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The Great Transition: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on World Problems
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11208 |
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NATURAL SCIENCE
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3 / 1986 |
5,230 Words |
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Alexander King
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About 5,500 days separate us from the end of the century and of the millennium. In the intervening years many crucial decisions will have to be taken if mankind is to seize the enormous potentialities presented by new discoveries in science and their applications in a benevolent technology. This period will be one of deep transition in human affairs, leading to a completely different life-style and society. It will demand the maximum wisdom which the species can muster. It will necessitate the shaping of a new capacity for the management of complexity and f uncertainty as mankind faces problems which will be increasingly global in character.
There is an unprecedented bright and fulfilling future awaiting humanity if only it will reach out and grasp it, but there lie ahead many difficult problems of transition and adjustment which constitute a challenge to human ingenuity as great as, if not greater than, any in our history.
Surveillance Of World Trends
There is a deep symbolism in the approach to the end of a century and still more to the end of a millennium, which casts its mystique over human affairs. It had been prophesied that the end of the first millennium of the Christian era would witness the end of the world, and this created great loss of purpose in the years which preceded it. When, however, the year 1000 was safely past, society began to work again. There is a certain analogy here with the present mood of society, which lies, with uncertain values, under the shadow of the nuclear threat. The world appears, at present, to be in a fin de millennium psychology with little sense of direction and many doubts as manifested, for example, by the innumerable Year 2000 studies which have appeared in recent decades in many countries. However, as we approach this symbolic date, the interval has contracted so much that projections to the year 2000 have become of relatively short-term significance and we must look beyond if we are to foresee the probable outcomes of the transition.
It is, of course, impossible to foresee future events with any precision and, indeed, forecasting the future is a fool's game. Nevertheless, it is important, especially in times of rapid change such as the present, to maintain a systematic and constantly updated surveillance of world trends in order to gain some feeling for the nature of future societies, to foresee, and if possible, to avoid or diminish the impact of problems inherent in the trends. The prospective approach is particularly necessary in democratic countries where the short electoral cycle of four or five years concentrates the attention of governments and oppositions on issues of immediate concern to the electorate and gives insufficient importance to longer term and often much more fundamental matters. The consequence is a drift to crisis government in which palliative measures are taken to combat symptoms of deep-seated ills, rather than to attack fundamental problems before they reach crisis level.
It has to be realized, also, that the problems of contemporary society constitute an untidy tangle of interacting issues, which are difficult to tackle successively, one by one in isolation. This was clearly demonstrated by the ramifications of the petroleum crisis of a decade ago. Furthermore, each of the individual strands of the world problematique is highly complex and cannot be solved by the politician alone, or by the economist, engineer,
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