that can be traced back at least to Bronze Age Egypt and the ancient Chinese Emperors.  In the modern era, it has been espoused by a great many prominent people.  Both the League of Nations and the United Nations, despite their limitations, were incremental steps in this direction.  However, in recent decades the traditional idea of a top-down world government has largely been replaced by the more complex, polycentric, democratic vision of “global governance” – a global system of limited self-governing regimes and cooperative action with respect to specific transnational problems and domains, rather than an overarching, unified, all-powerful political authority.

A significant degree of global governance of this nature has already evolved piecemeal over time in various specialized areas – international law, the law of the sea, international aviation, world trade, and more.   But there is an urgent new imperative.  As a recent review concluded: “Among different fields of global governance, environmental management is the most wanting in urgent answers to the crisis in the form of collective action by the whole human community…”  I believe we need both expanded global governance with respect to climate change and other urgent environmental and health problems and an enhanced role for world government. 

 Here is my take on what this regime might look like. What I am calling a Global Governance Initiative is grounded in the belief that there must be a major change in the dynamics of global politics and in the relationships between nations.  A significant course change will be needed to meet our growing crisis.  Our global system of deeply competitive nation states must shift gears and become much more cooperative in order to deal with this overarching challenge.  The competition, conflicts of interest, and sometimes bitter animosities that now exist between various countries must be subordinated to a collective mission with shared benefits and costs.  New financial resources and new organizational capabilities will also be required to stand up to these hurricane-force headwinds.  Only if we have an all-out cooperative effort will we be able to cope with the furies that we face, I believe. 

Our greatest threat may be each other, and a regression into tribalism and violent conflict.  Collective violence (warfare) has been one of the major themes in human history, going as far back as the evidence allows us to go.   We are now facing the very real prospect of an era of terrorism and “climate wars.”  Or worse.  Equally important, the challenges we face going forward will very often transcend national borders – from mega-droughts to lethal disease pandemics and the growing hordes of climate refugees.  These crises will overwhelm the ability of many countries to deal with them unaided.  A concerted international effort will be necessary. 

The basic idea is to create an overlay of new global-level services and support functions (along with new financial resources) linked to a set of negotiated social contracts with each country, rather than trying to supplant them or deny their sovereign autonomy and impose solutions.  In other words, the overall strategy would be to expand the scope and capabilities of existing international institutions, along with some added political constraints and reforms in some cases, in return for an array of positive benefits.  Call it the incremental reform model, or the big carrot, small stick strategy.

However, there is an obvious prior question.  How do we get from here to there?  What we are talking about is a major shift in global politics and governance.  There must be a change of “hearts and minds” at all levels within and between the world’s deeply divided nations, including especially the leaders and influential citizens in our most powerful countries.  They must come to see that it is in their own self-interest, as well as an urgent moral imperative, to lead the way forward to a new global social contract and a collective effort to deal with the challenges we face.  

 In his important book, Upheaval, Jared Diamond (2019) provides several case-studies of national crises where a major course change was achieved, and these can provide us with instructive models for the global crisis we face today (see also Diamond, 2005).  Among other things, Diamond says, there must be a broad public consensus that a crisis exists and that something must be done about it.  There must be a general readiness to make major changes.  There must be political initiative and a willingness to take responsibility for responding to the threat.   There must be a clearly defined goal and a practicable solution.  And there must be competent and skilled leadership to inspire and implement the necessary changes.  I would add to this list that there must also be sufficient financial and other resources – the “means”.

Historians and social scientists have long debated the question of which plays a more important role in social change.  Is it “bottom up” public pressure from ordinary citizens, or “top down” political leadership?  Recent research suggests that the answer is both.  Some of the most successful examples of major social changes and crisis responses have involved a synergistic combination of both “bottom up” political movements (with strong public support) and effective “top down” leadership.  Each one empowers and informs the other, and neither one would have succeeded alone.  

Everyone’s favorite example is America’s entry into World War Two. For several years after the outbreak of the war in Asia and Europe, America remained a deeply isolationist nation that seemed bent on avoiding involvement in the growing international carnage.  This changed literally overnight after the surprise Japanese air attack on our Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor on December 7^th, 1941. 

It’s now Pearl Harbor Day for our environmental crisis, but there may not be any psychological shock equivalent to the Pearl Harbor attack to catalyze our resolve.   Instead, we may have to rely on the alternative model provided by the likes of the women’s suffrage amendment in the early twentieth century and the civil rights legislation in the 1960s, where grass-roots political movements inspired by effective leaders gradually won converts and built political support until, finally, the economic and political establishment got the message and acceded to major political reforms.   

A similar process of education and consensus building (aided, alas, by the increasing frequency of climate-related natural disasters) may be our best hope for avoiding the metaphorical hangman’s noose.  To paraphrase Samuel Johnson’s famous line, nothing concentrates the mind like the prospect of being hanged in the morning.  It’s time for us all to look ahead and concentrate our minds on this life-and-death challenge. (My detailed recipe for change can be found in my 2023 book, Superorganism: Toward a New Social Contract for Our Endangered Species.)

There is a spreading mood of gloom in various quarters these days about the environmental crisis.  I call it the “doomsday caucus.”   It includes a significant number of the world’s leading scientists, as well as many mainstream environmental experts, professional writers, political activists, and many others who have given up hope that there can be any technological, economic, or political fixes for global warming and our ecological “overshoot” as a species.  To these pessimists, the apocalypse is already baked in.   Anything we do now is too little, too late. 

I believe that such defeatism in the face of our global life-and-death crisis provides a classic example of a self-fulfilling prophesy.  There is a great deal more that can be done to mitigate the potential future damage and prevent a full-scale ecological Armageddon.  I believe that doing everything we can to deal with the crisis is far better than doing nothing.  I much prefer the risk of failure to the certainty of failure. 

To sum up then, we are confronting an unprecedented survival crisis, where even our worst-case scenarios may not be realistic enough.  Menacing new climate-related disasters seem to be an almost daily occurrence these days.  Our survival problem clearly transcends and obliterates national boundaries.  We are collectively in peril.  Any we-vs-they, survival of the fittest response will likely be hugely costly and self-defeating, and we cannot depend on capitalism and “market forces” to solve our problems.  As we have seen, when the have-nots are desperate and have nothing left to lose, they will do desperate things.  And so too will desperate nations.  We could all pay a terrible price for inaction.

The key to our success as a species has always been cooperation, adaptive innovation, and synergy, and this must also define our path going forward.  In order to respond effectively to the destructive challenges that lie ahead, we must mobilize a significant share of the world’s surplus wealth and prepare for the future now, because the future is already well underway.  We must also undergird everything we do with the Fair Society principles (equality, equity, and reciprocity), and we must make a collective commitment to a universal basic needs guarantee.  Above all, we must have governance at all levels that is dedicated to the Public Trust, and a global economic system and private sector that serves the common good.  Every part must do its part for the collective survival enterprise – the superorganism.   But there must be reciprocal benefits for all the stakeholders and contributors in return. 

The very survival of our global superorganism and its many parts must now become our overriding priority, because we are deeply, inescapably interdependent.  To echo Benjamin Franklin again, we must all survive together, or we will go extinct separately.   It’s time to concentrate our minds on the hangman’s noose.  Both our past and our future as a species – our ancient heritage and our ultimate fate – are calling on us to respond.  It’s Pearl Harbor Day.  The time for us to choose is now.  As The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman put it: “Later will be too late.” 

Editor’s Note: To read all of Dr. Corning’s linked essays in this series, please go to Dr. Corning’s website: http://complexsystems.org