BOOK REVIEW Gore has seen the future The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change by Al Gore
Reviewed by Dinesh Sharma
The future is a shadow of the past, while the past is a shadow of the present, according to Al Gore. When the future casts a longer shadow than the past, as a human race, we should be worried about our planet and the species, Gore prophecies.
Gore’s vision runs deep. His consciousness encompasses the entire universe. Walking in the footsteps of visionaries like Jules Verne, Alvin Toffler, and John Naisbitt, he claims his "faith in the species" even though the future looks hazy, cloudy and dark.
Former vice president Al Gore, a Noble Peace Prize Laureate who
has been in the news lately because of Al-Jazeera's acquisition of US cable outfit CurrentTV, in which Gore had a stake, has just released a book, The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change, which reboots his "futuristic" vision of the world. This is a densely packed and expansive vision - something he has been refining for almost a decade. Gore's vision has come into sharper focus, partly due to the mounting evidence and importantly due to the groundbreaking changes already underway.
If the book throws up a "big challenge" it is that many of the megatrends described in the book are not really "futuristic"; they are on the verge of being accepted by leading experts. Thus, the reader might feel deluged by the rapid succession with which Gore conjures up new frames of reality when, for instance, he talks about the "global mind" from the billions of social media connections that now constitute our daily interactions or the impact of the policies he helped put in place for stem-cell research and genomics when he was in office. Others may be somewhat disheartened by the sheer onslaught of the dehumanizing effect of markets and technology.
The future is now, literally, because many of Gore's prophecies have already come true and many more will come true in the not-so-distant future. "Data-driven and based on deep research and reporting," the book has more than 200 of research notes and references. Gore deals with six interlocking trends or predictions about a future very different from anything we have seen before.
Earth Inc
Due to the outsourcing and robo-sourcing of jobs, globalization has led to new economic formations. The world has become an "integrated holistic entity with a new and different relationship to capital, labor, consumer markets, and national governments than in the past".
The nature of money and markets has become fluid; the nature of labor and work has become migratory and moveable; while national economies have not disappeared, they have become more open and porous to influences from outside. While national borders have not vanished, they seem less relevant today than 50 years ago to international trade, to the flow of capital, goods and natural resources.
This has led to the "crisis of capitalism" and some of the largest wage-gaps in the developed and the developing world, where the few, the rich and the powerful, the so-called 1% or the "global jet-setters", park their money and assets around the world while the middle classes in the local cultures are left holding the bag, for example, in the latest housing crisis. We need "sustainable capitalism", argues Gore, which is not focused on the short-term gains or also known as "quarterly capitalism".
The global mind
Just as fast as technology and the Internet have connected the world, humans - the innately social creatures that they are - have started to form online communities in order to work and play.
This has led to emergent forms of global consciousness, unprecedented in human history, where people can communicate, organize, and challenge power structures. This is a nascent form of "human technogenesis" that links "the thoughts and feelings of billions of people and connects intelligent machines, robots, ubiquitous sensors, and databases".
There is a "convergence" of minds in East and West in thoughts, feelings and aspirations, as Kishore Mabhubani said, recently at a talk at Asia Society. Across diverse cultures and societies, increasingly people are aiming foruniversal aspirations, democratic values and "the common good".
However, Gore is only cautiously optimistic. He urges Americans to restore both democracy and capitalism as these have been "hacked".
The results are palpably obvious in the suffocating control of policy decisions by elites, the ever increasing inequalities of income and growing concentrations of wealth. Fortunately, the awakening of the Global Mind is disrupting established patterns - creating exciting new opportunities for emergent centers of influence not controlled by elites and the potential for reforms in established dysfunctional behaviors.
Power in the balance
Al Gore has walked the corridors of power. He understands better than most what is at stake - a global shift in power is taking place, unlike anything we have seen in our lifetimes or in many generations.
"The balance of global political, economic, and military power is shifting more profoundly than at any time in the last five hundred years - from a US-centered system to one with multiple emerging centers of power, from nation-states to private actors, and from political systems to markets."
International relations experts have called this the "multipolar world", evident in new global formations, such as, the G-20. The State Department has called it the "Pacific pivot" in order to reorient and manage the dynamism of the Asia-Pacific region, or what Mabhubanihas called the "irresistible shift of global power to the East".
Outgrowth
The march of civilization and progress, now joined by the teeming masses in the developed and the least developed countries, has led to an imbalance in the earth's atmosphere, the so called "climate crisis". This is a reframing of Gore's original thesis about reclaiming the "earth in the balance".
"A deeply flawed economic compass is leading us to unsustainable growth in consumption, pollution flows, and depletion of the planet's strategic resources of topsoil, freshwater, and living species," argues Gore. Traditional ways of measuring progress, growth and development have to be radically altered to fix this crisis, but while experts debate the planet is becoming "flat, hot and crowded".
One of the clearest evidence is the correlation between carbon emissions and the rising sea levels, predicted to continue to rise with "potentially catastrophic difficulties for shore-based communities in the next centuries".
There is also evidence that Americans may be finally waking up to the climate debate. According to a recent poll by Think Progress, superstorm Sandy has been associated with climate change by 69% of New Yorkers, including 73% of independents.
Reinvention of life and death
The digital revolution, when combined with the advances in new biology, has brought humans within a striking distance to playing God. Today, we can understand our biological destiny for a few thousand dollars, while tomorrow we will be able to alter many life-threatening diseases.
"Genomic, biotechnology, neuroscience, and life sciences revolutions are radically transforming the fields of medicine, agriculture, and molecular science - and are putting control of evolution in human hands," suggests Gore. The path we take will determine the future of the human race.
On the edge
In the final analysis, Gore takes on the potential solutions to the energy crisis as a way to solve the climate debate, both scientifically and politically. There are no easy solutions to the crisis we face, he says; the US political system has been hijacked by special interests, which has partly led to the impasse on the climate debate. US democracy is broken, yet the world still expects the US to lead.
"There has been a radical disruption of the relationship between human beings and the earth's ecosystems, along with the beginning of a revolutionary transformation of energy systems, agriculture, transportation, and construction worldwide," says Gore.
Whatever your political orientation, you must contend with the issues described in this book by one of the leading minds kicking around today, who has been a very successful politician, visionary entrepreneur, and a big-picture thinker. The conundrums raised by this book will impact not only your future, but the future of your children and grandchildren.
In the end, Gore is poetic (Samuel Taylor Coleridge), when he urges us to take meaningful action for "a sustainable future":
So often do the spirits
Of great events stride on before the events,
And in today already walks tomorrow.
The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change by Al Gore. Random House (Jan 29, 2013). ISBN-10: 0812992946. Price US$30.00. 558 pages.
Dinesh Sharma is the author of Barack Obama in Hawaii and Indonesia: The Making of a Global President, which was rated as one of the top 10 black history books for 2012. His next book on Obama, Crossroads of Leadership: Globalization and American Exceptionalism in the Obama Presidency, is due to be published with Routledge Press.
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