SEVEN TOMORROWS
TOWARD A VOLUNTARY HISTORY
THE POTENTIAL CRISES THAT FACE HUMANKIND – AND THE ROLE OF CHOICE IN DETERMINING THE FUTURE
PAUL HAWKEN, JAMES OGILVY, PETER SCHWARTZ
BANTAM NEW AGE BOOKS 1982
PART V
PART THREE: TOWARD A VOLUNTARY HISTORY
Chapter 13: Conclusion
Nations and peoples move ahead and prosper when a common vision inspires their progress. The remarkable post-war recoveries made by Japan and Germany bear witness to the economic potential of sheer people power. Human resources are finally the most irreplaceable of all; the ideas, inventions, and beliefs that motivate a people add more to their well-being than the sheer brawn of labor power. The record of human progress shows how intelligence and ingenuity can accomplish more than muscle and sweat. But intelligence and ingenuity also require motivation, for instance, the challenge of national recovery after devastating loss, or the shared goals of a culture with common ideals. In short, some sense of vision or purpose can inspire a people to economic wonders, however handicapped they may be by shortages of capital and/or natural resources.
The ambitious plan of this final chapter is to define a vision for America. This ambition would be pretentious if we claimed to compose that vision from whole cloth. Quite to the contrary, the task at hand is a matter of reminding Americans of the visions and values deeply entrenched in our culture; not to invent anew, but to recall and refine some of our oldest beliefs, and to reinterpret their appropriateness to a new world. Our strategy is neither to hark back to old nostrums, nor to invent values. Instead our effort acknowledges those characteristics that define the people we have become; takes seriously the new environment of the world as it is now; and articulates a vision of what we might yet become.
The tactics for our strategy involve accommodation on three different fronts. The first two are the traditional Left and Right: the so-called liberal and conservative wings of an outdated spectrum that no longer defines the whole range of options in today’s world. A third force has recently performed the service of moving public debate away from obsolete argument between Right and Left. That third force we will call the Transformative Alternative. In its most comprehensive statement, the Aquarian Conspiracy, by Marilyn Ferguson, compiles ideas ranging from the physics of Ilya Prigogine to Theodore Roszak’s several books, Hazel Henderson’s economics, and many other contributions. The Transformative Alternative defines one side of a three-sided controversy to which we add a Voluntary History as a fourth position. Our differences with other positions are not to be reduced to a formulaic opposition on all points. To the contrary, our hope is to render their respective insights more realistic and consequently more powerful. As with our appropriations of many elements from traditional Right and Left, so our assimilation of contributions from the Transformative Alternative aims toward showing how ideological stances can be enriched rather than refuted by reality.
- To carry out the strategy of salvaging from the old what remains appropriate to new realities, we have abstracted a set of fundamental values that defines the three positions we hope to synthesize.
- Each of these values has some merit in itself, and even more merit when enhanced by the nourishing context of other values with which it is consistent.
- The values in question include freedom, social order, diversity, power, predictability, and peace.
- Each of these values represents some clearly discernible good. Unfortunately, not all good things go together.
- A society that stresses diversity may have to sacrifice a degree of social order. Real freedom precludes predictability. Power does not always serve the cause of peace.
The problem facing any culture is the problem of tradeoffs. Collectivist cultures trade individual liberty for social cohesion and predictability. Liberal democracies sacrifice a degree of social planning in order to protect diversity and individual freedom. Furthermore, different sectors of society stand to benefit or lose from the balance of values characterizing a given society as a whole. During the cultural revolution in China, for example, many intellectuals committed suicide rather than sacrifice their liberty to the goal of social egalitarianism.
Though it is unlikely that Americans will make a social choice as dramatic in its consequences as the cultural revolution in China, a broad-based transformation of attitudes along the lines of the Apocalyptic Transformation scenario is within the realm of possibility. The McCarthy era demonstrated our capacity for falling prey to a witch hunt mentality. And less dramatic trends among attitudes toward values may have consequences that are long lasting and therefore ultimately more significant than McCarthyism. We face our own version of a choice between the interests of the mandarins and the interests of the people.
- We will probably experience in the years ahead an ambiguous mixture of the values, virtues, and vices of all three tactical fronts – the Left, the Right, and the Transformative.
- Any ideological promise that requires universal conversion for its fulfillment is bound to be a promise that remains unfulfilled.
We make an appeal to the advocates of various firm faiths: How are you going to live in a world where not everyone agrees with you? Can you accept something less than total victory, or must your adversaries chose among the options of conversion, annihilation, or repression?
- Both right-wing and left-wing regimes have been known for ruthless and unpardonable suppressions of dissent; neither ideological extreme can claim innocence in this regard.
- While right-wing dictators and fascist regimes received more attention for acts of torture and repression, the Left mumbled apologies for Stalin as an aberration from the true principles of Marxist-Leninism.
- The Transformative Alternative tends to sidestep the issue of dissent altogether by assuming that its utopia is so attractive that no one could possibly dissent.
- As with the Left and the Right, so the Transformative Alternative will be plagued with dissent. Real freedom entails real conflicts.
- We have no final solutions, no five-year plans. Planning requires ongoing learning, not forced imposition of some unrevisable future.
Freedom is our strongest weapon for maintaining national security – not the license of unrestricted individual liberty, but the freedom of different groups to place different normative constraints on the behavior of their members. Freedom does not mean anything goes, nor it is a value that insists upon only one code of behavior. Instead, freedom allows some forms to flourish: not one, not all, but some.
- By fostering a spirit of social experimentation, we satisfy an evolutionary principle of progress.
- We will not attempt all futures; we need not settle on one; we will choose some.
- Whether the topic is welfare, weaponry, or the economics of pollution, the American route toward a sustainable future will lead through freedom and diversity.
Because we have insisted on retaining a passionate commitment to individual freedom combined with unrestrained desires, we have created a paralyzed society adrift without vision in a turbulent and often dangerous world. If we continue on our present course, we will most likely encounter an increasingly authoritarian, war-ravaged future. If, instead, we recognize that freedom is more than the individual liberty to shrug off the needs of others, then we can learn to act cooperatively to take more control of our lives together. We can learn to give more and expect less. We can recognize that empathy, compassion, and security are inevitable handmaidens, and we can see through the fallacy of total victory in a diverse and pluralistic world. We may take heed from Alfred North Whitehead who once said, “It is the business of the future to be dangerous.” It has always been dangerous, confronting as it does the unknown. For it is through the unknown that we transform our fears into knowledge and a richer understanding of what it means to be human.
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