A Brief History of the Future: A Brave and Controversial Look at the Twenty-First Century (26 page)

We must therefore expect many civil wars and thus, as always, the designation of scapegoats for elimination. As always, genocides will then be committed with the crudest of weapons. At least three of these massacres — against the Armenians, Jews, and Tutsi — were perpetrated in the twentieth century. Many others will take place in the twenty-first. And those who do not believe it have only to remember that in 1938 no one thought the Shoah would be possible.

As in the past, some countries will go so far as to make war on their neighbors to maintain their rank, distract domestic opinion from internal concerns, or else to wage an ideological or religious war.

Iran or Pakistan, for example, could commit themselves
to war in order to take control of the region extending from Palestine to the Chinese frontier. Nigeria could attempt to take control of raw materials in neighboring countries by occupying them; Kazakhstan could fight Turkey for control of the Turkish-speaking countries in the region. As has often been the case in the past, Russia might make war to avoid encirclement — this time by Asian allies of the United States as well as by China and Islam. China could fight to recapture Taiwan, to control Kazakhstan, to occupy Siberia, or to allow a single party under stress to hold on to power. The United States might go to war to defend Taiwan, Israel, or Europe against weapons aimed at them from Iran, Egypt, or the Maghreb. India might fight to control its border regions and destroy the rear bases of Muslim rebels. Australia could go to war to thwart its neighbors’ ambitions, such as Indonesia and China.

Pirates have attacked the sedentary since the dawn of humanity. They have done so in the name of money, faith, poverty, a national ideology, or ambition, and they show absolutely no respect for human life. The Roman Empire died at their hands, and the mercantile order too seems likely to succumb.

As in remotest antiquity, on all the seas, piracy (whether criminal or political) will continue to disrupt relations between sedentary groups. According to the rare statistics available, incidents of maritime piracy
increased fivefold between 1995 and 2006. That figure will continue to rise, especially around the Malacca Strait, which channels almost half of the world’s petroleum, and on the Caribbean, where more and more drug-laden ships are on the move. The Mediterranean will also return to being a major zone for piratical exactions — which will also occur along the axes crossing the deserts and in densely populated neighborhoods of big cities in both South and North.

Piracy will go on attacking the mass-tourism sites of virtual nomads. Everything that moves will be considered at once a target and a weapon — airplane, truck, train, ship, and every kind of communications network.

The pirates — religious, nihilist, or simply criminal — will strike the sedentary by surprise with the aim of instilling fear. They will not only seek to grab booty, but also to cut pipelines, close straits, stop all trade, all commerce, tourism, and traffic. They will attack the lands — real and virtual — of the empire with viruses — real and virtual — transforming their first victims into nomadic weapons sowing death around them. They will seek to disarticulate surveillance systems and so terrify the sedentary that they stop moving about altogether, ceasing to plan ahead, to create, to entertain themselves. The sedentary will shut themselves off in their bunkers.

The pirates will use all the weapons of modern corporations, with vanguards, local groups, “circuses,” and “theaters.”

Some of these pirates (and not only among religiously inspired movements) will have recourse to suicide attacks. The first attacks of this kind were by
Russian nihilists of the late nineteenth century, and then by Japanese forces during the Second World War, followed more recently by Tamil freedom fighters in Sri Lanka. Mafias have already used the suicide weapon, setting off unwilling human bombs. Islamist terrorists have used them in Europe and the Middle East, particularly in Iraq, Lebanon, and Israel. The attacks in Kenya in 2000, in New York on September 11, 2001, then in Casablanca, Madrid, and London are an integral part of this story, without constituting either a break with the past or a change of nature.

One day (perhaps not as distant as we think) poverty-driven pirates without theological motives will blow themselves up in European city centers. We shall witness convoys of suicide ships from the southern hemisphere blown up in the open Mediterranean and Caribbean, live before the television cameras.

The masters of the polycentric world, then of super-empire, will strive to fight such acts by transforming the defensive military Alliance into a world police organization. Mercenaries, paid by the Alliance, will destroy the pirates’ fallback bases, fight house to house in neighborhoods occupied by mafia gangs, and intercept their raids before they reach their objectives. They will trick them into killing one another and draw down on them the anger of the infranomads. The civilian population will be caught between the two lines of fire.

As noted, at this tempo, it will not be tomorrow’s Africa that will one day resemble today’s West, but the whole West that could tomorrow evoke today’s Africa.

When the polycentric world begins to unravel, when corsairs, pirates, private armies, mercenaries, and terrorists attempt to take over, totalitarian regimes will slaughter one another to establish supremacy without acknowledging any law of war or even any arbitrator. Countries of the North will form alliances with those of the South, while Islamist terrorists will join forces with drug cartels. There will simultaneously be hot wars and cold wars, private wars and state wars. Police and armed forces will mingle with one another without respecting the most elementary rules of warfare. Civilian populations will be helpless prey, as was the case in World War II. The religions of the Book will fight one another, to the greater glory of their enemies. Some theologians will see in this the advent of the battle signaling, in the Book, the end of days — an end (for the Jews) that must lead to the arrival of the Messiah. For Christians, it is linked with His return; for certain Muslims, with the hidden Imam; for Hindus, it is marked by the advent of Kalki, Vishnu’s tenth and final incarnation. In all cases, they say, it will end with the victory of good over evil.

If (once super-empire is in place) all these sources of conflict come together one day in a single battle, if all the players we have so far mentioned see their interests served by going one after another into the same confrontation, hyperconflict could then be unleashed. It might be triggered in Taiwan, Mexico, or the Middle East. All three are points of confluence of the major conflicts over water, oil, religions, demography, the North-South gap and frontier disputes. It could also be
triggered by a lightning attack on the West by an Iran in alliance with Pakistan, which will both have become Islamic nuclear powers.

No institution would then be capable of negotiating compromises or jamming the machinery. The world would become an immense battlefield where nations, mercenary peoples, terrorists, pirates, democracies, dictatorships, tribes, nomadic mafias, and the religious would crash into one another, some fighting for money, others for the faith, land, or freedom.

Every weapon we have earlier discussed could then be used. Humanity, which since the sixties has possessed the ability to commit collective suicide, might well use them, in which case there will be no one left to write history, which is never anything but the thinking of the strongest. This is of course a worst-case scenario, but nothing is impossible here: man’s tragedy is that when he can do something, in the end he will always do it.

And yet, well before humanity has thus put an end to its history — at least I would like to believe this — the failure of super-empire and the threat of hyperconflict will compel the democracies to find sufficient motivation to vanquish the pirates, the nonstate entities, and the rogue states, and suppress their own death wish.

The more optimistic — and more likely — view is that Alliance’s armies will sweep the dictators aside; the drug cartels will be tamed, big corporations will no longer gamble their future on the growth of military orders; all religions will calm down and become forces for peace, reason, and tolerance. Already at work, new forces will seize power in order to create a just, pacific, united, and brotherly world.

And then, as happened after the fall of the Roman Empire, there will be a rebirth — on the ruins of a promising past spoiled by an excessively long series of mistakes — a mighty longing to live, joyful interbreedings, jubilant transgressions. From them new civilizations will surge forth, made of the residue of nations bled dry and of super-empire in escheat, nourished on new values.

A planetary democracy will be enthroned, limiting the market’s powers. It will try to win other, much more urgent, wars: against the madness of men, against climatic upheaval, against mortal disease, alienation, and poverty.

Now the third wave of the future will roll in, that of
hyperdemocracy.
Here is a brief sketch of its history.

A
t the end of his last book,
Critique of the Gotha Program
(a commentary on the draft program of the United Workers’ Party of Germany), Karl Marx wrote this mysterious phrase in Latin:
“Dixi et salvavi animam meam”
(I say that only to save my soul). As though he wanted his readers to understand that in his view the program he had just proposed to the German socialists had not the slightest chance of being implemented, as though he thought that no one, ever, would have the courage or the means of mastering capitalism and its consequences, at once inspiring and suicidal.

Today, at a time when market democracies have traveled a large part of the road predicted by the author of
Das Kapital
, and when socialism has gone astray in many of the dead ends foreseen and denounced by Marx, the long-term survival of a free, happy, diverse, equitable humankind, concerned for dignity and respect, seems impossible. It even seems vain to think about it.

And yet when Thomas More dreamed in 1516 of having the leaders of Utopia, his imaginary city, elected to office, he had no idea that four centuries later the ministers of his own country would be chosen by the
whole people. And when in July 1914 Jean Jaurès dreamed of a free, democratic, peaceful, and united Europe, there was nothing to suggest that such would be the Old Continent’s situation less than eighty years later.

Today we must perform the same act of faith in the future. Try once again to show that humanity is not doomed to destroy itself — neither through the market, nor science, nor by war, and above all not by stupidity or malevolence.

Everything seems to promise a progressive transformation of man into object, an amplification of injustices, insecurity, violence. Everything even indicates that we are entering a dark eve-of-war phase. The most sophisticated nations react to barbarism with barbarism, to fear with selfishness, to terror with reprisals. It even seems reasonable to resign ourselves to admitting that man is a mere monster, and that our world will never become a planetary democracy, tolerant, peaceable, diverse but united. Yet such a dynamic is already on the march: goodness, after the market and war — Jupiter after Quirinus and Mars.

To save humankind from its demons, this third wave of the future must obviously break before one or other of the two preceding waves makes an end, each in its own way, of the human species.

To conceive how such a future could arrive in time, we must — like the visionaries of the past — look very far ahead, far beyond the present supremacy of the American empire, the threatening emergence of the polycentric order, beyond super-empire and the countless conflicts that will follow. Then we will understand how what I call hyperdemocracy fits naturally into this
history of the future. We will see that many forces are working underground to lay its foundations, and that it depends only on us for it to become — in a few decades — the world’s reality.

As with the dawn of every major revolution, we must first determine how urgently matters stand and who the players are. We must also define the revolution’s values and picture what its institutions may be, in the modesty of daily life and the immoderate passion of the ideal.

Countless positive forces are today working toward the achievement of a world everyone can live in — the dizzying discoveries of the sciences and our amazing technical advances will foster a growing awareness in a growing number of people that the world is a village, that abundance is conceivable, that it is possible for everyone to live longer and much better.

We could rationally deduce from all this that the climate can be stabilized, that water and energy can be found in abundance, that obesity and stark poverty can disappear, that nonviolence is attainable, that prosperity for everyone is a realistic goal, that democracy can become universal, that businesses can serve the common good, that we can even envisage protecting all the differences and creating other ones.

Yet awareness of these possibilities would not be enough to forestall the advent of super-empire nor avoid hyperconflict. Man has never built anything on a foundation of good tidings.

On the other hand, a few of the catastrophes already foreseen will demonstrate crudely to the most skeptical that our present way of life cannot last. Climatic upheavals, increasing obesity and the use of drugs, the stranglehold of violence on daily life, more and more terrifying acts by terrorists, the impossible gated seclusion of the wealthy, the mediocrity of our entertainments, the dictatorship of insurance companies, the invasion of time by market goods, the scarcity of water and oil, the rise of urban delinquency, the increasing frequency of financial crises, waves of immigrants washed ashore on our beaches (first with outstretched hands, then with raised fists), increasingly murderous and selective technologies, the moral bankruptcy of the wealthiest will one day come along to wake the deepest sleepers. Once more, disasters will be the most eloquent advocates for change.

As at the end of any great war, people will then speak once again of drawing lessons from the past, of forgiving without forgetting, of building a different world, of doing away with violence forever. People of every social condition, of all cultures and religious affiliations, will ponder the possibilities for humanity’s long-term survival. They will realize that neither super-empire nor hyperconflict can create a world built to last. Political plans will spring forth from everywhere for settling border disputes, reconciling manifold national claims within the same territory, and teaching people how to live serenely with themselves and others.

These utopian plans will perhaps be briefly taken over by dictators dreaming of founding a peaceful and planetary empire. A new totalitarian ideology, all-en-
compassing, reassuring, messianic, religious or secular, will doubtless have its prophet, its book, its priests, its police, its butchers. Then a new, harmonious organization of the world will see the light of day. At first, it will merely be a planetary cohabitation of market and democracy. A little later, both will be overtaken by what I shall call hyperdemocracy
.

To help understand this prognosis, I must here introduce some new concepts.

Vanguard players (I shall call them
transhumans
) will run (they are already running)
relational enterprises
in which profit will be no more than a hindrance, not a final goal. Each of these transhumans will be altruistic, a citizen of the planet, at once nomadic and sedentary, his neighbor’s equal in rights and obligations, hospitable and respectful of the world. Together, transhumans will give birth to planetary institutions and change the course of industrial enterprises. For the benefit of each individual, they will develop
essential goods
(the most important being a
good time
), and for the general benefit a
common good
(whose chief dimension will be a
collective intelligence
).

Then, even beyond a new global balance between market and democracy, between public services and corporations, transhumans will give birth to a new order of abundance, from which the market will be gradually excluded in favor of the relational economy.

All this may seem utterly improbable. None of the agents of these changes seems even to exist. Here again, this is not for the first time. When Marx spoke in 1848 of the imminent victory of the bourgeoisie and the coming power of the working class, Europe possessed
practically no bourgeoisie and no working class. Even before they emerged, he had identified history’s future players. This is again our task today.

When a convoy is on the move, its vanguard includes many more people than the generals lolling in the midst of their troops. History bifurcates only when adventurous beings, concerned with their freedom and the defense of their values, advance the cause of men (generally to their own great regret). In the mercantile order, this vanguard has until now been composed, core by core (as we have seen), of what I have called the “innovative class” — entrepreneurs, inventors, artists, financiers, political leaders.

In the future, a part of this class — individuals particularly sensitive to this question of the future — will realize that their happiness depends on that of others, that the human species can only survive united and pacific. They will cease to belong to the mercantile innovative class, and refuse to put themselves at the service of pirates. They will become what I call transhumans
.

Altruistic, conscious of the history of the future, concerned by the fate of their contemporaries and their descendants, anxious to help, to understand, to leave behind them a better world, transhumans will reject the selfishness of the hypernomads and the destructive fury of the pirates. They will not believe that they own the world, merely recognizing that they only hold it in trust.
They will be ready to put into practice the virtues of the sedentary (vigilance, hospitality, a sense of the long term) and those of the nomad (obstinacy, memory, intuition). They will feel at once citizens of the world and members of several communities. Their nationalities will be those of the languages they speak, and no longer simply of the countries where they will live. For them, rebellion against the unavoidable will be the rule, the insolence of optimism will be their moral standard, and brotherhood will suffice for ambition. They will find their happiness in the pleasure of giving pleasure, particularly to children they know they are responsible for. They will learn again that transmission is peculiar to man.

Women will become transhumans more easily than men: finding pleasure in giving pleasure is peculiar to motherhood. The progressive rise of women in every dimension of the economy and of society — particularly through microfinance — will add enormously to the number of transhumans. Among today’s transhumans, we might cite both Melinda Gates and Mother Teresa. We will also find among them billionaires who have entrusted the bulk of their fortunes to a foundation, as well as social innovators, teachers, creators, religious and secular women, and quite simply people of good will. People for whom the Other is a value in himself.

While in the world of scarcity, in other words in the market, the Other is a rival (the enemy come to quarrel over scarce goods, the one against whom freedom is built and with whom no knowledge must be shared), for transhumans the Other will be first and foremost the witness of his own existence, the way of verifying that he is not alone. The Other will allow him to talk, transmit, prove
generous, loving, outstripping himself, creating more than will satisfy his own needs and more than he believes himself capable of creating. The Other will allow him to understand that love of the Other, and therefore first of himself, is the condition of humanity’s survival.

Cheek by jowl with the market economy, in which everyone measures himself against the Other, transhumans will usher in an economy of altruism, of free availability, of mutual giving, of public service, of the general interest. This economy, which I call “relational,” will not obey the laws of scarcity: transmitting knowledge does not deprive its transmitter. This economy will make it possible to produce and exchange truly free services — recreation, health, education, human relations, and so forth — that each one will deem it good to offer the Other and to produce with no further remuneration than respect, gratitude, jubilation. These services are not scarce, for the more one gives, the more one receives. The more one gives, the more one has the desire and the means to give. Working, even in the relational economy, will become a boundless pleasure.

We may also hope for the reinforcement of states, the socialization of public spending, the enhanced capacities of armies to fight against piracy, better systems for rights to property. And, for the poorest, products manufactured by the market, from clothing to housing, from food to the telephone, from credit to insurance, will be widely available.

Transhumans will constitute a new innovative class, bearers of social and artistic innovations rather than solely mercantile offerings.

Transhumans will perfect the instruments of their
project. Just as the market’s driving spirits create industrial firms that allocate scarce resources, transhumans will favor relational enterprises that allocate essentially unlimited resources. Their final objective will be to improve the world’s lot, treating problems the market cannot solve, counterbalancing the globalization of the market with the globalization of democracy. In such firms, profit will be only a constraint necessary for survival, not a final goal.

Political parties and unions are the first relational businesses. The Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, CARE, Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), and above all many other nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) created in Asia, Latin America, or Africa, such as Grameen, have taken up the challenge. To mention just one of the latter (from among the thousands that exist), I would cite the NGO that made it possible for a shantytown in Lima — Villa El Salvador — to enroll 90 percent of its children and grownups in school. Situated on the margins of capitalism, these relational enterprises are already playing the part the merchants of Bruges and Venice played on the margins of feudalism. Soon we shall find all kinds of institutions fulfilling civic, medical, ecological, or social missions (NGOs, intermediaries in diplomatic negotiations, amateur sports clubs, free-of-charge or cooperative meeting places or sites). Most will be created in the South by people who will act without expecting anything more from anyone. One of the most important categories in relational enterprises will be made up of microfinance institutions, increasingly major players in the market, democracy, and human relations.

The production of relational enterprises — evaluated in mercantile terms — already represents 10 percent of world GDP, and that share is increasing very rapidly. They have already created concepts seen as harbingers of the future’s values — the right to intervene, the right to a childhood, the right to dignity. They are also at the origins of the most recent international institutions: the AIDS Fund, the International Criminal Court, the World Environment Program. Thanks to these very special institutions, we are starting to speak of an
international community
(although not yet of a
world government
) and of the protection of nature (although not yet of a
common good
). Here already are the first babblings of a world democracy, which I call hyper-democracy
.
New relational firms will appear, above all in urban management, education, health, the fight against poverty, environmental management, the protection of women, equitable trade, balanced nutrition, the valorization of what is free, social reinsertion, the war on drugs, and monitoring of the monitors. They will take the place of private enterprises and public services: they will take charge of disease prevention, the social reinsertion of the marginalized, arranging access for the weakest to essential goods (particularly education), and conflict resolution. New professions will emerge from within these firms. A new attitude to work will develop, consisting of finding pleasure in giving — making people smile, transmitting, relieving, and consoling.