Farewell innocence
The survival of our species hinges on our ability to globalize the concept of “we” — Lasse Berg, writer
The boundaries of the world tumble down. Globalization is not just a trade term to describe evil market forces. It is a real and all-embracing force that will change human life on this planet for good. For the first time in human history the world is about to become truly integrated. We have begun a shaky journey towards “the global village”. This has huge implications.
It influences political power, communication and money, it changes the relationship between cultures, ages and the sexes, and it forces a new view of privacy, freedom, crime and punishment.
Boundlessness entails that every life must be lived in greater openness and that no one can escape responsibility. For some this appears to be insecure or even frightening. Some feel threatened. Thus there are strong counterforces. Nationalistic, xenophobic, misogynous and religiously extremist tendencies stand out starker than ever now that they no longer can be the norm.
So, what will happen with us?
Setbacks are our constant companions, but we have undoubtedly started a journey where the final destination is complete integration. We can still abort the trip. Humanity can by free will crawl back into a state of segregation. But the farther we travel and the more who join in the less likely is such a retreat.
No one knows precisely into what tracts this journey takes us, but it is already obvious that it places new demands on us and changes certain basic preconditions. Not everyone will applaud the change. But if we make the right choices on our way, in a truly boundless world somewhere in the distant future the fundamental principles of our existence may look something like this:
We must live our lives in openness.
We know that we must take responsibility for what we do, what we say and what we bring about.
We have left behind us the age-old fear of standing up for who we are, and there is a sense of calm in this.
We cannot with impunity hurt each other, but we have also come to know each other well enough to almost always refrain from doing so.
We let ourselves be influenced by others; no Big Brother sees us; all societal education is reciprocal.
My conclusion is, to stretch it, that we must choose between maturity and chaos. I guess most people do not even see that as a choice, since they can clearly see what the alternative to mature community would be in a boundless world. But we have a free will.
***
To say that globalization is impossible to roll back is not merely a high-sounding empty phrase. Do not believe those who say that fundamentally we are ruled by the same kind of empires today as yesterday, and that the hunger for power and the falsehood of rulers have never changed. History does not repeat itself. It mimics itself, but because the conditions constantly change the outcome is never the same twice. Like ourselves: We are born with DNA helices copied from our foremothers and forefathers, and yet we will never see the exact spiritual or physical copy of another human being. To every new-born man and woman the world is new.
Some people only notice the economic aspects of globalization. They see a kind of market empire gain ground, and they imagine that this empire must eventually fall, like every other. This image of the openness revolution that we are experiencing is unfairly one-dimensional. Dampers open in every wall, every roof and every floor, and the draught — sometimes fresh and healthy puffs, sometimes stale fumes — pull in both directions. The market triumphal is no chimera, but it is no more and no less than a tool for material improvements, and as a basis for effectively exterminating poverty we now know that it needs to be curbed by and cooperate with a benevolent and active state.
Also the market economy will perish the day the conditions have changed enough to make room for something else. In a transparent world the crude features of capitalism will survive just as poorly as authoritarian regimes. Boundlessness and digitalization have dislocated the meaning of the concept economy. Money as banknotes and coins could already be on the verge of being phased out. It has been transformed into numbers on displays. With a few pressings of buttons the pension is moved between virtual security portfolios which only by name belong to different continents. It is difficult to envisage today, but in its farthest extension the development points towards the abolishing of the monetary system — in a stealthy, evolutionary way, as with every truly revolutionary change. How would such a society look? The question boggles the mind, and I do not even have a hint of an answer, but one thing is sure: Nothing says that a human society must use money.
***
The religious beliefs about how humankind has departed from an original paradisiacal existence, lapsed into selfishness, been dispersed and linguistically confused are well compatible with what we know about our common past in Africa and how human tribes spread from there all over the world. Now humankind has returned into fellowship again, but this time with the entire planet that we have been endowed with as our common home.
This means, I suggest, that the species Homo sapiens is beginning to heal. Our dependence on each other is bigger than most of us understand. The inner longing for the numinous in life that most of us can perceive from time to time, an insistent suggestion which rationalists have wanted to dismiss since Enlightenment but which seems impossible to silence, is perhaps basically a longing for the original human community, like a twin who ignorant of a sibling has grown up alone and yet is tormented by an inexplicable feeling that something is missing in her life.
The notion that no human being is farther away from any other human being than six steps appeared already in the 1920s, when there were less than two billion people in the world. Not until now, when we are four times as many, this idea has become hands-on. You know that with a few clicks you can reach people on the other side of the planet, either through a screen, a phone or in the form of an air ticket whose price would have been insurmountable for your parents or grandparents.
Humanity can be considered an organism, just as every individual is one. It is well known that a collective entity, such as a work team, can perform better than the sum of the individuals of that entity. But to try to entirely accept the consequences of the following gives you vertigo nevertheless: Social networks can control us and our lives without us even noticing. In their book “Connected” Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler show that networks can enhance the intelligence of individual members as well as make persons with a safe and loving upbringing act destructively.
The former is more plausible than the latter. As a matter of fact, it has been shown that the average IQ level increases by approximately three points per decade in the general population. This has been the case in every country where IQ changes have been measured. Interestingly enough the results have increased the most in subtests that do not have to do with educational level, such as abstract patterns. There is no established scientific explanation to this so-called Flynn effect, named after the philosophy researcher who made the discovery in the 1980s, other than the obvious: We live in an ever more intellectually demanding and knowledge-heavy society.
What are we but cells in the organism humankind? It is not hard to understand that a cell or a single organ (perhaps a country, or a sect) whose membranes and synapses are injured, or which is surrounded by sick cells, will have difficulties developing. Reversely it is quite understandable that cells and organs with frequent and healthy contacts with the rest of the body can thrive. In the words of Nicholas Christakis: To understand what a human being is we must understand how she is connected with others.
The more complete the organism humankind becomes, the clearer it shows when parts are hurt. It is ever more important to nurture our common body. On the other hand, now is the first time in history that we can actually do that together. Knowledge about good solutions can be spread with the speed of light, and it is. Throughout history different peoples have invented the same things unknowing of each other’s discoveries, sometimes hundreds of years apart in time. Today new insights are immediately accessible to everybody. When one problem has been solved by one person once, it has been solved for everyone for good, writes Clay Shirky.
We will probably never again have white spots in the present tense: All that exists ”now” will be public domain. This will presumably enhance our curiosity about the white spots in our past: Where do we come from? Who are we? Why are we here? The idea that there is a critical limit beyond which basic human insights adhere more easily — when knowledge has been spread to a sufficient amount of people, and when a sufficient amount have connected with each other — has been described in new age-terms like the myth about “the hundredth monkey” and ”morphic fields”. These have a spiritual dimension that repels many. Maybe one day we will find it obvious that the connections that are found between the parts of one organism also exist between groups of organisms?
I have just as little knowledge about that as anybody else. What I do know is that I in my twenties experienced a brief period of existential agony, which in my case emanated from the excruciating thought that my Self was locked into the lump of meat I had in my head. If I were a harsh existentialist I would have drawn the conclusion that what I felt was nothing but the true pointlessness of life, and the only thing I could possibly do about it except killing myself was to fight as long as possible against the cruelty of having been born.
One cannot entirely disregard the possibility that Jean-Paul Sartre and other representatives for the idea about life’s meaninglessness are right, but any possible proof will not present itself anytime soon for us who live here and now. I can only conclude that evidently there is an insistent inner inkling about a community with something larger than our individual bodies and a longing for togetherness. Psychological research has shown that people who experience what sociologist Aaron Antonovsky called SoC, Sense of Coherence, have considerably greater ability to survive in extreme situations than those who do not, and they have a higher quality of life in general.
Dismiss this as created needs in the brain of an over-competent ape, if you will. But the craving, the inkling, the longing is with us at any rate and it constitutes an undertow in the development of our species.
But isn’t our time the era of individualism? On the surface it can appear that way, and it is a paradox. I would rather, with a concept borrowed from Carl Gustav Jung, call our time the era of individuation. We must be given the opportunity to understand ourselves and mature in our own capacity to be able to understand others. If we do not break up rigid small group affiliations — family, nation, party — we can never become a part of larger contexts, ultimately the largest of them all: humankind.
The Nobel Laureate in literature Mario Vargas Llosa has highlighted this paradox. In one of his speeches he emphasizes increased freedom as the highest expression of maturity, and he demonizes collectivism. He concludes, however, that “collectivism was necessary in the dawn of history, when the individual was only part of a tribe and was dependent on the whole community for her survival.” As humans have made material and intellectual progress the need for fixed group affiliations has diminished. But such an ancient archetype does not disappear in a hurry. “In every period of time this atavistic defect, collectivism, has shown its ugly face, threatened civilization and thrown us back to the epoch of barbarism. Yesterday it was called fascism and communism, today it is called nationalism and religious fundamentalism”. Vargas Llosa thus criticizes a forced collective order, where solidarity is selective. Only mature and free individuals can live in true solidarity with others.
Humanity’s growing integration has nothing to do with ideologies. It is too big a thing to be clad in political terms. It is so much bigger than the sometimes infantile debate about the battle between (right-wing) individualism and (left-wing) collectivism. It is obvious that society needs both. Anyone who claims that people’s preferences over the years swing from neo-liberalism — “there is no need for a state” — to socialism — “collective solutions solve everything” — only contributes to a sharpened polarization in the political discussion. Such a description has little to do with reality. For what is occurring in the hands-on party politics if not a synthesis between extremes? This ideological equalization is sometimes portrayed as a “menace to democracy”, but it points to a future which both liberals, conservatives and socialists ought to be able to embrace.
***
The boundless world places demands on us, something that really is not perceived as promising by everyone. No one can be faulted for feeling anxiety. I do. But some are blocked by what they see as a blood-chilling scenario, where life is lived as if it were some kind of live broadcast. There is little doubt that those who do not accept openness will have problems, and they will rebel. The good news is that there is little evidence for the all-encompassing “clash of civilizations” that Samuel Huntington predicted. Rather we will see, and are already seeing, skirmishes between civilizations — in fact the death-throes of the old, separated civilizations.
The expressions of fear are well known: Racism and xenophobia. Religious extremism. Immature men’s violations against women when institutionalized oppression of women disappears. But even somewhat more sensible people, who feel great insecurity before the new and unknown openness, will continue to be attracted to miscellaneous retrograde movements from left to right. They may be Russian communists, UKIP followers, Lega Nord supporters, Tea Party activists or members of the Muslim Brotherhood, but they are all opponents of development who are less panic-stricken and less insane than thugs and terrorists but who nonetheless have got most things wrong.
The open world we walk into will thus not be very easy to meet, at least not for everybody. It will be a world for those who are prepared to lift their eyes, reconcile with themselves and leave the fear of the other behind. We will never again be able to hide behind a nation, a family or a football team. We must take responsibility ourselves. We cannot get away.
My 2012 book ”Farväl oskuld” (only in Swedish; the title means “Farewell innocence”) is a collection of essays about the implications of a world with fewer borders and more transparency. I examine the increasing openness in as diverse respects of our society as communication, economy, culture, politics, diplomacy and the (closing) gender gap. The loss of fixed categories can be both intimidating and deeply hopeful. My conclusion is that no one can escape the shift and that we all need to take more responsibility for our behavior and actions.
The above text is a summary plus the entire concluding chapter of the book.
