Introduction
Good Morning. I'd like to talk about an event that will take place in less than three years, the dawning of the year 2000. While in reality that year is a landmark only in the mind -- its observance is a lot like watching the odometer in a car turning from all nines to all zeroes -- it is a landmark in a way, because so many predictions have been made about the world in the year 2000. For me, it will be a personal landmark too: in the year 2000 I will turn 50 years old.
The reason that I am talking on this subject today is that this landmark date is close enough now to see clearly. You can even hold the evidence in your hand. This battery, which I removed from my flashlight the other day, expires in January, 2001. We are close enough now to see that we will not have colonies on Mars, as predicted as late as the 1960's. We will not have thinking computers, or manned voyages to Jupiter, as depicted in the 1966 movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Neither will we have global collapse caused by plague, famine, overpopulation, ecological destruction, or by the arrival of space aliens on Hale-Bopp's tail. The economy is good, food is plentiful, and people all over the world are working hard to better their situations.
Today I would like to examine some of these predictions about a future that we are now about to experience, and why those predictions were right or wrong. From this, I hope we can learn something about ourselves and about our world. I will also discuss a few of the challenging new ethical issues that we face in the near future of the next 20 years and beyond. Finally, I would like you to share your ideas during the discussion period at the end of the service.
It's Not about Technology
I was reminded recently in discussing the outline for this program with the Adult Religious Education group that meets on Sunday mornings that, "It's not about technology - it's about people." Technology has always been moving forward at an increasing rate during the past 100, 200, 500, 2000, or 6000 years, depending on where you want to start. Each new generation adapts to its technological situation in many different dimensions - ethical, moral, cultural, political, economic, theological, and so forth. But for all the differences in technology through the ages, people are still people.
For me, this truth was tested recently when I obtained a copy of the diary of Elise Wuppermann, a woman who had immigrated to Texas from Germany in the 1850's. Although she is no relation to me, she and her family settled a few miles from where my mother's family lived near New Braunfels, Texas. The diary mentions a picnic at Geronimo Springs, which is a place where I played as a child over a hundred years later. The diary also told about crossing the river on a ferry boat, which my mother remembers was still operating in the 1930's. Elise described baking Christmas sugar cookies, and other Texas-German holiday rituals that I myself remember so fondly. She also told of a life that I will never know: a hard life of manual farm labor in the heat of southern Texas, and of being separated from her husband for a year while he made the hazardous round trip to Germany by ship. She wrote about losing two young children to diseases that are probably preventable today. But some human tragedies are universal: I, too, experienced the loss of two children, even with the availability of modern medicine.
This diary was a link over 140 years, to a person who died before my great-grandparents were born, and yet her vitality, intelligence and humanity showed through to me in a very personal way. Nevertheless, I was taken by surprise and momentary shock to read that she had owned slaves. In a commentary written by her daughter in the 1920's, I learned that the mother had owned a total of five house slaves; that she had complained about how lazy they were; and that she had bragged about selling them at a profit.
People are just people, but we are also a product of our culture. Just as Elise Wuppermann was a product of antebellum Texas, we are a product of our time and our culture. Are there elements in our present culture that future generations will find repugnant, as we now do with slavery?
Is the Current Age so Unique?
Looking back over the last 200 years, I'm not sure that the present era is a particularly rapid period of change in terms of the way that the average person lives. Consider that between 1910 and 1930, personal transportation went from horse and carriage to what was essentially the modern automobile. Around the turn of the century, people got electricity and telephones. What a wonder that must have been to be able to talk to people miles away! Today's cellular phones only represent an evolutionary refinement compared to that radical change in people's lives.
And what about in-home refrigerators, which were made possible by the invention of Freon in the 1930's? I heard in the late '70's that appliances would soon all have computers imbedded in them. Micro-chips are great, but they can't cool a 6-pack. And every time there is a power glitch, all the time displays go blink - blink - blink.
Basic things like electric washing machines, refrigerators, and vacuum cleaners represent a much more profound change than the "computer-controlled house" that magazines like Popular Science write about every couple of years. Perhaps the most useful high-tech gadget for the home I've seen lately is the clapper - I really hate getting up to turn off the light at bed time.
Elaboration of the Global Village
Another thing prompting this service today is the thirtieth anniversary of Marshall McLuhan's book Understanding Media. By the 1960's, McLuhan and other cultural commentators had begun to recognize that our mass culture - the product of television, radio, telephones, and so forth - was in a way analogous to a village, albeit one that spanned frontiers of geography. Among all the advancing technologies, communication media in particular were shaping who we are, how we think, how we act, and even how we believe.
It is easy to recognize in television an electronic baby sitter, story teller, even village shaman. Today's interactive media -- e-mail, news groups, chat rooms, personal and commercial web sites, and the like - can also be characterized in terms of the 'village' model: perhaps as an amalgam of the stove at the general store, the clique at the beauty shop, and the playground before school. A place where information in its rawest and most unfiltered form is exchanged exuberantly and promiscuously.
Some of the stuff on the Internet is inflammatory, misleading, and even dangerous. There is pornography, computer viruses, rumors and hoaxes. The Heaven's Gate cult had a Web site on which they promoted their peculiar and bizarre ideas. Their example is by no means isolated. Easy transfer of information makes the world a smaller, more interconnected place for all sorts of insanity which would be powerless in isolation. This free market of information and misinformation has been growing for hundreds of years, since soon after the invention of moveable type. This invention enabled people to print cheap broadsides promoting religious heresies as well as scams and all sorts of other nonsense. The descendants of these publications are still seen in the checkout line of the grocery store. Most of us are discerning enough to pass these by, though I admit that I may take a peak at the covers occasionally.
These days it is possible for anyone with $19.95 a month to become a vanity press. Bad novels, UFO stories, knock-knock jokes - everything from the ridiculous to the sublime -- can be posted where it can be read anywhere in the world. I have several of my sermons posted on my web site. I've had e-mail messages from Texas and from Israel. I don't know how many other people may have looked at them without writing.
On a more serious note, I heard the other day on the radio a story about the Turkish and Greek factions on the island of Cypress. Although there are no telephone lines from one community to the other, one way that they can communicate with each other and learn about one another is through the Internet. Their messages may travel thousands of miles to go a few hundred meters.
Censorship, Responsibility, and the Constitution
One very real criticism of the Internet is that it makes all sorts of pornographic material freely available to anyone. That is entirely true, but I'm not sure how to get the genie back into the bottle. The Communications Decency Act, which was passed last year, is currently under scrutiny in the courts, and there are currently no effective barriers for freely posting this kind of material on U.S. Internet sites. Even if the Decency Act is eventually ruled to be constitutional, I am certain that the information bazaar will be nearly impossible to police. It is better that we learn to be good, if skeptical, consumers of that information. We must learn what is gold and what is brass. And we must teach our children. Programs like the Unitarian-Universalist curriculum About Your Sexuality, which aimed at youngsters entering the adolescent years, may be able to help by teaching kids responsibility. I think that teaching a good lesson is preferable to censorship, but I realize that there are many well-meaning people who don't agree with that view.
The ability to access masses of information is wealth indeed, even if there are side effects and unintended consequences. We must not jettison these riches, but must learn to deal with the other consequences with intelligence, common sense, and with respect for others.
Predictions for the Year 2000
Most predictions relating to the year 2000 fall into two groups: doomsday scenarios and high-tech, "space-cadet" scenarios. Both have to some extent missed the mark, though with cellular phones, geostationary satellites, and Internet, the space cadets have hit somewhat closer.
Probably the granddaddy of all modern doomsday prophets was Thomas Malthus, who predicted population growth and resulting resource shortages. His most famous observation, quoted from An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) was as follows:
Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio.
Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. A slight
acquaintance with numbers will shew the immensity of the first
power in comparison of the second.
Reverend Malthus was correct about the arithmetic, but so far has been incorrect about the long term consequences. Other doomsday scenarios have included death by plague, famine, global warming, pollution, loss of the rain forest, etc. The television generation, of which I am a part, seems easily lead to believe the doomsday prediction du jour, even though in the past countless such predictions have come and gone. Some of the recent doomsday prophesies have included the following:
These events have clearly not taken place within the originally predicted time frame, even though population and industrialization continue apace. I would like to suggest this morning that Malthus and other doomsday prophets underestimated the power of human adaptability, intelligence, and hard work. This is perhaps best illustrated by the way our society has dealt with air and water pollution in recent years. We are grateful to Rachel Carson in 1962's Silent Spring for alerting us to the consequences of indiscriminate pesticide use. Governments throughout the world have established agencies such as the U.S. EPA to deal with such issues. Pollution is consequently down substantially as the result of hard work by a lot of people.
Alternative Futures
George Orwell wrote about an all-knowing electronified Stalinist state in the book 1984, which was written 36 years earlier in 1948. In fairness to Orwell, 1984 represented a possible future, not necessarily a prediction. Although the book spawned a couple of rather mediocre films, the alternative future that he described thankfully did not occur in either the U.S. or in Western Europe. Nevertheless there have been and are today regimes that use governmental terror to control the minds and actions of their people. We have seen in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe a struggle against such repression during the last ten years or so.
Aldous Huxley actually wrote two novels with entirely different futuristic scenarios in Brave New World and Ape and Essence. In Brave New World, he writes of a pleasant, but regimented world in which people are gestated in glass jars, having been bred for certain roles in the society. Everything is hunky-dory as long as you cooperate with the society. Outcasts and free thinkers are not killed or "disappeared" as in some repressive societies, but are shipped to out-of-the-way stations such as the Falkland Islands, where they won't infect others with their ideas. I expect that the Falklands would have a dandy UU congregation.
In contrast, Ape and Essence describes a post-holocaust world of anarchy and devil worship. The ethics of survival-at-all-costs is paramount, because anything other guarantees death. A perhaps unintended theme of both books is the adaptability of the individual to the circumstances of life.
I think that what all these predictions really show is the resilience of the human race in dealing with their circumstances. This behavior is impossible to model in computer programs that use simple straight-line extrapolations of phenomena that depend on behavior. Humans adapt. They will continue to do so in the face of food shortages, air and water pollution, and even global warming and the ozone hole. If the Earth were hit by an asteroid like the one that destroyed the dinosaurs, I'd bet on the human race to survive, just as our distant ancestors did 65 million years ago.
If so many doomsday scenarios have been wrong, so too were the super high-tech scenarios for the year 2000. Simply stated, we aren't on the moon because there is no reason to be there. There is currently no economic or other incentive to go there right now. In a few years, advances in commercial aviation, materials, and propulsion systems may make moon tourism economical. When the round-trip ticket dips below $50,000 per person, I'm sure that you will see a Hilton Hotel there. I hope that I'm still spry enough to go myself.
Our Legacies
To avoid the doomsday scenarios, there are some things that we, the present generation, must consider in terms of our legacy to future generations. Simple arithmetic and common sense are all that we need to see where we are expending irreplaceable resources that will never be available again.
For example, consider petroleum reserves. We burn petroleum as a fuel so that this generation can have the luxury of personal mobility. It is clear that these reserves will eventually run out. I don't know when, but most likely in 100 years oil will not be nearly as abundant or cheap as it is today. People will have developed alternative fuels for transportation out of necessity. Whatever personal transport we have may not go as fast or as far, but who knows? I trust that people will adapt by finding alternative modes of transportation. I am just not a good enough prophet to say whether those alternatives will include hydrogen-powered cars, or hay-powered buggies.
When the true end of the oil supply does appear on the horizon, people will have time to make a transition to other fuels, change modes of transportation, or change housing patterns to minimize travel distances. Like tourism on the Moon, our adaptation to diminished oil supplies will most likely be driven by economics -- the cost of gasoline at the pump -- more than by any other consideration.
[in the interest of time, the following two sections were omitted from the program on April 20]
Ethics, Morals, Copyright, Intellectual Property, and the Fourth Amendment
Software piracy is an issue that has probably touched most of us that use computers every day. How easy it is to "borrow" a copy of a program from a friend. Who wants to pay $49.95 (or potentially a lot more) for a program that you may not like? How many of those programs are still being used, while the publisher is unpaid? Don't let the kids know, or they might imitate their parents.
Maybe UUFR should devote a Sunday to "getting right" with software piracy. Everyone in the congregation who had unregistered software on his or her computer would either pay up or erase it. We could have a big festival with door prizes. Maybe a jackpot for the person deleting the most expensive program. Think that would fly? Probably not.
One of the issues that I am currently embroiled with at my job is the fair use of intellectual property. I am working on a project in which we are gathering information from thousands of different publications and repackaging that information for a commercial data base system. Of course the investors in developing this system expect to make a profit. This has exposed me to the Gothic world of Copyright Law and "fair use." I learned that most of us are petty criminals with respect to copyright laws. Do you know what the restrictions are on articles that you photocopy? Do you know if copying a web page to your computer violates the law? I didn't before I started that project. These are issues that more and more people will encounter in the coming years. As both a user and a generator of intellectual property, I'd like to see a simpler and more uniform system for compensating authors for their ideas.
Finally, on the subject of information and law, is constitutionally-protected speech. Do you know what spoken or written material is subject to slander and libel laws? As many of us become "publishers" as noted previously, what protections do we have against being sued for making a negative remark on a web page or other public forum? What rights does the person who is the object of slander or libel have? What is legal or illegal regarding pornographic material, or politically sensitive material, or government classified material? These questions become greatly complicated by the international nature of communications.
I am personally on the side of greater liberties, greater freedoms, and less restriction on open communication. Does this mean that your fourteen year old may see something on the Web that you'd prefer he didn't? Does this mean that an author may not get full compensation for a copied publication? Does this mean that insulting and untrue allegations can be published where millions can see them? Perhaps - but consider that the alternative is repression of individual creativity, arbitrary censorship of unpopular ideas, and, in the extreme, the realization of Orwell's nightmare.
Economics as a Tool for Change
One thing that is clear to me having lived through the petroleum embargo of the 1970's, is that economics and consumer demand drive culture. I was in Los Angeles during the worst of the petroleum crisis. I saw first hand how a relatively small upset in the national economy could affect life for the average person. For perhaps 15 years after the embargo, people were sensitive to fuel economy and were concerned about petroleum resources, if only to avoid another fiasco like the crisis of the mid-70's. The economics of cheap petroleum and consumer demand for larger, higher-performance cars have caused us to slip back into a pattern of increased gasoline use. I don't think future generations will thank us for using up all the easily found oil reserves.
The current runaway exploitation of petroleum reserves and of tropical rain forest are only two of many societal problems in which economic self-interest is the driver. If we could somehow harness the power of economics, we might be able to reverse some of these problems. I don't have any specific suggestions how to do this, but it is something that I hope the activists among us will consider as a potential tool. Well-meaning brochures, public service announcements, and toothless UN resolutions are all well and good -- we need to educate the public on these issues. But real change will only happen if we can make preserving the rain forest in the personal self-interest of every campasino, and using mass transit in the self-interest of every professional working in the Research Triangle Park. Figuring out how to accomplish that will be the challenge - a challenge that I hope that some us will adopt as our own.
Ministries for the Future
I'd like you to take from this program today the idea of adopting a "ministry" to carry into the next century. The idea of a personal ministry is more common among Baptists than Unitarian-Universalists, but consider the following questions:
Isaac Newton said, "If I have seen farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Let us each do what we can to elevate the view of human kind in the coming years.