ethics news & views: The ethics of future shock: pressures for the exercise of moral imagination

March 01, 2003

The ethics of future shock: pressures for the exercise of moral imagination

How can we solve the problems of the future? This is the question at the center of Thomas Homer-Dixon’s book, The Ingenuity Gap. Homer-Dixon is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto and the Director of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program. Before we can answer the question he has put to us, we need to understand it. Our future will involve systems of increasing complexity that generate complex problems. In order to avoid serious disasters, we will often have to respond to these complex problems with incredible speed.

If you complained in your math class that timed tests were unrealistic because in the real world one does not have to solve equations under such tight and arbitrary time constraints, you may want to reconsider. Homer-Dixon commences his discussion with a sobering discussion of United Airlines Flight 232 on July 19, 1989. That flight crew lost control of the rudders and elevators; their ability to steer was severely impaired. They were forced into a situation that demanded ingenuity under tremendous pressure. And, with some luck and cockpit team work they did well under the circumstances. The plane crash landed and 111 people died, but 185 survived. Thirty-five subsequent attempts to repeat the landing on a simulator failed.

Relying on the work of Steven Predmore, the manager of human-factors analysis at Delta Airlines, Homer-Dixon points out that the “for the entire duration of the crisis, the crew members were close to a human being’s peak cognitive load.” And if, as foreshadowed in such events, our modern problems will present ever greater demands for ingenuity, how can we prepare ourselves?

Homer-Dixon asks: “Is our world becoming too complex to manage? Can all societies supply the ingenuity they need to meet the challenges they face? Sometimes it seems that we are collectively careening into the future, very much as United 232 careened to a crash landing. Must we, in response to the challenges before us, turn ourselves and our societies into analogues of the United 232 crew?” (20).

In truth, The Ingenuity Gap is much more persuasive in suggesting the staggering depth of modern problems than it is in offering suggestions for developing the ingenuity necessary for dealing with them. It surveys a range of conditions that will contribute to future problems from trends in air pollution to consumption choices, and, of course, population growth.

After pointing out that the earth’s population has grown from 1.65 to nearly 6 billion people in the twentieth century alone, he adds: “…most of us can’t really grasp the statistic’s true meaning. Perhaps it’s easier if we imagine this population evenly distributed across the planet’s 60 million square kilometers of habitable land…. Spread out this way, each of us would nevertheless remain within easy calling distance of our neighbors” (49).

More important than acknowledging this unprecedented population growth is understanding the effect of this growth on our environmental resources. Although our population has nearly quadrupled in the twentieth century, the human impact on the environment is much greater than this number suggests, owing to increased per capita consumption and waste. Homer-Dixon argues that the human impact on the earth’s environment is now nearly sixteen times greater than it was in the year 1900. We should not be surprised if the potential natural and social crises look daunting.

Homer-Dixon next looks at the capacities of our traditional problem-solving institutions, such as science, markets, and democracy for coping with the ever increasing complexity and urgency of modern problems. Corporate politics driven by demands for short-term profit increasingly direct both the aims and methods of modern science. Although some laissez-faire slogans remain, preventing market failure in the present requires carefully calibrated regulation rather than merely protecting the economic sphere from government intrusion. Finally, democracy itself is a slow process that by its nature cannot respond to emerging choices very swiftly. And yet these institutions have been among the best we’ve developed. How do we prepare them for the future that is coming?

Although Homer-Dixon doesn’t provide a blueprint for increasing our stores of ingenuity, he does make several interesting observations. In preparing for the future, we can seek to build our stores of ingenuity for solving complex problems at light speed, or, alternatively, we can also seek to slow down the rate of change and transformation. We have a tendency, he points out, to complacently assume that new solutions will be found when they are needed, but he warns that this overconfidence may not be justified.

“ It’s as if we’ve got our collective foot slammed down on the world’s accelerator pedal. We need to think creatively about how we might slow things down, how we might ease up a bit on that pedal. I’m convinced that if we don’t – if we allow the complexity and turbulence of the systems we’ve created to go on increasing, unchecked – these systems will sometimes fail catastrophically” (398).

So aside from dedicating many more resources to developing technological solutions to our problems, we should also be thinking about the consequences of our lifestyle choices. Somewhat surprisingly in this age of overly technical policy analysis, Homer-Dixon concludes that our ability to cope with the future may depend as much on developing our moral character and considered view of the good life as it does on our technological know-how. “[O]ne fundamental change that could slow things down gets far too little attention: change in our values and in our perception of ourselves” (398). Must our view of the good and successful life correspond with conspicuous consumption?

This book is refreshing in a number of ways. Homer-Dixon looks at results in systems theory, sociology, economics, and other empirically based social and natural sciences and tries to think through the meaning of these results for dominant western narratives of prosperity and progress. His writing integrates a large volume of empirical information with his own personal stories. It is neither artificially neutral in tone nor overly dramatic and dark.

The resulting discussion therefore seems to invite the reader in, asking the reader to reflect on his own experiences and contribute to the discussion from his own point of view. In this way it avoids becoming the type of dogmatic “expert” technical diatribe that discourages discussion and encourages excessive respect for technical authorities.

Yet, at the end of the survey of problems and institutions, we are a very long way from closing the ingenuity gap. This book offers a spirited call to begin a discussion that faces squarely the future problems of our present choices. It asks us to think seriously about the kinds of ingenuity that will be needed, and perhaps, most importantly, to consider the relationship between our present views of the good life the problems of tomorrow.

The Ingenuity Gap By Thomas Homer-Dixon. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2000. 496pp. $30.

[ Posted by Michael Sullivan at March 1, 2003 10:26 AM |