Splitting the Difference between Doomsday and Utopia = Embracing Humanity's Main-Character Energy

In this article I examine a couple of recent 纽约时报 articles: The first examines the divided state of futurism today and the second involves interpreting the latest IPCC report on climate change.

Quoting from the first:

Humanity now faces a confluence of challenges unlike any other in its history ... This troubling situation calls for new perspectives to make sense of a rapidly changing world and work out where we might be headed. Instead, we are presented with two familiar but very different visions of the future: a doomsday narrative, which sees apocalypse everywhere, and a progress narrative, which maintains that this is the best of all possible worlds. Both views are equally forceful in their claims — and equally misleading in their analysis. The truth is that none of us can really know where things are headed. The crisis of our times has blown the future right open.

[Understand, the author is pre-selling his upcoming book on the history of global crises, so he is pushing this straw man duality for his book to ultimately solve. I don't have any problem with that salesmanship -- obviously, but when one examines the history of doomsaying versus techno-utopians, there is no question that the former consistently get it wrong and the latter consistently get it right -- just typically on a longer timeframe than promised (sigh, we have flying cars finally and nobody wants to buy them!). So equating the two as equally misleading is, in my opinion, complete BS.]

To me, this sort of pick-option-B fatalism is as unhelpful as going all in on doom or utopia. Since we can't know, just sit back and enjoy the ride, basically:

To truly grasp the complex nature of our current time, we need first of all to embrace its most terrifying aspect: its fundamental open-endedness. It is precisely this radical uncertainty — not knowing where we are and what lies ahead — that gives rise to such existential anxiety.

Humans are supposed to stand in awe and fear of our current era's "fundamental open-endedness"? Why should we fear open-endedness? To me, that is merely a giant invitation to think and act big. The next several decades will see humanity reshape itself and the planet to a degree never before witnessed. I don't view that "open-endedness" with fear but with tremendous ambition.

As I argue in America's New Map, many great things have unfolded under globalization and many great things continue to do so. But these advances come with costs, like climate change across the developing South, and with challenging consequences, like demographic collapse across the advanced North. These costs and new challenges do not invalidate globalization -- far from it. It is impossible to argue that we live in a today that is worse than yesterday.

Since humanity has advanced time any time again across great periods of upheaval and change, there is no reason to assume otherwise this time around. There are no "good old days"; there is merely where things have advanced to today and where we are capable of advancing them in the future. The rest is religion and the various retreats from reality found there (and yes, I do see a new fear-based faith arising around the subject of complexity -- a development I find childish given the accompanying [and highly interconnected] development of computing power).

Can we predict the future? Not with any specificity. But we can calmly examine where long-term trends are taking us -- or what I call inevitabilities -- and, by doing so, plausibly describe a range of future pathways that we can choose to engage or ignore. The pox-on-both-your-houses approach of this first article is unhelpful in this regard. It is too passive for a world being reshaped by past and current choices we are making.

Why? Because in any great time of upheaval and change, there are always still plenty of choices to be made, many of them involving inconceivable efforts -- when judged by the past and present but which are entirely within our powers to achieve. By claiming we just have to live with uncertainty sidelines our natural instinct to think and act big when the situation demands it.

In my worldview, we simply need to embrace this new set of challenges as the best problems we have yet encountered -- most of them surrounding the emergence of a global middle class whose demands for a better life our world system must now meet or likely suffer great political tumult right as we encounter great environmental tumult.

Is there great power competition in all of this? You bet, and that is a good thing overall. America just needs to remember who we are, how we got here, and what we still bring to the table when it comes to shaping the world's future evolution. Retreating to either doomsday prepping or goofy complacency is -- again -- a false and rather meaningless choice, because those of us who do make such a choice will be left largely on the sidelines of the history-bending developments to come. But it is equally bad to worship at the altar of uncertainty, because that will freeze the middle, preventing its action. And that would be terrible, because it is in the middle where we find the best ideas and the best implementers.

The second article, basically an interview on a climate journalist regarding the latest IPCC reporting, speaks more sensibly toward a future we must adapt to and shape to the best of our collective ability. My favorite bit that highly reflects my approach in America's New Map:

Climate change isn’t the kind of issue where we either succeed or fail. At every step, we could always make things better. There’s always a chance to stop global warming and maybe we will. That’s going to be really difficult. But there’s always a way to improve the situation. It’s important to convey that.

There are great stories about people finding ways to adapt to climate change. There are also stories of failure, death, destruction and heartbreak. But those are inherent to the situation. It’s such a big, sprawling topic that reporting pure pessimism would provide an incomplete picture of what is happening. At the same time, climate change poses very serious risks and threats. We need to convey those as accurately as possible.

The reason why I chose to embrace this notion of "throughlines" in my book is because I wanted to signal our ability to engage these mega trends day-in and day-out, always finding a way to improve the situation -- as argued above.

We're not living in a two-hour disaster movie here; we're building a future step by step by the choices -- and the agency -- we embrace.

So no, don't give into the extremes or accept the notion that their very duality means we must simply surrender to fate. Humans are infinitely clever and inbound generations consistently outperform preceding ones -- thank God.

So, chin up! This is a good fight and we are collectively great fighters.

I say, embrace your main character energy and keep moving forward toward solutions. Doom-sayers we got. Utopian dreamers we got. What we need are confident and motivated do-ers.