THE MEANING OF THE 21ST CENTURY: A Vital Blueprint
for Ensuring Our Future by James Martin Eden Project £20 pp431 In all cultures, most people, most of the time, have considered it highly likely that the world is about to end. Like war and religion — to both of which it is obviously related — The End seems to be hard-wired into our species. Perhaps it is simply that the burden of knowing that we, individually, are going to die inspires us to generalise our predicament. Or perhaps the end of the world really is always at hand. Our existence is a tightrope act. We can wobble within certain limits, but, one day, we will fall.
These days, we are certainly testing our wobbles to the limit. James Martin mentions the strange case of Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov. During the Cuban missile crisis, a Soviet submarine had been depth-charged by US destroyers. Unknown to the Americans, it had nuclear-tipped torpedoes. Three men were needed to give authority to fire. Only one, Arkhipov, refused. The end of civilisation and maybe the human species was the twist of a key away. This story is disputed but not its essence, that this Fox Class sub almost fired. One day there will be another sub and no Arkhipov.
More familiarly, we are now seeing a whole ballet of death-defying wobbles. We chuck 26 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year. We plan physics experiments that could suck us all into oblivion through a black hole of our own making. We rape the rainforests and the prairies, mainly so we can eat more beef. Our rapacity is destroying species at a rate not seen in 65m years. Resource wars (notably over water) loom. Novel bugs creep around our antibiotic and antiviral firewalls. And, with ever more sophisticated technology, our hard-wired tribalism pursues its own implacable ends.
Maybe the future has always looked this threatening. But, this time, there does seem to be some very hard evidence. Our destructive powers have been massively extended, the human world is becoming a single, interdependent system, population levels are plainly unsustainable and the weather is growing alarmingly hot and turbulent. Martin Rees, the astronomer royal, has estimated we have no better than a 50/50 chance of surviving the 21st century. This may be the most starry-eyed optimism.
All of which brings me to this quite extraordinarily irritating book. Martin seems to be one of those entrepreneurs of ideas who specialise in what came to be known, after Alvin Toffler carved this publishing niche with Future Shock in 1970, as futurism. Martin is a great founder of things — Headstrong, a software company, the World Education Corps and the James Martin 21st-Century School at Oxford. Predictably, therefore, the book reads, for most of the time, like a press release about the amazing James Martin.
Martin, for example, doesn’t interview people, he conducts “depth interviews”, presumably to distinguish them from the shallow babble in which hacks like me indulge. Oddly, however, all this depth seems to elicit only the most banal responses. Martin also uses the word “awesome” repeatedly and adopts the standard PR procedure of assuming his readers are idiots. “It is desirable,” he writes, “to prevent pandemics in which an infectious disease spreads quickly and kills many millions of people, as has happened many times in history.”
Gosh, James, thanks. That is desirable. Trust me, I am being fair; this is one example among many. His broad solution to all human conflict is, basically, that we should all be much nicer to each other. In addition, Martin, for all his “depth” interviews, seems conceptually naive. He talks blithely, as so many do, about “human enhancement” without once realising that he has a serious definitional problem on his hands. Can humans enhance humans? How? Is your enhanced human the same as Osama Bin Laden’s? I don’t think so. He also seems to treat China as if it has become a human-rights paradise and he says there is “total opposition to torture in most countries”. Of course there’s total opposition, James, that’s because they’re torturing people and they don’t want you to know about it. It is what we and the Americans do, after all. Torture is already a 21st-century norm.
There is also the great moment where he says, “Professional philosophers applying rigorous logic to ethics are coming to conclusions that contradict religious doctrine in certain important areas.” I am sorry, this is so funny on so many levels, I can’t fully explain here. Suffice it to say that Martin seems to have failed to grasp the gist of the past 500, if not 2,500, years.
But, okay, this book is a handy guide to many of the things that might happen in the future. As a kind of directory, it is fine and occasionally good. Even at this level, however, it has a conceptual problem — though this, unlike the stylistic failings, is understandable.
The problem is growth. Everything we now know about the environment tells us economic growth must stop. We can’t afford more consumption and emissions. However, Martin, like many others, says we can continue to grow, largely through the application of extremely high technology. A world-wide introduction of “pebble-bed” — safe and small — nuclear reactors would cut emissions drastically. He also offers evidence that economic development can, in fact, improve the environment. Literacy among women, for example, reduces birth rates.
In essence, as Martin rightly shows, the solutions — technical, social and political — to all our problems are quite clear and have been for at least 30 years. But they have not been implemented and that means that the real problem, the intractable problem, lies elsewhere. It is, in a nutshell, the plain fact that there is absolutely no prospect of people overcoming enough of their differences even to start to save the planet. We have known what harm is caused by the destruction of the rainforests but loggers still do it. We know burning fossil fuels will one day fry the planet, but we are burning more than ever. We know that religious fundamentalism can be twisted into murderous nihilism, now more than ever.
Martin, with his technophile, progressive, conventional mind, is not, therefore, a reliable anatomist of the future. In the most basic sense, he just doesn’t understand the problem. Or perhaps, beyond all the “awesomes” and the “depth interviews”, he does, and he knows that to understand is to despair. In that case, this book is, indeed, a press release, a document of consoling distraction to be read as we gallop into the flames, ignoring the warning cries of one last, but this time unsuccessful, Vasili Arkhipov.
www.bryanappleyard.com
The Meaning of the 21st Century is available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £18 (including p&p) on 0870 165 8585
Wired for life
Author of The Wired Society, the 1977 book that predicted the internet, James Martin is particularly exercised by the impact of technology. Wondering which invention in the 21st century “will have the most effect on changing the future”, he posits that it may be “the creation of wireless links that connect our brains directly to external electronics, including global networks”.
