I survived the airport drug swoop and made it home to catch the news on ABC TV. The minister of foreign affairs, Alexander Downer, was chiding the “bourgeois left-wing anti-American pseudo-intellectuals” who urged him to stand up for the rights of two Australians kidnapped in Afghanistan and transported to Camp X-ray, where they remained in cruel and unusual imprisonment under 24-hour floodlights, in contravention of the Geneva Convention, deprived of exercise and legal aid. If this is how we treat suspects held under the world’s spotlight, what happens in the dead of night to those kept far from scrutiny? A clue can be found in the July 2002 refusal of Australia and the United States to ratify the UN protocol against torture.

The leadership of these two great Western nations has never been in worse hands. Far from fighting a war to “save civilisation”, Australia and the United States are in retreat from civilisation.

Good leadership is not about constructing the new Bastille, it is about reaching for the moon. John F. Kennedy’s Apollo projects ignited both the age of information and the first glimmerings of Western eco-awareness. That startling sight of a blue green planet floating in a vast black void was an early warning of the vulnerability of Earth.
The biggest issues being played out in public life today result from the clashing of paradigms. That of an imperial past built on hierarchies, versus the paradigm of a globalising world built on networks. Our attitude to nature is shifting from one of Biblical dominion to urgent trusteeship, from exploitation to sustainability. On a psychological level we are striving to shed our self-centredness and to achieve a shared sense of purpose and equity, a journey from self-indulgence to self-discovery.
In Darwinian terms, competitors are the enemy, the world is a jungle, the game is to win. In an age of fairness, competitors are our benchmark, the game is perpetual innovation, and it’s not a jungle out there, it’s a community… and all of us are stakeholders.
Up to this point in history, the human drama could be broken down into three acts: conquest, colonisation and consumption, a journey from the cave to K-Mart. This kind of evolution is reaching a dead end. Are we in the throes of its climax, as we shop like there’s no tomorrow, drip fed from oil wells protected by gunships, a collective orgasm of sweet surfeit?
Such a limited, linear view of evolution, suggests the European futurist Ervin Laszlo, fosters such outmoded reactions as “my country right or wrong”, closed borders and the belief that poverty is best alleviated by the rich getting richer, so that wealth “trickles down”.
Is there another kind of evolution within our grasp, one that is vertical, psychological and sustainable? An evolution which takes us from separation to wholeness, shifting our reliance from outer sources of authority to a deeper way of knowing and enriching our capacity for creative self-organisation. An evolution focussed on connection, collaboration, community and consciousness. One day we might welcome the role of the spiritual (as opposed to the religious) in health, business and public life. Politicians could realise that the integrity of our borders is of far less import than the integrity of our actions and the quality of our desires.
The above-mentioned Ervin Laszlo, president of the Club of Budapest, an informal network of “spiritual and artistic” change agents, seeks a liberated future in the accelerating innovations of super-tech. “The new scientific world picture”, Laszlo argues, “could provide a socially sanctioned basis for the perennial vision of oneness between one human being and another, and between all human beings and nature”. Hold on – more than two billion people on Earth are malnourished, without sanitation, access to electricity or the means to make a phone call – this won’t happen overnight.
All the same, farmers in developing nations are wielding cell phones to connect directly to customers, bypassing middlemen. The internet is an unruly salon, providing the kind of intellectual sustenance once reserved for scholars, monks and revolutionaries. Could inner-space expand into cyber space, embellished by the accelerating innovations of science – info-tech, bio-tech, robo-tech, nano-tech – sparking the prospect of cheap, renewable sources of energy? Star Trek meets the kitchen sink.
Pinning the future on the wonders of hi-tech can be dangerous, as discovered by a previous generation of futurists. The First Futurist Manifesto, published in Le Figaro in 1909, revered the automobile:
We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed.
A racing car whose hood is adorned by great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath – a roaring car that seems to run on shrapnel – is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.
Five years later the shrapnel of World War I wiped out the rev heads who supported such fantasies, the adulators of “multicoloured billboards and enormous turbines that destroy the old sickly cooing sensitivity of Earth…” Almost 100 years later, the Pentagon heaps mountains of shrapnel, chemicals and warheads onto the sickly, cooing sensitivity of Earth, and many of its occupants.

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In December 2001, the newly installed defence minister of Afghanistan, Mohammed Fahim, announced it was time for the United States to stop dropping bombs on his country. A ministry colleague added that any al-Qaeda remaining in the land were few in number and of little threat, even “demanding” that the Pentagon pull back. The response of General Tommy Franks, emanating from the Texas ranch of President Bush, was worthy of Attila the Hun: “We will not be pressed into doing something that does not represent our national objectives, and we will take as long as it takes.” So much for the notion of an independent Kabul. (As we go to press the Pentagon is still dropping bombs).
Is it just me, or do you also get the feeling that many Americans are obsessed with instruments of destruction? When I happened across the live footage of events in Waco, Texas, in February 1993, as federal agents stormed the Branch Davidian compound, guns blazing, it became blindingly obvious that some very sick people were running the country. The pretext was that children were being abused, yet the FBI attack started a fire which killed 76 people, many children among them. This is a land where it is an honour to head the CIA, and where arms dealers hob nob with presidents. One day, those who invent sophisticated methods of mass slaughter will be considered criminals, not entrepreneurial role models. The American way of life is partly built on an industry of death. Global arms sales reap around $US25 billion, led by the United States, mostly flogged to developing nations, after first being tested on them. The mentality of Waco infests the globe. The violence of U.S. culture is so endemic it explodes from almost every movie Hollywood makes, perpetuating the cycle of bloodshed. The source of this violence is surely greed.
Immanuel Kant argued that time and space were not things found in the world, but were concocted by the brain to help humans organise impressions, “irremovable goggles” to give our thoughts structure. In our era, these goggles have been embellished with another lens, the lens of avarice, functioning as a distorting measure of worth – the worth of nations, objects and each other. The goal of life drummed into our heads without us even being aware of it, is to get as much as we can as fast as we can. Rarely discussed are the ethics of enough.
Wealth need not be expressed as money. The Tibetans, the Aztecs and the Balinese possessed rich and elaborate cultures without a monetary system – until the heroes of the West arrived. Socrates was penniless, Diogenes lived in a tub, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the most intelligent men in the world, inherited two fortunes and gave them both away. The artist, writer and anthropologist, Tobias Schneebaum, confessed to a documentary maker that he had lived “hand to mouth” for 50 years and loved it, “I wouldn’t have it any other way”. One of TV’s most radical confessions.
This book is not only about the war in the Afghanistan, it is about the war for the soul of the future. As we move through this millennium, we need to evolve a global ethic, and to ask – is it reasonable for the super rich to increase their wealth without limit, without putting a chunk back into the service of the globe, from which it was extracted? After the first $50 million, say, how about the rest going into a global kitty for the underfed? The controversial Indian philosopher, P.R. Sarkar, puts it well: “When the whole property of this universe has been inherited by all creatures, how can there be any justification for the system in which someone gets a flow of huge excess while others die for a handful of grain?”
It is argued that wealth trickles down, but piles of research shows that the opposite is true. Prosperity bubbles up. “Growth in national income does not necessarily lead to improvement in well being”, the United Nations found in a 1995 study and later concluded, “nearly 90 countries are worse off economically than they were 10 years ago”. Available indicators in the United States for the years from 1998 to 2000 point towards a further jump in incomes at the top. The wealthiest one percent in the last two decades have doubled their share of national household wealth, from 20 percent to close to 40 percent. In February, 2002, the Financial Review reported that the gap between rich and poor in Australia is widening, a disparity that offers bleak outcomes for health, crime and education. On the whole, Australians feel trapped in a paradox of needing less, and acquiring more; seeking simplicity and finding complexity, owning shares and out of a job. The myth of endless material progress has hit a brick wall.
I don’t claim to posses the answers. I feel a dread, however, that the megalomania of high rollers and Western power brokers is driving us to the brink. An example: In June 2002, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reported that Uncle Sam’s emissions of toxic gases – already exuding a quarter of the world’s carbon dioxide – will have risen 43 percent by 2020. In face of this, George Bush wants to build dykes and encourage business to adopt “voluntary measures”. Is he mad? How can the world’s most powerful politician owe his primary allegiance to a single nation, at the expense of the whole of Earth. The age of unconditional sovereignty is surely receding.
Meanwhile, the journey to a whole Earth healing inches ahead, regardless of Uncle Sam and his adolescent delusions – Kyoto, the World Court, arms reductions, the rights of children, and one day, maybe, a global tax, a wealth cap, a commission on currency transactions, the cancellation of Third World debt. A proposed Earth Charter calls for the creation of a People’s Assembly at the United Nations, one open to “systematic input from nonprofits and corporates”, and for the bounty of bio-tech to be pursued on behalf of the Third World, for micro-credit to be made available to the poor and that all new weapons of mass destruction be criminalised. In the wings, no doubt, is a Universal Declaration of a Global Ethic.
This is not the time to give up. It is not the moment to slink back into our shells, muttering that people are brutes, that we never change. Such worldly disdain faced those who set out to abolish slavery, bear baiting and public executions. History resonates with success. Ethics evolve. The philosopher, Friedreich Hegel, hardly a hippie, regarded the dialectical sweep of history as humanity’s path to self-discovery.
Some feel we are irredeemably shaped by hidden forces, victims of our genes, our upbringing, propaganda, tempting us to surrender our innermost being, to the “herd”, to “them”, to public opinion, like today’s so-called leaders, timidly tiptoeing backwards in the shadow of the polls. Instead of protecting our cherished borders, whether of the nation state or our self-belief, we should expand them, to live in full pursuit of the edge of our freedom, our responsibility and our capacity to love. The world is our workshop, and the future is up for grabs. But who will do the grabbing? Sooner or later we in the West will be confronted with a damning choice. Can we bear to have a bit less, so that others can have a bit more?
Or will it be business as usual, winner takes all? So far, the official future seems to be a projection of the hopes and aspirations of the West. Scholars associated with the space industry have already unveiled a proposal for the U.S. Lunar Economic Authority, to oversee the “development and exploitation of extra-terrestrial resources”, including mining, manufacturing, power generation, tourism, real estate and other “macroprojects on the moon”, which could – wait for it – “employ three to 12 percent of the U.S. population in new jobs”. Here we go again. Who wants the gold mines? Who wants Pizza Hut? Who’ll get the casino?
And you thought the moon belonged to everyone.


Ocean Press, September 2002.

www.richardneville.com