Is there a tribe, a nation, or a people whose identity does not rest in part upon the heroic, even mythic exploits of its greatest leaders and liberators? From Moses and Joshua, Pericles and Alexander, Horatio and Anthony, Genghis Khan and Ivan the Terrible, on to Arthur and Alfred, through Columbus and Pizarro, Joan of Arc and Napoleon, Elizabeth and Drake, Washington and Lincoln, Nelson and Wellington, El Cid and Cortes, Tecumsah and Sitting Bull, Bolivar and O'Higgins, down to Churchill and Montgomery, Stalin and Zhukov, Roosevelt and Eisenhower, Jinnah and Nehru, MaoZedung and Chou Enlai. It matters not whether these heroes were morally good or morally bad. Their status as national or tribal heroes is beyond rational debate. They are embedded in the consciousness of their descendants and immune to the judgements we bring to bear on lesser mortals.
But who follows them? Kennedy? Thatcher? Reagan? Blair? Bush? Hardly.
Ghandhi? Mandela? Castro? Ho Chi Min? That's more like it. There's a good chance that they will be remembered and revered as great popular heroes and liberators. But will we see their like again? Probably not. The world of the 21st Century will be very different to that of every century since the dawn of history. Certainly, it will be a century of struggle, but what kind of a struggle will it be? And what kind of leaders will be needed for that diufferent kind of struggle?
In his essay Now or Never: A Sustainable Future for Australia?, Tim Flannery says
Our despoliation of Earth’s life-support systems seems to mark us destroyer of our own civilisations,and as the planetary crisis we have created deepens, it is certain that no saviour will arise to rescue us from ourselves.
There is no real debate about how serious our predicament is: all plausible projections indicate that over the next forty to ninety years humanity will exceed – in all probability by around 100 per cent – the capacity of Earth to supply our needs, thereby greatly exacerbating the risk of widespread starvation, or of being overwhelmed by our own pollution. The most credible estimates indicate that we are already exceeding Earth’s capacity to support our species (termed its biocapacity) by around 25 per cent. With global food security at an all-time low, and greenhouse gases so choking our atmosphere as to threaten a global climate catastrophe, the signs of what may come are all around us.
Flannery goes on to say that “Everyone knows what the solution is: we must begin to live sustainably.” So far, this is fairly routine stuff, until he asks “ But what does sustainability actually mean?” He then takes us beyond the environmentalists' definition of “living in such a way as not to detract from the potential quality of life of future generations“and uses James Lovelock's Gaia Theory to produce a much larger and bolder meaning of “sustainability”.
From two fundamental questions.
How does Earth work?
What is our purpose as a species?
Flannery proposes that Gaia Theory provides the basis for his belief that, in direct contradiction to the teachings of the Judaism, Christianity and Islam:
we are evolved to serve Earth, and that our great and distinguishing characteristic – our intelligence – is not ours alone, but Gaia’s as well, and is destined to be used by Gaia for her own purposes. James Lovelock took the name Gaia from the ancient Greeks: it was their term for the earth goddess. I believe that over the course of the twenty-first century we will again come to serve our Earth goddess, perhaps even to revere her.
(In so doing) we humans are poised to become, from now on, the means by which Gaia will regulate at least some of its essential processes. Is it right to say that we are Gaia’s self-awareness? Gaia’s brain? I believe it is.
And thus
those of us living at the dawn of the twenty-first century are destined to achieve an extraordinary transformation, one unique in the 4-billion-year history of Earth, and one which will influence the fate of life from now on.
To get from here to there, Flannery argues that
our knowledge of Earth’s processes must be put to use. Within (our)lifetimes ...Gaia will pass from an unconscious to a conscious means of control after 4 billion years of self-regulation. Either that or we will fail to achieve sustainability, and Gaia’s newly attained consciousness – which is made possible only by our global civilisation – will vanish, perhaps to be lost forever.
In a review for the New York Review of Books, February 26, 2009, entitled “The Superior Civilization”, he goes further and makes this remarkable prediction:
we shall find ourselves living sustainably in a global superorganism (my emphasis) whose own self-created intelligence has been bent to the management and the maintenance of its life systems for the greater good of life as a whole.
I have quoted Tim Flannery at length because his vision of a sustainable civilisation as a global superorganism and that of a global network of Gaian Democracies are entirely compatible. The difference between, us, however, is that Flannery does not ask the crucial “How? ” question.
Assuming that both of us are on the right track, we need to at least try to answer the “How” question: If we agree with Flannery and Lovelock that, “Potentially, at least, we have the intelligence to learn how to work with Gaia, rather than undermining her”, then we surely have to ask,
How do our societies learn how to use our knowledge of Gaia and our intelligence to achieve long-term sustainability, as a global superorganism or a global network of Gaian Democracies?
Where we differ, as far as I can tell, is that in none of his otherwise admirable books, essays and audio-visual appearances does Flannery tackle that question.
Which leads me to a further question:
What do admirable people in positions of influence like Tim Flannery have to do to initiate and carry through that process of societal learning?
In other words, what kind of competences do people like Tim Flannery need to become the kind of 21st Century leaders our societies need?
END OF PART ONE.
