I have, as I have entered my 'golden years', tended to become more and more optimistic about the possibilities for the future of the human race. I don't think people are necessarily good or even wise, but we are clever. Looking at the long tendency of human history, I acknowledge that our existence has hardly occupied a micro-moment of universal history, but we have crafted many clever inventions to aid our ability to feed and clothe and shelter ourselves. I am not someone who expects everything to turn out all right. When people say to me things like, 'See you next Thursday', I most often respond 'Unless I or you die or the volcano goes off'. Shit happens. The possibility of a better future is not a guarantee that there will even be a future.
And yet, we have experienced a period of unparalleled advances in human technologies to make that future better. Again and again, I have tried to look at those advances through the lenses of the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Alvin Toffler, and Marshall McLuhan. That is, I see the changes as being part of the evolution of the earth, as being highly stressful to us earthlings, and as changing us in ways that are mostly unavoidable but which we seldom really recognize or understand. So, smaller transistors allow our minds to become interconnected with each other and with machines in ways which worry us but which we use more and more because somehow we just can't unplug.
Once again, unicorns--new companies valued at more than a billion dollars-- have roamed our world. As consciousness has spread, even tribal folk who need no clothes and little in the way of shelter find themselves as part of the larger world and sell their products anywhere there's electricity.
The potentials I, a perhaps foolishly optimistic old man, have seen have not been without opposition. Vide Trumpist populism or radical Islamism. But I have expected, barring the volcano's going off, that the folks of the world would adjust to their new environment after a bumpy few years, and emerge in a new and also disruptive and environment equally hard to understand but with fewer people starving.
But, the volcano seems to have gone off. The black swan has come and it has gone viral in a few months.
I must confess that I am writing this essay not because I have an clever plan that cannot fail to help us cope with the falling skies. Rather, I am writing it to help me think through it for myself, to try to think of the right questions to ask.
It helps to dismiss the wrong questions, the first of which is 'why?', whether compounded as 'why now?' or 'why here?' or 'why me?'. The answer to that question is, in crude terms, 'shit happens', and in more elegant terms, 'the laws of thermodynamics'. Einstein may not have wanted God to play dice with the universe, but so far as we can tell, the universe is basically a dice game.
Because I am an optimistic old man, I tend to ask, 'what happens after?' I mean, it's pretty obvious that a lot of people will die, and that we are unprepared, and that our political 'leaders' aren't half so smart as they told us they were, and that it's gonna be harder for poor countries than for rich countries But if we indeed do survive until next Thursday, after the ash has settled, what will it look like?
I had been expecting a world in which most nations would become less and less important. China with its Roads and Belts would probably remain a major player, but Europe is becoming more and more a theme park and the United States seems at least under its current administration or the opposition party to be drawing more and more into isolationism. The 'Global South' is a whole other big dice game, but even Brazil now makes airplanes.
I had been expecting a world in which trans-national corporations would supplant most of the national services. Remember Eisenhower's Interstate Highway System. Now we are getting Musk's Hyperloop. How long can it before Google's Nest security system would have facial recognition and a stun ray so we won't have to call the police, whom few of us like much anyway?
I had been expecting a world in which we might recognize that your eating a slice of pie does not need to mean that I must skip desert.
But it does seem that your having a face mask does mean that I must face Voldemort bare-faced. In southern Italy the trans-national corporations are already supplanting the government: they are organized crime syndicates.
Predicting the future is in itself a sort of hopeful activity. As the Second World War was winding down with a lot more needless destruction than necessary, because we are fools, England started planning for the Brave New World ahead, and set up the Brabizon Committee to assure that Britain would have global leadership in post-world air travel. They built a number of airplanes to try to sell to the world to assure that role, and to provide air service to the British Empire in British aircraft. One of them was the largest aircraft yet built, the Bristol Brabizon, named for Lord John Theodore Cuthbert Moore-Brabizon. It was longer than Lord Brabizon's name. It was HUGE.
No one bought it. Imperial Airways had become part of BOAC before the war, and soon BOAC would be known as Boeing Only Airways Corporation. When was the last time you flew in a British airplane? When was the last time you toured the empire? Now British Airways, having been winnowed out of BOAC and British European Airways, Cambrian Airways, and Northeast Airlines in 1974, seems likely to become more chaff of the virus, another bit of corn eaten by the black swan.
So. It's a rather cool early spring afternoon, one on which I might choose to go to the beach and read another chapter of After Shock and look forward to the next fifty years. Instead I am sitting in a tin can, far socially distanced from the world, listening to minimalist music from catastrophic movies, wondering if there will be a next Thursday. But although it may just be part of my old foolishness, I ponder the wonder that I have actually lived to experience a big black swan, and I look outside my window from time to time so as not to miss any unicorn that wanders out of the forest.
If you've read this far, and have any expectations past next Thursday, after the ash has settled, I would be delighted if you shared them in the comments.
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