Montgomery: The Next Thousand Years – World Policy Journal

WORLD POLICY JOURNAL

ARTICLE: Volume XV, No 2, SUMMER 1998

The Next Thousand Years
John D. Montgomery

This generation may be a little more sophisticated about the passing of a hundred years than its forebears were, just as reactions to the appearance of the once frightening comets have become almost routine in our jaded age. Apart from its commercial appeal and anticipation of computer glitches, there is not as much popular excitement over the dawn of a new century as there was 100 years ago. Our insouciance may be suspended, however, if we remind ourselves that we are approaching the end not only of a century but also of a millennium. To look that far ahead calls for something beyond reminiscences of the past and extrapolations of the present.

Outside the realm of science fiction, thinking in thousand-year units is rarely useful. If such a perspective had been suggested a thousand years ago, the analyst would be projecting from a Europe that was just a few generations beyond Charlemagne, a Chinese Middle Kingdom that was a cultural mountain among world molehill civilizations, and a Japan that was still in the shadow of Fujiwara Tadahara, awaiting the coming of the Minamoto. No intellectual artifice could have reached from the issues of the tenth century to those of the twentieth. Most of the novelties of the second Christian millennium were quantum jumps, not incremental changes from the past.

Consider, for example, these five innovations of the past thousand years: the state, the corporation, extensive crime organizations, religious pluralism, and the morally autonomous individual. In turn, each sprang forth as an innovation representing new insights. Each was a noteworthy departure from its predecessor. Not only were there no states a thousand years ago, but even the most ambitious political entities were modest in size (a vigorous youth could ride his horse across the largest unit of political organization in a few days, with occasional stops to negotiate with bandits).

There were no corporations then, either, nor were they needed: the largest and most prosperous enterprises were family-managed and staffed by obedient but unimaginative workers who confined their productive activities to tasks the owners could assign personally or at least understand fully. There were bandits, but no families of them working across boundaries, and no loyalties beyond those of feudalism, whose productive units were derived from small, scattered plots of ground encumbered in a tangle of rights held together by personal and kinship ties. And worship was tightly controlled; divine claims were absolute, their authority otherworldly (though they did not despise luxury or comfort when it was displayed for the glory of God). And lastly, common individuals had no claim to human rights; they recognized only duties, and law protected only the powerful (who were, by definition, the virtuous).

These five institutions were novelties created over the period of a thousand years, none of which, however, could predict the needs of our own technology-driven, information-burdened age. Commonplace though they are today, they were millennial changes. Even the most practical-minded Nostradamus could not have summoned up the nation-state, demanded an open stock exchange, shivered before a drug-infested Mafia, transcended the holistic mysticism of the times, and projected the absolute rights of individuals or conceived the pragmatic quality of life a thousand years forward. He could hardly have imagined the possibility of environmental entropy or identified more than a tenuous link between the standards of the monastery and current morals and behavior.

The Problems That Lie Ahead
History nevertheless asserts a continuity beneath the jagged thrust of time. It is in the problems and the manner of their confrontation that give us the possibility of prediction. The millennium that was to come in A.D. 1000 uncovered challenges that underlay the appearance of a static order, all of which threatened humanity’s struggle toward a better life that awaited the next ten centuries. The way in which our ancestors dealt with those problems suggests how their times are linked to ours. Each of the new institutions that have emerged out of the past was designed to resolve emergent problems; and each is bringing with it new problems that in their turn will threaten the prospects of a moral existence for our descendants.

The emergence of those problems is a better prognosticator of the next millennium than would be an extrapolation of the institutions that dealt with them. For us to look into a thousand-year future, rather than examining the natural history of present institutions, it will serve us better to think creatively about the problems that humanity has to solve if it is to prosper for another ten centuries.

Many of the problems that lie ahead are embedded in solutions achieved earlier, since they are the major innovations of the millennium. Identifying the earlier solutions will at least hint at possible new ones. Since at least some new problems could endanger the future of the human race, it is no waste of time to consider them. If they are not resolved in the next ten centuries, the kind of disaster that might strike could not have been forecast in the year 1000.

Science and technology might save us, just as innovation and new applications of knowledge have salvaged and enriched life over the history of humankind. These engines of change have always been with us, bringing benefits and costs that could rarely have been predicted or extrapolated from the past. The interrupted incrementalism of science-the old mysteries it has solved and the new ones it has introduced-has been the one persistent but unstable element in the human climb out of the caves of ignorance and barbarism. It is also one unpredictable element of the coming millennium that we can count on.

Each of the five innovations of the past millennium has bequeathed to the future tasks that are far graver than those posed by their antecedents in the old order.

The Moral Incapacity of the Nation-State
First: the nation-states that replaced the warring duchies and baronies did learn to control dynastic struggles (though they have not completely done so), but in the process they have heightened the demand for human sacrifice in the name of “security.” States offer protection to larger numbers of citizens than kingdoms, baronies, and feudal protectorates could, but the number of lives lost in the process has risen faster than the degree of protection afforded. Although states have learned to restrain major external wars, they seem helpless before internal ethnic violence, which in some ways resembles the old disorders but will not yield to the old solutions.

The new struggles produce internal wars, not over dynasties or boundaries or even markets and resources, but out of the political ambitions of upstarts and rogue communities that are hungry for power. War is not disappearing so much as it is turning inward. Just as international peace seemed almost to arrive, it was shoved aside. Political manipulators, financed by economic fellow-travelers, offer recurrent challenges to the public order. Violence still attracts religious and racial fanatics who reject views larger than their own ambitions, and in so doing lay claim to the sanction of moral absolutes. Even those states that possess the physical capacity to restrain such misadventures still hesitate to challenge the ethical claims that these groups present. For their part, extremists who attack the public order sustain themselves by relying on the myth that to sacrifice human life in their just cause is a moral act. As a result, states that are strong enough to refrain from war now shrink before a more insidious threat to peace, their own moral incapacity to deal with internal claims.

Meanwhile, for all their strength, states jealously guard their autonomy, refusing to collaborate effectively on global issues like environmental exhaustion and international crime. New kinds of policies and institutions will be necessary to deal with these challenges. Facilitating group reconciliation is more than a national problem, and though there are viable theories of internationalism, states lack the political will to carry them out.

Restraining the Global Corporation
Second: corporations, which were created originally to promote economic development, have been allowed to claim the privileges of “citizenship” in the past century or so. This fiction has enabled them to outmaneuver the efforts of real citizens to control them. It is an odd feature of contemporary corporate law that permits commercial organizations to gain access to civic rights such as free speech and the unrestrained freedom to acquire property; in that respect they have far outpaced private individuals for which these rights were conceived. The problems these fictions create may not be life-threatening, but they can asphyxiate life as they proliferate and as their role expands beyond the states’ regulatory jurisdiction. For the modern corporations, power is an end as legitimate as economic production. In escaping the inconvenience of regulation and competition, they have taken on unrestrained supranational forms that challenge the state, and they are learning to control the competitive market that might otherwise restrain them. They transcend geography and political sovereignty because they can shift the locus of decisions and production from place to place to suit their convenience. They enjoy power with few counter-balancing controls.

Inventing solutions to the problems they pose will provide enough challenges to occupy humanity for the next thousand years. Solutions will not come through extrapolating current regulatory doctrine; it seems more likely that the legal basis of incorporation itself must be reconsidered. The cost of treating “corporations” as “citizens” is still more obvious than the benefit of treating them as instruments of individual will.

The Reach of Organized Crime
Third: in a thousand years, organized crime, in effect, became a degraded feudal society. Today’s corrupt bosses are understandably called crime “lords” out of an unconscious recognition of their feudal prototypes, who also lived by violence and depended on the loyalty of their henchmen, just as their predecessors had a thousand years ago. When feudal fiefdoms were absorbed by the states over the centuries, the crime lords contributed little to them other than spectacular myths of their special rights and martial virtues in their search for respectability. The search continues today as their counterparts convert their wealth into political and corporate power and international networks, all of which enhances their claim to legitimacy. Unlike their feudal predecessors, these crime lords are not inhibited by moral concerns or a mythology of the public good. Their ambitions are even more dangerous than those of feudal barons, since their turf is not geographically limited. Organized criminals, beyond the sheer economic losses they encompass, are much more serious threats to the social fabric than warring baronies. Their entrance into modern political life via commercial legitimation and electoral influence is creating institutional as well as moral problems that society has not yet fully recognized. They are an emerging problem because their presence in political affairs undermines the prospect for sustained democratic government.

Troublesome Theocracies
Fourth: new and troublesome forms of theocracy are emerging after centuries of “enlightenment.” They differ from the familiar spec-imens of the past because they direct their special claims to the control of communities, not to kingly crowns, and they claim uniqueness in the form of ethnic virtues rather than ancestral right. To be sure, several old-style theocracies survive, at least in theory: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and, according to some advocates, Israel. But these theocracies are declining in sacral legitimacy, in international recognition, and in secular authority. As theocracies they cannot survive very far into the next millennium. Current claimants to divine right, in the Middle East and Asia, on the other hand, would transcend geography and eschew the state. Their malevolence toward outsiders derives from God-given authority to lead their self-selected groups of believers, but these semireligious zealots identify their constituency not on the basis of nationalism, but on a fancied superiority of culture or race.

Sometimes these pretenders mask their claims as religious, even, in one or two rare cases, presenting themselves as new Messiahs or prophets. In the worse cases, they violently demand exemption from the law. Some of them base their claims on ethnic or even primordial “history”; they insist upon a communal or indigenous uniqueness that demands special privileges, including separation from their compatriots. If they shrink at secession from the body politic, they seek entitlement to restored “rights” on the basis of their status as injured peoples whose ancestors were wronged by history. The confused source of their moral authority has made it difficult for governments and laws to distinguish among such communitarian claims, since the laws and constitutions conceived in the past three centuries derived their sense of justice from individuals rather than groups.

Moral Individualism
Fifth: the most important innovation of the past thousand years has been the somewhat hesitant reaffirmation of the individual- rather than the church, the divine-right state, or the holy gospel- as the ultimate source of moral values in human society. Only two centuries ago Kant recognized this source when he equated it with the rest of creation, finding but two eternal verities: “the starry heavens above and the moral law within.” But this century’s experience has uncovered a complex reality: that moral individualism is not an unalloyed virtue, after all, when the values it pursues offend the moral aspirations of other members of society. One current response would designate communities as a corrective to extreme individualism, but when communities, too, fall prey to ambitious exclusivity, they become as dangerous as individual license. The corrective has to be internal to the individual.

The Common Good
These five problems-flawed nation-states, unrestrained corporatism, feudalistic crime, godless theocracies, and individual virtue as the basis of morality-do not converge into a coherent, predictable future; their solutions will not be a unified policy of corrective action. A society whose legitimacy derives from the morality of individuals rejects any community that weakens personal responsibility. No state can continue to claim absolute sovereignty over even domestic affairs; corporations cannot escape the short-range vision their structure requires of them. Even though feudal crime lords may find respectability through their wealth, their parasitic followers have no interest in it. And the next millennium is left with the unresolved paradox of the moral individual who accepts no ethical bounds.

The emergence of solutions to these problems will depend upon the creative capacity of individual men and women to work together for a common good, condemning both the excesses of individualism and communitarianism when they undermine the trust upon which the commons depends.

These are long-term challenges, but first we must deal with short-term problems as we develop our capacity to deal with them. Thinking in thousand-year terms does not absolve us from having to solve current crises. Most current reform proposals recognize the need for a fundamental shift in perspective, even as they address today’s pressing problems: Reducing threats to the environment will require changes in the next year’s behavior as well as the next decade’s. Reforming the United Nations beyond relatively simple administrative repairs means dealing with internal contradictions in the structure of the world order and with the sources of conflict within nations. And cre-ating new institutions for global problem-solving, for monitoring and protecting access to human rights, and for bringing about widespread reductions in military arms will challenge our best efforts for the next century. Today we discover a problem of unemployment; tomorrow we may find that technological progress can reduce half the population to productive obsolescence in current economic terms. Meanwhile, and for the rest of the millennium, we have the five great challenges to meet.

It is hard to avoid one conclusion: before we can address the organic problems of the next millennium, we shall have to reshape the moral perceptions and expectations of individuals. All of our religions have attempted to do that, and all have succeeded in some measure. But the keys they offer to individual morality do not fit all locks.

We are discovering that inclusive moral communities are not natural: they will have to come from new versions of social solidarity free from bondage to state, nationality, religion, or race before they can produce a confidence in the future of the human race that transcends the persistent differences in religious and political myths that have separated us for a millennium and longer.

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