WEDNESDAYS WITH DR. JOE
A TREMBLING WORLD – Part 4
It is a very sobering picture, isn’t it (the last three blogs)? It is indeed. Yet, even so, I promised last week that we’d now turn to the up-side, affirmation, hope, solutions.
It is time.
A DIFFERENT WORLD
You will remember that, several times in recent months I have referred to my earlier prediction that, historically speaking, the other side of the zeros (100-year-turn, 500-year-turn, 1000-year-turn) invariably turns out to be radically different from all that came before—and that this one, being all three (100, 500, and 1000) would inevitably prove to be the most seismic since the years 1500 and 1000. We are only now beginning to realize that the ebbtide of the old order is taking place before our very eyes. What we don’t know yet is what kind of incoming tide will replace the receding one. We can only guess.
What we can predict with a high degree of accuracy is that the pace of life and change will continue to increase in speed as the world continues to constrict into nanotechnology. So when did all this begin to accelerate? Only three-hundred years ago: when the zeros of 1800 replaced the zeros of the 1700’s. Up until that crucial watershed (turning point), for millennia, the pace of life had remained relatively unchanged: the fastest land-speed being a galloping horse and the fastest sea-speed being a sailing-ship. Because neither of these optimum speeds could be long sustained (obstacles on land and becalming on water), there was no need for clocks; sundials worked well enough, until the industrial revolution of the 1800’s when steam-power replaced sail-power. Only when ever faster locomotives made it imperative that we divide the nation into time zones, did accurate time become relevant, for before the invention of mechanical engines, no one could possibly know for sure when either a land-vehicle or a sea-vessel would arrive at a given destination.
Every year since 1800, the pace of life has continued to accelerate. Sometimes at such a rate that the juxtaposition of two opposites proved to be ridiculous (such as during World War I, fought with both cavalry horses and armored tanks; fought with both drifting balloons and power-driven airplanes).
Nostalgically, my thoughts drift back in time a half-century to a musical play my high school students put on during the mid 1960s. Our theme song was “Far Away Places,” and the play began and ended with a dreaming teenager in her home bedroom, and the lyrics had to do with “those far away places with strange-sounding names.” The music that followed came from all over the world. Places that seemed strangely exotic to us back before jet travel replaced prop-engine travel. The world seemed so vast to us back then!
I remember when I first heard the phrase: “The world is a vast web, and you can’t touch any part of it without it affecting the lives of everyone else.” That seemed so far-fetched back then, really too much of a stretch to take seriously. So what if rainforests in far away Brazil or Papua New Guinea were being cut down at an ever-increasing rate? It surely couldn’t affect me! Far-fetched then because I’d never been to either place, and with the pace of travel back then, it seemed unlikely I ever would. But that’s not true today when I can doze off in one continent and wake up next morning in another, thousands of miles away. When astronauts can return to earth after having actually walked on the moon!
But the flip-side of speed is nanotechnology: being able to reduce all life and technology to such infinitesimal proportions that the naked eye cannot see it at all. And thanks to this new technology, sports victories can now be accurately calibrated down to a hundredth of a second—even a thousandth!
Not surprisingly, national boundaries are increasingly viewed as both indefensible and outdated, and dictatorships are toppling like rows of dominos thanks to the worldwide web of the Internet. Not even the strongest walls in the world can keep the Pentagon’s innermost secrets from being hacked. Corporations can set up shop in the loosy-goosiest countries (regulation-wise) on the planet; and jobs can be out-sourced to wherever in the world the hourly pay is the cheapest. No longer does someone in the most powerful country in the world have the edge over someone in the poorest country, given that access to a computer so levels the playing field that Thomas Friedman can justifiably announce that “The World is Flat.”
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So now comes this global slowdown that dramatically changes every aspect of life for every person on this planet—not just ours here in the U.S. Everything was working so well—as late as only three years ago. Then Bam! Bam! Bam! —one after another, the bludgeon blows continue, with no apparent end in sight. No one appears to have the answers. In the words of that timeless baseball skit: “Nobody’s on first.” Nobody. Not here in the U.S. Not anywhere else in the world either. All even the most powerful leaders in the world know is this: the old order, the old template that enabled all the markets in the world to peacefully coexist and churn out prosperity for the majority of the world’s industrial powers, is broken, and there isn’t a mechanic in the world who knows how to fix it.
That’s just it: it is unfixable. The answer nobody wants to hear is this: A new template, evolved from scratch, must be created from our new realities. It is anything but a quick fix, and it is almost certain to take a long time to develop. And we have to face the likelihood that when we do finally get it up and running again, so that the world’s markets once again purr their satisfaction, even that template will be foredoomed to a short shelf life, because change in future years will be near continuous.
The good news is that these are exciting times in which to live. We have been long overdue for a course-correction; unfortunately, we waited so long that this one is likely to be the mother of all lulus.
Next Wednesday, we’ll discuss silver-linings.
Wednesdays with Dr. Joe 