The key lessons of the 20th Century are that the state and private enterprise cannot be trusted with enough concentrated power to be the central organizing principles of human action, yet the democratized public cannot be relied upon to act with sufficient collective rationality to solve the long run problems humanity must face. The central lesson which is derivative of the first two key lessons is that no model of mass human organization is working well-enough to guarantee reasonable prospects for survival.
The 18th Century was the Age of Revolution in the West. These were the same revolutions which gave birth to contemporary democracy. The 19th Century saw the further ossification of the cross-links between liberal democracy and corporate industry. The 20th Century stands against democracy. It is the time of the counter-reformation against democracy. The reactionary challenges to democracy including fascism, authoritarian communism (which should be called “uncommunism”), and what Sheldon Wolin calls the “inverted totalitarianism” of corporatism.
The key lessons of the 20th Century are that the state and private enterprise cannot be trusted with enough concentrated power to be the central organizing principles of human action, yet the democratized public cannot be relied upon to act with sufficient collective rationality to solve the long run problems humanity must face. The central lesson which is derivative of the first two key lessons is that no model of mass human organization is working well-enough to guarantee reasonable prospects for survival.
Humans must evolve. If we are to survive the 21st century we must evolve from what we might call the proto-Homo sapiens or Homo sapiens genesis to Neo-sapiens. Neo-sapiens who can not only enter the Anthropocene age where we have phenomena such as Anthropogenic global warming and human-made geological events, but to survive to what we can call the Anthropocosmologic epoch—where humankind can project ourselves into the cosmos and reproduce our civilization against the astronomical calamities. I do not know whether this will occur through bioengineering or organically through our accelerated cognitive development as we adapt and use advanced information tools, but I am sure it must occur.
Part of what gives our existence meaning beyond the experiential is the reproduction of our existence. We have to understand that nature is a series of catastrophes and each catastrophe could be an existential threat. We must not heed Thoreau and return to nature and the ways of the past. We must envelope ourselves in a life raft of ultra-rational high-technology and mathematical symbolism in order to safely navigate the vast expanses of space-time. The definition and framing of the problems is a matter for philosophy, but the solution of the problems is a matter for scientists. We need a vast number of people to be plugged into this grand scale scientific enterprise.
To achieve that kind of unity of effort we have to get over the petty intra-species conflicts that we have. And in order to resolve those conflicts peacefully we must all share common epistemic values (values which say not what is particularly true but what generally counts as true).
The dominant human culture of the day is liberalism. Liberal cultures have the epistemic value of value pluralism, which is really a perverse commitment to the non-existence of epistemic values. Pluralism is a social technology that works at the individual level. It allows people, when confronted with a powerful strain of thought which they resist, to claim that this thought is but the product of one voice in a sea of voices, all with equal claim to the truth. Value pluralism is not a conflict resolution strategy; it is a conflict evasion strategy. It does avoid conflict in some way, but only in that it pushes the conflict to a future time. This is not the same conflict avoidance as proper conflict resolution, which actually settles the conflict so that it is put to rest until it reemerges (hopefully it will not).
The core theoretic challenge of conflict resolution is to produce and distribute an epistemic value system which can universalize. Only then will we be able to act with the kind of collective rationality to solve ecological and cosmic problem sets with convergent solutions.
For millennia we have had the technology of law. Law is a conflict resolution system designed to legitimate some particular negotiated or imposed distribution of rights and duties. But law is a pre-modern technology which resists the uncontroversial rigor we need. We need a conflict resolution system built on a core set of indubitable epistemic values of sufficient powers to render testable statements uncontroversial enough to achieve consensus. It sounds like a trivial endeavor but the future of the species depends on it.
The defining moment of the 20th Century was the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis (CMC). The leaders of the two major powers brought the world to the brink of terminal thermonuclear engagement. But during the CMC something happened to the leaders—Kennedy and Khrushchev—men whose commitments to the ideological positions which characterized their nations had been at least solid enough to propel them to the national fore. Both men were faced with an ideological opponent who threatened the way of life their people held dear. To put it in context, this is after a history of self-destructive action by humans who put the reproduction of the regular patterns of behavior sociologists call structures before their own individual or collective survival. But these two men both acted as rational agents and put survival ahead of ideological purity (Khrushchev even more so than Kennedy, because even at that early stage he must have possessed some vision to see the potential that Soviet uncommunism was unsustainable in the face of western capitalism). This is an inflection point which trends towards civility in dark times. It is the seed of a hope planted in the most destructive century of human existence. It is a seed of hope for human survival in perpetuity.