The Future is Now!

Future Shock

I just experienced something strange… the future now. About ten years ago our (humanity’s) plausible future became increasingly obvious to me. I saw our advancing technology leading toward a time of plunging human population, to a point where, for example, governments would support citizens during their parenting years. Now, when I travel on freeways or in the city I eerily ’see’ the time when they will be half empty and overgrown. Needless to say, I never expected to see any solid evidence of this future in my lifetime. Heck, I’ll be ‘lucky’ to see the impact of global warming.

To my surprise, support for this forecasted future turned up last night in a documentary, Japan: Robot Nation, which deals with the plunging population of Japan. It was especially interesting for me as I spent five years there during the 1970’s. What is happening there, and the reasons why, appear to fit the overall model I predict for our species.

I see two primal forces at work in the evolution and interaction of a social species such as ourselves (although I see the same forces at play in every social species). One is an attractive, cooperative, pulling force that draws the group together. Counterbalancing that is a repelling, pushing, competitive force that divides groups so that they don’t end up as one monolithic group, and eat themselves out of house and home. The idiosyncrasies of culture embody these forces in ways uniquely different in each culture, yet similar in underlying effect.

Up until now evolutionary dynamics, such as the ‘bottle neck effect’ played an important role in pulling peoples together on one hand, and pushing them apart on the other. For example, the English settlers in America gradually pulled together as an ‘American’ people, and pushed away from their ancestral European roots. The increasing ease and speed of global communications makes this ‘bottle neck effect’ impossible to play itself out in any meaningful way. It is now impossible for groups of people to become isolated from each other, or from any so-called mainstream. Yet, these same pressures, the push and pull forces of nature, are certainly still within us. They are integral to biology. How will they play out without the age-old conditions that normally promote the ‘bottle neck effect’?

In the midst of such endlessly increasing technology, I suspect the only place these forces can play out is within each individual. Instead of island groups cut off from each other through time and space, humanity will become island individuals cut off from each other through a kind of cognitive time and space. Humanity’s greatest challenge has always been ‘finding the means for physical survival’. The greatest challenge facing humanity from now onward will be ‘finding the meaning for life’. Previously, finding meaning for life came naturally through the social interdependency necessary in our struggle with nature, or in wars between ourselves. As we either win, or call a truce in these, there is less survival glue to socially bind us. We will truly become free to do our own thing. Alas, with such freedom we will face our greatest challenge: the search for true meaning. Without core survival serving to focus emotion, we become increasingly neurotic as we make ‘mountains out of molehills’ in a quixotic quest for a meaningful life.

The documentary demonstrates to me how this is occurring in Japan. I see many facets to this, but I feel little need to expand on this further. If you know what I’m saying, you’ve heard enough to fill any gaps you see yourself. If you don’t, I doubt saying anymore would change that. Beside, rather than fill it to the brim by keeping it upright, better to have stopped in time.