Since the human species separated from its ape ancestors it has organized itself into ever larger groups. The extended family became the clan, then the tribe, then the nation and now the nation state. The challenge we now face is to make the transition from the nation state to a global community of some kind. The ultimate aim of this part of the website is to answer the questions “What kind of global community?” and “How can it be created?”.
The human family is united superficially in the United Nations, which is made up of 192 nation states. The UN does valuable work, but the extent to which there can be genuine community in this global macrostructure is limited by the fact that a nation is really a tribe writ large and tribes are, by definition, exclusive, defensive and usually aggressive. A tribe is obviously territorial in nature, but it separates itself from the others by having its own “culture”, a word which embraces religion, language, mythology, dress, architecture, sport, literature and many other factors great and small.
The nation state is essentially a group of tribes living in the same geographical area and seeking an artificial unity (often for defence) by handing over most of their independence to an agreed executive body which is called the state. In time what began as an artificial unity comes to feel natural, just as a sense of being British developed after the Act of Union in 1707, when England, Wales and Scotland became united in a new state, Great Britain.
Globalisation is the new ideal and the dynamic of this website. There is much glib talk about the communication revolution and a global village, but the fact is that despite all this the world is divided still into groups which are ruled by tribal consciousness. Only now the tribes are on a continental rather than national scale. The world’s nations take their different identities from their history, and from their different mythologies. What is needed now is a common identity which can only be created through education in all its forms and which is determined not by individual histories but by a common vision of the future.
A global family with shared values and a shared understanding of reality may take centuries to appear, but until it has come about Homo sapiens will be not so much a single species as a group of competing subspecies, each with a radically different sense of identity and in extreme instances vastly different ideas on what it means to be human.
The quest for a common identity as members of a global family is what this website is ultimately about, and this part of it is about the political and economic aspects of this new identity.
Vaclav Havel spoke for a growing number of thinking people when he said, in an address to a joint session of the American Congress in 1990:
Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness, nothing will change for the better in the sphere of our being as humans, and the catastrophe towards which this world is headed – the ecological, social demographic or general breakdown of civilisation – will be unavoidable.
Many will say that such a revolution is impossible, because “human nature never changes”, but evolutionary science proves the contrary, for we have traveled from ape to caveman to the great civilizations of India and China, Greece and Rome, mediaeval Europe, the Renaissance and the post-Enlightenment “West”. Looking back on our history, there is every reason to think that we are capable of still greater changes. They will certainly take centuries, and we must have patience as well as vision, but the great cause for optimism is that for the first time in our history we are able to acquire a global consciousness.
The vector of hominisation is paralleled exactly in the evolution of the human brain, which can be seen, very simply as a journey from animal to caveman to fully human. But we are not yet fully human. We know enough about the working of the brain, especially the hippocampus, to be confident that the "arrow" of human evolution is still in flight. It can go further, much further, if we will it.
The following papers deal with social and economic change from various aspects. Click on each title to open the document (PDF format).
Facing the Future
A summary account of the forces which are now converging to create global crisis around 2050 and which will, so far as we can see, usher in a new Dark Age. These include climate change, resource depletion, the population explosion and the looming energy crisis.
A Global Family: Concept and Reality
We take for granted that the world is permanently divided into nation states. This structure is remarkably modern but issues essentially from tribal and territorial consciousness. We live now in a world which is rapidly globalizing and need to think radically about the kind of structures which are now needed to overcome tribalism.
The End of Economics
An article from Jehovah and Hyperspace dealing with the nature of money, its historical development and future, with emphasis on alternative forms.
Metaeconomics: A Not for Profit World
A continuation of the theme of The End of Economics, unpublished and deliberately left unfinished, as new economic entities, such as hedge funds, collateralized debt obligations and sovereign wealth funds, take standard economic theory towards destruction.
On Becoming Human and the Evolution of Social Structures
A look at the historical forces which have helped create different forms of the human group, and how such groups are instrumental in creating human nature. First published in Jehovah and Hyperspace.