Can Humanity Choose Its Future?
For all my lifetime, futurists have had a dream, of humanity coming together to consciously decide its fate. In the past, the world was too fragmented and competitive for any one group’s decisions to have global effects. But today, we do in fact have global conversations on humanity’s situation, and on policies to change its directions.
Long ago I worried that world governments would be required to direct global changes, and that they’d suffer from special problems of rot and accountability. But in fact even without a world government, the world now has strong convergence on many policies, resulting from global conversations on those policiers.
The reason is that we now have a shared world monoculture, especially among the elites who set most policies. So conversations among these elites do mould and reflect a shared world culture, which gets embodied in the policies of most governments and high prestige orgs around the world. World policies converge, even without a world government.
However, the shared world monoculture is itself a big problem, and will likely cause this shared world civilization to fall, to be replaced by others. And there isn’t much hope that in this shared conversation of this monoculture we will together decide to fragment into competing disagreeing parts.
It is thus much harder than it might seem for humanity to collectively choose its future. So far, our superpower is cultural evolution. But that only works when we are split into different enough competing cultures. If we join together into a single culture, we can decision things together more easily then, but that unit which we decide over will decay and be replaced by others.
It might be possible to someday make a world government that encompassed many quite different cultures. But then we couldn’t rely so much on a shared culture to help manage the conversations in which that government negotiated its policies. And without a shared culture it seems much harder to maintain the legitimacy and dominion of such a government. Even so, maybe it will happen someday.
This seems to be a fundamental human problem. We cannot organize ourselves into cultural units without feeling the need to oppose other cultural units or absorb them. There is simply no "let them be." Modern liberalism, by which I don't mean progressiveism, likes to see itself as tremendously open and, indeed, liberal in the original meaning of that word. Yes, we can value other societies and cultures. But only after we have vanquished them, as is the case with indigenous cultures that we pay verbal homage to, including literally offering land acknowledgments, but not actually ceding those people any authority over their land or their place in the broader culture. We simply cannot abide other people seeing the world differently than we do. We have to conclude that they are fools, or that they are motivated by an evil that must be suppressed.
Your original vision, that the world could unite once we reduced barriers of time and space, is paradoxically prevented by its exact opposite. We could live differently from one another when it was harder to communicate, when it was harder to reach out across distances and interact with each other, and we relied on specialists to manage the communications, trade, and other interactions between our relatively distant cultures. Only in this way could we actually call inhabit this planet as different cultures.
But once the ships and airplanes got fast enough the first thing people did with those ships and airplanes was to attempt subjugate other lands. Including those that previously would have been too difficult to subjugate and may have required cooperation and trade over vast distances, the way the Pacific was managed from the 1500s until the 1900s. I might have thought when I was in college four decades ago that we might have been able to coexist under an umbrella of relative prosperity, where as we saw that the Zero Sum game assumptions of the prior centuries no longer applied, and that it would be possible for countries that live under vastly different cultural schemas each to use modern tools to educate their populations and produce prosperity from within their own frameworks. And, indeed, the 1990s suggested such a thing might be possible, at least to my young mind. 9/11 changed some of that and then the global economic difficulty a decade later made that seem even more farfetched. Now, with the emergence of a global rlite that goes to Davos every year to decide what policies and preferences they should try to impose on the global economy, it is clear that even under tremendous prosperity we are simply not able to allow people to be truly different from one another. It is too threatening. We don't need to look across nations to see this, we see this in the United States. Every group wants to shut every other group down, whether left or right, because they find their thinking to be abominable and, indeed, genuinely object to some of their practices, which are not neutral in effect, I do not wish to pretend otherwise. All of this to say, that we are on the brink of being too able to communicate, too able to cross borders, and too able to attempt to control and dominate each other. And so therefore we will try to do this. Which will lead to exactly the balkanization that you describe, where we revert to slower communication, less international trade and collaboration, and less travel, ultimately. Everything that my generation got to benefit from, and see come to rich fruition, will now be taken from future generations, bit by bit, piece by piece, and this is very tragic. Though, not catastrophic. Eventually, the children deprived of the wonderful expansive life we live now, will rise up and try again. Perhaps they will have better tools or perhaps they will simply watch the cycle repeat itself.
/At the moment/, this seems to be a great existential risk. But if you study the history that led to the ideal of a world government, you'll find that this elite monoculture has one root to it, which has dominated Western culture since the 4th century AD: rationalist Platonism, under which I include Christianity (especially the Orthodox, Catholic, Calvinist, and Unitarian churches), Islam, Rousseau, the French Revolutionaries, Hegel, Marx, progressivism, modern art, Italian fascism, Nazism, Heidegger, post-modernism, and the Social Justice Movement. (Platonism has some roots in Pythagoreanism, Hinduism, and Egyptian beliefs; but Plato made the first great rationalist synthesis.)
Opposed to it is the empirical liberal tradition of the British Enlightenment, which includes the US Revolution, New Amsterdam, the Rhode Island colony, the Netherlands, early Venice, etc., back at least to Athens, and arguably to Old Babylon. Liberalism and empirical epistemology have always been under attack from Platonist reactionaries, back to the days when Socrates' students betrayed Athens to Sparta, and Plato said he'd like to burn every word Democritus wrote.
(This dichotomy doesn't generalize in an obvious way to non-Western nations.)
It's essential to understand that "left" and "right" are both Platonist. See them as opposites, and you've already lost.
We already know the solution: Liberal democracy combined with a written legal code and an independent judiciary, balance-of-power government, free speech, free trade, good-faith debate, compromise, empirical (not just rational) science, and consequentialist ethics. It is no coincidence that every one of these essential ingredients has been under intense attack since the 1930s. Read Plato, then Augustine, then Rousseau, then Hegel, then Marx, then Hitler, then Heidegger, then post-modernists, then contemporary progressive theory; and see the shared assumptions, the recurring arguments, and the common objectives. There's been a gradual accumulation of more and more subtle philosophical tools and tactics, but otherwise little has changed since Plato said we just need to get rid of everybody over the age of 10 and start over.
The greatest weakness of Platonism is that its ideology requires believing that the Good is universal, and therefore all good people want the same things, and therefore rational people always agree, compromise is inherently evil, and the only possible solution to disagreements is to impoverish, exile, or kill the people who are wrong. (Plato and Rousseau both use this reasoning.) Platonists believe that conflict resolution mechanisms are immoral. So they'll split into factions and kill each other whenever they don't need to unite against liberals. It happened to Rome in the 4th-6th centuries, culminating in the obliteration of the Arian West by the Nicene East; it happened to the French Revolutionaries, to the Russian Revolutionaries immediately after the revolution, and in the 1910s & 1920s, when communism and labor movements split into left-wing (internationalist and revolutionary), right-wing (national and seeking incremental change within the system), and fascist.
(Fun fact: The phrase "right wing socialist" was more common than "right-wing conservative" until 1975. See this Google n-grams chart for proof: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=right+wing+socialist%2Cright+wing+conservative&year_start=1910&year_end=2009&corpus=en-2009&smoothing=1)
This in-fighting seems to me to have happened in the US after the 2024 election. The Democrats are torn between people who say they lost for being too extreme, and people who say they lost for not being extreme enough. They might not be able to agree on a candidate in 2028. The Republicans are likewise torn between MAGA Trumpers and conservatives. If Vance remains loyal to Trump for 4 years, the Republicans will also be at great risk of splitting in two. If both parties split, that would be great. If one splits and the other doesn't, that would be worse than before.
A new advantage we have this time is that AI can expose the true meaning of, and failings of, Platonist philosophy. I'm working with some people who are testing the latest chatbots to see if they can point out fallacious reasoning and hidden assumptions in propaganda. At present, they're too gullible to pick up on flawed reasoning themselves, and too unemotional to notice that questions like "does this speaker advocate murdering millions of innocent people?" are more important than questions like "is this speaker's cultural background being adequately respected?"