A New Global Enlightenment

A new Enlightenment is required for solving global problems cooperatively.?

The old Enlightened countries?of Europe who had embroiled the world in two horrible wars in the last century have brewed another one in Ukraine. Pious commitments to solve global problems of climate change, hunger, and poverty have been forgotten. India and other countries are being asked to take sides in what is being presented as an ideological contest between liberalism and authoritarianism.?

In his prescient book,?Brave New World,?written in 1932, between the two world wars, Aldous Huxley had foreseen technological?and social forces that would suppress?individual liberties around the world, even in--or specially in--the most technologically advanced countries, no matter which side won the ideological wars between capitalism and communism.?

What would be a better way to solve global problems? I suggest a way in my article in The Tribune this morning. Here is a link to it, and the article too.?

https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/comment/new-ways-needed-to-solve-global-problems-410087

NEW WAYS NEEDED TO SOLVE GLOBAL PROBLEMS

The Ukraine war reveals the poverty of global leadership. The NATO alliance’s war against Russia and China has set humanity back in its battles against climate change and global hunger. Global energy and financial systems have been disrupted to punish Russia. Global food chains have broken down. Coal plants are back; climate change commitments forgotten. Citizens in the developing world are most affected. Even before Ukraine, nations’ leaders were struggling to solve complex, inter-related, global problems listed in the Sustainable Development Goals.

?Ukraine has exposed once again the geo-political power game that caused two world wars in the last century: two hot ones and one long cold one which was supposed to have ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union and admission of China into the WTO. The Ukraine war has diverted attention from the urgent need to find better ways to solve complex planetary problems.

?The first world war was a fight amongst capitalist countries for territory. The second was a fight of liberal capitalism against fascist capitalism. In the second war, Russia, a communist country, joined the Allies in the fight against fascism. After the war, capitalists declared communists as their existential enemy, and a long cold war, which kept the world on the edge of a nuclear holocaust, played out until 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed, and Russia became capitalist too. The doomsday scenario of totalitarianism that George Orwell had predicted in his 1949 book, “1984”, was avoided. Nevertheless, threats to liberalism are back, in Europe, in India, and even within the US, the leader of alliances against fascism and communism for the last hundred years.

?Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World”, written in 1932, was more prescient than Orwell’s “1984”. Huxley foresaw the world that would emerge with methods of mass production that were being developed in the US and that Russia was emulating. He anticipated the depletions of individual freedoms with mass communication technologies and the mass consumption culture that mass production needs to produce its “economies of scale”. Henry Ford introduced mass production and automation to the automobile industry. “You can buy any color of Model-T so long as it is black”, Ford said. He complained that he got a whole human being when he needed only a pair of hands for mass production. Organizing for efficiency on scale requires standardization as well as centralized control. The Soviets adopted Ford’s ways, along with Fredrick Taylor’s methods of time-motion study, to successfully increase output in large scale factories and farms.

?After fascism was defeated with the extermination of the German and Japanese war machines Huxley wrote a sequel in 1958, “Brave New World Revisited”. The impacts on human freedoms of scientific methods of organizing mass production and promoting mass consumption— “Fordism” as he called them, that he had foreseen in 1932, were very visible. In an anticipation of social media, he saw further advances in technologies that would enable central controllers to condition minds without need for crude methods of torture that Orwell had feared in “1984”. When the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991 a political scientist said the last remaining totalitarian states were Western capitalist enterprises. Huxley had already pointed out that political dictators and managers of large-scale economic enterprises use the same ways of organizing to produce outcomes on scale: the only difference is who the controllers are. In one system they are private capitalists in the other political leaders.

?Wars between “isms”—capitalism, communism, socialism, and fascism—scarred the world in the twentieth century. The “isms” of the Right—capitalism and fascism—have fought together against “isms” of the Left—communism and socialism. The conservative Right wants to keep power at the top; the progressive Left wants power to shift to the masses. Both use the same mass production methods to produce outputs on scale: standardization and division of the organization’s parts into verticals coordinated at the top. The organization is a machine, whose levers are pulled by controllers at the top. This is the way of modern management, in business, in governments (centralized programs with one solution for all), and even in large philanthropy programs.

?Good organization is required to coordinate diverse actors and to produce outcomes on scale. Large, industrial scale organizations destroy diversity and reduce freedoms. The farmlands of the Punjab have been destroyed by large scale, mono-crop agriculture. “Stand up and start up” is the Punjabis’ entrepreneurial spirit. After the tragic partition of their state in 1947, millions started again in the Punjab, in other states, and in other countries too, starting small enterprises to recover their lost wealth (as my father did too.) Small, entrepreneurial, enterprises which do not have the tidy form of large industrial enterprises are looked down upon by economists.

?The history of ideological conflict was supposed to have ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the final victory of capitalism over all other isms according to Francis Fukuyama. It never did. India must not get dragged into taking sides in this false ideological battle which, in truth, is a battle between East and West for global hegemony.

?India must take a lead in showing a new way. All countries must cooperate to find new solutions to global problems of inequality, persistent poverty, environmental degradation, and climate change. New ways of organizing are necessary to solve these problems. They cannot be solved by applying the same methods that have caused them.

?Top-down solutions developed by experts in silos, high above ground realities, harm the sustainability of complex ecological-economic-social systems (as has happened in the Punjab and other parts of the world). Complex problems take different shapes in different parts of the world. Therefore, the correct way to solve global systemic problems is local systems solutions cooperatively implemented by communities. ?

?Global solutions, and liberty of the people, demand that government of the people from above—which is the authoritarian way of nations and enterprises, must be changed to governance by the people. Power must shift from the old colonial countries to others. Within countries it must shift from their centers to local governance in towns and rural communities. Within organizations of government, business, and social work too, it must shift from chiefs and experts above to people within.