The "wild globalization" project
The "wild globalization" project
Guest essay by Gary Bedford
What is “globalization”…and how does it drive “civilization” in the 21st century?
The 20th century dawned with the “promise” of world peace and prosperity – brilliant technologies, egalitarianism, a budding global economy. It collapsed into chaos, genocide, holocausts, environmental destruction. Seventy million lost in great wars, 50 million in a global flu pandemic.
Yet the century's second half, defying nuclear and Cold War threats, saw "rising tides” of wealth over poverty, foodstuff abundance, even more amazing technologies, Eurasia's “convergence" into the global economic community…and six billion human souls on the planet.
21st Civilization carries both trajectories – at once “prosperity…super-abundance”, as Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley have put it. Yet it has also brought nuclear confrontation… “great” depressions, energy panic, global pandemic with one million flooding urban centers every week along with growing human slavery and trafficking.
What’s going on with the human “race”? It’s not clear. Do we have
“Hyper-globalization” (1990-2020) or “reverse globalization” (2020-2050)?
Demographic explosion (1950-2000) or demographic “reversal” (2020-2050)?
Malthusian scarcity with peak oil/gas or a bottomless well?
Urbanization collapsing fertility rates – China, Brazil, Mexico, Europe, Japan.
A global social-political-economy where “for the first time in history”, according to Louis-Vincent Gave, wealth is being created from something (‘knowledge’) that is in unlimited supply and has a marginal cost of zero”, and where knowledge is both a “black swan” (“We do not know what we will know.”), and a “black box” (multi-factored, hyper-variable, unpredictable, defying measure), and finally “hyper-natural”. In the words of Thomas Sowell: “The cavemen had the same natural resources as we have today…the difference between their standard of living and ours is…knowledge.”
The Wild Globalization Project
To understand what is going on, I want to invite you to the Wild Globalization Project. The Wild Globalization Project investigates global human culture in the 21st century. How did we get here? What are the critical questions? If we gathered various thought leaders and asked, “What’s going on…what’s most critical for human survival and prosperity? Are we on the right track?” How would they respond? Would their answers run together or run over one another? Would consensus or rough debate emerge? Or both?
The project is tracking a revised pragmatism. It’s pursuing critical thinking, ideas over “ideologies,” and rough beer-hall, arm-wrestling debate over “consensus.”
¨Can we subordinate “ideology” to one among many, competing factors?
¨Can we get down and dirty, to practical, hands-on thinking?
¨Can we come up with a working ethics?
¨Can a vigilant experimental method drop stuff that’s not working; can we self-correct on the fly?
Minimal Inquiry
What do we mean by “wild”?
Might 21st century civilization be better understood as a black box, a “quantum entanglement” of highly energetic, intra- and inter-variable, undercutting, overlapping, unstable, emergent, bundled, hidden, hard to measure, weak and strong forces and energies? These forces include ecology, demographics and culture, technology, economy, and governance.
We might try to guess what goes into the box, and we can observe, try to measure and respond to what comes out, but what happens inside that gives rise to spontaneously evolving and now hyper-globalizing orders evades complete understanding or rational governance. It’s wild!
Maximal Inquiry
How do these "wild” forces-energies drive and produce civilization? Our lifeworld grows increasingly “globalized,” whether the recent “bright” hyper-globalizing version (1990-2020), or now the apparent reshuffling, retreat, to a “darker” yet still global geo-political order?
Have the Enlightenment sciences' amazing successes - Apollo, Hubble-Webb, the Internet of Things, now the "Cloud" and “AI” - tricked us to believe we can understand, command, or control this civilization? Are these energies difficult to discern because they are flowing so fast and powerfully in their complex entanglements, like tsunamis sprung from deep ocean earthquakes that at first appear benign but upon reaching shore grow to massive and overwhelming scale? Grey and black swans?
Human culture is overwhelmed and overrun by phenomena running faster than it: mass global migrations and urbanization (1 million+ per week), or errant public and private mortgage capital leading to great financial crises, insatiable energy demands, citizens evermore dependent on governments buried in errant debt and unfunded welfare liabilities, and now human-caused (or not?) global pandemics? Civil orders have grown vulnerable, indeed, hyper-fragile, and more easily disrupted. History is moving ahead of our practical and our ethical ability to respond.
Approach
The Wild Globalization Project tracks these five “factors” or “energies” - ecology, demographics and culture, technology, economy, governance.
Ecologies
We live on a wild planet – all of “formal” human history (@10,000 years) has occurred under the warmth of a climate “optimum,” the 10-15,000 pauses in global glaciation. As recently as 20,000 years ago the Laurentide Ice Sheet – up to 2 miles deep – covered most of Canada and much of the Northern U.S., and was busy carving the Great Lakes. Paleo-climatological study is concerned with how the appearance and disappearance of ice ages appear to be primarily caused by the Milankovitch “Cycles,” the Earth’s orbital oscillations around the solar system.
Modern history has also escaped the catastrophic global winters triggered by super-volcanic eruptions – a Yellowstone (1,000 cubic kilometers ejected mass) rather than a St. Helen’s (1 square kilometer) and which appears to erupt every @600,000 years – most recently @600,000 years ago. How could civilization respond?
The sun creates most of our ecology’s energy yet it can also be massively destructive, as the 1859 “Carrington Event” demonstrated. It involved the greatest geomagnetic storm on recorded human history. If the event were to occur today, there would be massive damange to power grids and civilization might even revert to the dark ages.
Is radical, cyclical, pervasive variation the norm or the exception in the earth’s five billion year history? Do our concerns see the entire picture of environment?
Our project intends to contribute to the full examination of how we live in a wild ecology, and how “advanced” civilization may be growing more vulnerable to ecological risk.
Demographics and Culture
Global population has grown from about 1 billion in 1804 to nearly 7 billion in 2000. Remarkably, people today enjoy significantly better health and nutrition than at any time in history.
The 21st century is now experiencing what Charles Goodhart and Manaj Pradhan call a global “demographic reversal.” Fertility rates are dropping, especially in developing countries. Birthrates have “collapsed” in China as it faces a “middle income trap.” Why? – urbanization and technologization, the hallmark demographic phenomena of the modern era. People are flooding into cities, over 1 million/week supported by global “supply chains” moving every manner of goods. As people move from agrarian lifestyles, they have fewer, many, kids. Urbanization – the massing of populations – is transforming 21st century culture.
Robert Neuwirth in Shadow Cities brilliantly describes “squatter cities” in Rio de Janeiro, Nairobi, Mumbai, and Istanbul. Two realities paint modern urban skylines – e.g., Nairobi’s modern version, above, and its “shadow city,” the Kibera neighborhood, below.
Human culture is transforming tectonically, beneath our feet and senses. And just what do we mean by “culture?” It’s our unique histories, languages, customs, ethical beliefs, philosophies, and faith traditions, it’s our legal institutions and our arts and sciences, even our culinary habits, it’s the flow of our buying-selling-trading economies, all of which evolve civilization. Science and technology, which are shaping and morphing moder life, can’t really “think” culture. Culture is the quintessential alpha and omega of this black box/quantum entanglement set of circumstances.
Technology
Are humans “unnatural,” or are we rather “hyper-natural?” We’ve emerged from nature. Our proto-human ancestors made tools three million years ago; they “discovered” fire and started cooking one+ million years ago. We are nature’s experiment with bipedalism, digital dexterity, big brains, language and advanced socialization – finally, we are nature’s “knowledge” children.
Technology tracks population, and vice versa. The 21st century is at the apex of this rocket-ride. Our tech makes material civilization, yet with it we can destroy ourselves and our worlds. “AI” looms as beneficial, but with unlimited, unknown black/gray swan risk. And it’s inevitable. It’s already here. Can our tech help preserve civilization – from CME’s, super-volcanoes, the next ice age if and when it’s coming? How?
Human technology, since the atlatl or the crossbow, or now the atom bomb, has appeared through human’s run as the harbinger of promise and mayhem…our most audacious creations and the greatest challenge to any claim of a working “ethos.” As Robert Oppenheimer, quoting the sacred Bhagavad Gita, remarked about witnessing the birth of the 20th century’s apex technology, atomic energy: “Behold I am become death, destroyer of worlds.” Tech races ahead of our ethical instincts and intuitions, our “better,” altruistic natures. Tech is wild.
Economy
Gave tells us this anecdote. “In Alaska, during the first gold rush, one winter was particularly rough and a famine ensued. To survive, people only had sardine cans, and a lively market took place in this rare commodity. One fellow bought himself a can of sardines at an extraordinary price, but was surprised to find, upon opening the box, that the sardines were rotten. He went back to complain, but was told by the can’s previous owner: “but those weren’t eating sardines, they were trading sardines!”
Economy is elusive – it’s tangible, like a can of sardines during famine, but intangible because the “trading” sardines are actually rotten. Economy is elusive because it’s really about “value” – what is something “worth.”
The Wild Globalization Project will try to sneak up on “economy” from an evolutionary approach. Economy emerges from human nature’s own survival strategies – “scarce resources” trigger “innovation” and eventually “excess production and reserves.” Yet long ago, and over Homo Sapiens’ 500 millennia, these deeply rooted “subsistence” strategies evolved from immediate life or death competencies into schemes and maneuverings based on competition, enterprise, “markets” – and “produced” yet new forms of virtual value. The challenge of understanding 21st century economy and value is about how we made this transition, or rather, how it made us.
Governance
As Brooksley Born put it in his testimony to Congress regarding the 2008 financial crisis: “We had allowed the system to race ahead of our ability to protect it.”[17]
Formal governance attempts to arrange human “orders” (e.g., politics, legal, societal, monetary, economy, education) and so integrate “values” (social-economic-political philosophies, faith-traditions, egalitarian concerns) into formal arrangements and conventions (institutions). Nations are "constituted" into executive, legislative, and legal systems.
Business is itself “incorporated” and governed by "boards of directors" and "bylaws." Faith traditions, emerging from nascent, often humble prophets, avatars, “messiahs” and “messengers,” yet evolve (inevitably?) into global institutions governed by imams, swamis, bishops, popes and may even have their own political "state" (e.g., the Vatican).
Yet rising from everyday "street" play, humans shape themselves into informal, private ("small"), even "counter-cultural" arrangements (the arts, social media, closely held business, independent intellectuals, entrepreneurs and inventors, spiritual societies). Your local hardware store or family-owned restaurant…the “Doors,” “Rolling Stones,” or “Credence Clearwater Revival” rock ‘roll bands…brilliant minds like a Hawking, Einstein, a Taleb or Mandelbrot…genius inventions of Edison…entrepreneurs like a Musk or a Jobs…or artists Dalí or Christo or Monét or Chagall…new orders of “value” incessantly emerge and evolve.
And in the ever-wilder 21st century's global marketplace, we hear the incessant background noise of those one million souls per week spilling into urban centers, forming micro neighborhood governances, overwhelming, even defying formal government. The shocking "street-up," under- and overflow of entirely unpredictable, new social "orders."
Gary Bedford is head of Bedford Wealth Advisors in Boulder, Colorado.