SEVEN TOMORROWS
TOWARD A VOLUNTARY HISTORY
THE POTENTIAL CRISES THAT FACE HUANKIND – AND THE ROLE OF CHOICE IN DETERMINING THE FUTURE
PAUL HAWKEN, JAMES OGILVY, PETER SCHWARTZ
BANTAM NEW AGE BOOKS 1982
PART III
PART TWO: SEVEN SCENARIOS FOR THE EIGHTIES AND NINETIES
Chapter 3: The Official Future
Technological triumph sums up the Official Future. American power is ascendant. While the instabilities and inequities of the world have not ended, the plight of the world’s poorer nations improves markedly as a result of U.S. leadership. The spread of Soviet ideology is checked. At home people are optimistic and satisfied with the “American experiment.” More people are more affluent than ever. The quality of life thrives on a quantity of goods and services undreamt of by earlier generations. Higher education, improved health care, and vacation travel become available to a higher percentage of the population. More personal computers and Cuisinarts wind up in the hands of the middle classes. The race for economic success remains active because the prizes remain appealing and attainable.
Along with the burgeoning technology, increased productivity, smoothly functioning world trade, and widespread affluence, we encounter rapid environmental deterioration, rising crime rates, and restrictions on personal freedom hidden behind the wealth. Nevertheless, in the Official Future, people gladly trade clean air and water for a new car or some comparable commodity.
Chapter 4: The Center Holds
The Center Holds begins precisely in the same manner as the Official Future. The eighties start out bullish and aggressive. America is militarily assertive abroad and forceful at home in solving its energy problems. Technology after technology issues forth from corporate America promising answers to present and future problems. But shortly thereafter, America is confounded with problems. Energy supplies are suddenly reduced, the economy stops growing, and social unrest is exacerbated by rising food prices caused by an erratic climate.
In response, the survivalist prophets crow with righteousness and prematurely pat themselves on the back for their prescience in calling America’s fate. In the end, the survivalists are proven wrong. Instead of a devolving economy and society, the large multinational corporations combine their forces with big government to restore systems. The new system is highly centralized and more authoritarian. A conservatively packed Supreme Court interprets the First Amendment increasingly narrowly. As conformity becomes the passport to success, the system becomes rigid and intolerant. Science is evermore the handmaiden of government, with increasing amounts of research funded by the central government. And technology, buoyed by its success in curing the fundamental energy problems of the eighties, becomes government’s major tool for collecting all of the pertinent data about society needed to ensure that the nation could not break down again as it almost did in the eighties.
Chapter 5: Mature Calm
In Mature Calm we wake up, jolted to attention by a decade of uncertainty and ineptitude, and decide that it is time to drop ideological barriers. America rediscovers that a nation forms in order to help itself, not to place limitations on citizens in a belief that people cannot be trusted. Just as the Nixon administration opened the doors to the “peril” of China to the delight of the radical left, so do the actions of a series of conservative administrations implement many of the programs once dear to the ecological left. The shift to conservatism allows Americans a breathing space in which they can be less selfish and more prudent, less impulsive and more thoughtful. Renewed American commitments calm a bellicose world and provide two decades of stability and peace. During this time there are no great strides made in any one direction: Russia remains mistrusted, nuclear weapons are stockpiled, environmental problems continue, and economic inequities resist change. Nevertheless, the nation does not feel it is slipping backward. Despite the fact that it is a slower growing economy and that energy is allocated by the high price of the marketplace, America feels safe. The wisdom of senior leaders restores the power of the largest demographic group, those over 55. Young people stay in school, families buy homes, and the Yankees win the World Series. We all wonder what the big scare was about in the late seventies. Did we lack faith in the momentum of the commonplace?
Chapter 6: Chronic Breakdown
Chronic Breakdown is about creeping decay. Anyone who has suffered a week when everything went wrong knows something of what Chronic Breakdown might be like; stretch that week to twenty years, imagine the sufferings of a nation in place of the sufferings of an individual, and you have some sense of this uphill struggle against entropy. The United States finds itself beset on every front by forces it no longer controls. Its destiny seems hopelessly lost. Events seem chaotic and decisions almost futile in the face of randomly negative news. Chronic Breakdown is the future that defies rational planning. Mere coping is the most we can manage.
The events we have chosen to illustrate such a breakdown are not as significant as the mood of pervasive pessimism that characterizes this scenario. The rhythm of decay is an adagio of despair without the percussion of decisive turning points. Progress melts as the main driving trends all worsen. Energy becomes chronically short. Unbalanced economic policies catch up and wreak vengeance on Mr. and Mrs. Homeowner. Like a tired old lion claiming territory it is unable to defend, America watches as smaller, younger counties eat away at its former sphere of influence. It is a sad and dreary sight. The weather is terrible: cold in winter, dry in summer, windy and tempestuous in spring and fall. In many ways Chronic Breakdown is a depression from which no one sees a way out.
A society that functions subnormally becomes accepted as the new reality. People’s disillusionment is proportional only to the extent of their realization that what goes down does not always come up. Crises provoke no sense of opportunity, only an ever deeper sense of danger. What little economic activity persists has the air of a scramble for better chairs on a doomed Titanic. But America never sinks. We just sail on into the fog, no haven in sight.
In the sixties, E.M. Cioran observed, “You cannot treat destiny” The best you can do in bad times is “to keep abreast of the incurable.” In the seventies, Jim Hougan added, in a book entitled Decadence, “Nero correctly understood that beauty, music and irony can co-exist with disintegration, that the inevitable can be accompanied on the violin.” Throughout the eighties and nineties, the slow decline – not the fall – of industrial culture was accompanied by electric guitars and the sound of breaking glass.
Chapter 7: Apocalyptic Transformation
Human transformation is possible. We see it, albeit rarely, among individuals. But what about the transformation of a whole society? Can a people change direction like a flight of birds, all at once? Would there have to be a leader? Or might some series of events unite all humanity against some common enemy or for some common goal? We like to think that social transformation is an easy thing, an unavoidable elevation just in the offing. But we think it more likely that only a severe shock to the entire system will initiate anything worthy of the word, transformation. So this scenario illustrates a monumental wave of drastic change, from breakdown through trough toward a crest of transformation. Human transformation is possible, even in its social form. But the easy routes toward it are even less likely than the hard ones, which, by their own accounts, are sometimes called miracles.
Chapter 8: Beginnings of Sorrow
Beginnings of Sorrow portrays our worst fear short of nuclear disaster. We confront the Latter Days, the Great Tribulation. That such a future should happen is unthinkable, and yet it is a distinctly possible scenario. We dare not plan for it. Yet we cannot remain oblivious of its threat.
- In Beginnings of Sorrow, national and international events combined with individual and social responses lead a critical mass of people to believe and act as though there would be no tomorrow.
- A narrowness of vision restricts our collective potential to mere survival.
- Suddenly the richest nation the world has ever known goes broke.
- In this scenario we put all of our eggs in one basket, the basket of a high-growth, energy-dependent industrial society. That basket topples from the perch of our high expectations.
How could this happen? Problems like energy, inflation, crime, and moral decay may yet overwhelm our capacity to solve them? The crises we confront may be out of control. All of our past follies may catch up with us as heedless industrial folly has with the poor citizens who live near Love Canal. We may exhaust hope and replace it with fear. We may learn how thin is the veneer of civilization. The psychology of fear may drive us toward a new Dark Age.
Many people who lived through some of the darker days in Europe following World War II can tell you what it’s like to have a nation fall apart. Barbara Tuchman’s remarkable study, A Distant Mirror, shows us what a civilization in chaos can be like. The survivors of Cambodia, E. Timor, or Auschwitz are testaments both to survival and to what humans are capable of inflicting upon each other.
We Americans assume that somehow we are invulnerable to all that. But we shouldn’t forget our own Civil War and its aftermath in the south, or My Lai, or Jonestown. We are a nation that went to the moon, but in that same year we were also killing thousands of Vietnamese with equal technological efficiency.
Chapter 9: Living Within Our Means
Radical transformation of society follows from diverse adaptations to a declining economy plagued by shortages of resources. Following the energy crisis of the seventies, the eighties hit with an equally surprising food crisis causing massive dislocation of both individual and world economies. Unlike the survival-oriented ethic of Beginnings of Sorrow, American ingenuity, pluck, and gumption forestall social collapse by a rapid restructuring. Americans do not change because they think change would be better, they change because the old ways no longer work. Middle-class Americans adopt much of the lifestyle pioneered by the counterculture of the seventies, without surrendering more than a few inches to its underlying ideology. The masses of the eighties meet the privileged drop-outs of the sixties and seventies in a social milieu of a deteriorating climate, severe resource shortages, and a faltering economy. Far from the fruited plain on which their former rivalries were fought, diverse groups establish a common ground of belief that the world has changed irrevocably and in a way that renders frugality, conviviality, cooperation, spirited attention to community, and family hard work as the last best hope for mere survival.
Conclusion
The Title Living Within Our Means implies a world in which people are well adapted to their circumstances. But as in the Beginnings of Sorrow, the means have been drastically reduced. Living within them is hardly a choice, it is a painful necessity born of reality. The industrial paradigm, runs smack against the declining capacity of the earth. The new but practical economic model stresses real personal satisfaction rather than personal consumption. Emerson’s ideal of “plain living and high thinking” taps deeply into strong American values and abilities of self-sufficiency and neighborliness. We make the best of what is bad because we are in fact prepared, because we consistently opt for responsibility, and because we choose to stay together as a people, as a society, and as a country. We discover strengths that had long been forgotten in the relative ease of contemporary life.
PART THREE: TOWARD A VOLUNTARY HISTORY