This is the title of a salon I've been asked to help facilitate next month. My designated position on the panel is that of middle ground, between the optimist (yes it can) and the pessimist (we need to reclaim the commons, is how I think his position was described to me.) I was surprised to be invited; I had no idea I was perceived as any kind of authority on this topic. Perhaps there's some value to being outspoken after all; often I feel as if it just gets me mired in controversy.
But how do I actually feel about it? I'm not sure if middle of the road is the right place for me or not. I strongly suspect we're doomed, and that the effect our technology is having right now is to dig a deeper hole to bury ourselves in. To quote Einstein, "You can't solve a problem on the same level you created it." We need to move to a higher level of thinking to find a solution to our problem (if in fact a solution exists.)
One thing I know to be true: if you devote resources to solving a problem, you make progress toward a solution. If you devote a lot of resources, you make rapid progress. That is why we have a telephone system, an interstate system, an internet. It's why we have the most advanced military in the world.
It's also the case that a failure to devote *enough* resources can doom us to failure, and can be used as a strategy to destroy an otherwise promising option. If a project is funded on a shoestring long enough, its opponents can use the lack of progress to justify shutting it down entirely. Wind and solar and the electric car have all been adversely affected by this type of funding strategy. It's also a common strategy for holding women back in traditionally male careers (I used to have a research reference for this, back when I was still at MIT, but it would take some serious digging to find it any more.) One might think of it as a variation on "damning with faint praise."
But even more true is the fact that we are facing what reporters are beginning to refer to as a "perfect storm" of crises, and the one of the things we know to be true is that we can't fund every kind of research at once. In the Limits to Growth studies, the cause of collapse was never an unsolvable crisis -- it was too many crises happening all that the same time. So if we want to survive this "perfect storm" we have to be extremely careful about where we put our limited resources.
One of the problems with our current business-as-usual approach is that all the most promising possibilities are competing for a small and relatively fixed-size pool of research dollars. To pursue more options in parallel, we need to free up resources from other, wasteful enterprises to increase the size of the funding pool. But a lot of that wasteful spending is happening in the private sector, under corporate control -- whether it's advertising, marketing, media propaganda, packaging, political campaigns, global shipping, lights burning in empty buildings, or further enriching the uber-rich. Some of it is in government, mostly in the form of extravagant military spending, but even the government is increasingly falling under corporate control. Most of that spending is simply making our problems worse, so if we redirected it toward solving global problems, it would certainly make a difference.
But to get all our resources on board we will have to refocus our economy, instead of letting it run without a head, churning out short-term amusements and trash at the expense of our long-term viability as a species. And even if we did refocus we would have to think very carefully about where to place our bets. Because gambling is what it comes down to. High stakes gambling, with the world in the balance. If we back the wrong horse, we may not get another chance. And the likelihood that we're going to have the opportunity to place a bet at all is growing slimmer with each passing year.
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