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Mayan calendar picks a pivotal year

By Peter McMahon - posted Thursday, 12 January 2012


2012 promises to be a pivotal year in world history. This is because a number of core trends – economic, political, social, technological and environmental - are reaching critical points. Each trend is a major challenge in itself, and in combination they will transform the way humans live on this planet. Whether this transformation is for better or worse depends on how we respond at a global level.

2012 is, now famously, the year that the long count Mayan calendar predicts will see radical transformation. The exact causes put forward to explain this transformation differ and are sometimes hard to take seriously, but however that all turns out, the timing is interesting. There is an underlying psychological factor at work here: if enough people believe that change is imminent, it most likely is.

The underlying causes of the growing global crisis are that our core socio-economic institutions are fragmenting with changes in our underlying material conditions. In short, we are hitting limits to growth and our main social institutions are just not ready to deal with it.

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The basic concept of limits to growth emerged in the 1970s as computer modelling first got going. It initially generated some concern but this fell away under criticism about the value of the underlying models and the go-go materialism of the 1980s. The models were improved and recent research indicates they were roughly on target. So limits are back.

The material changes we face are mostly to do with limits to resources, but this also has to do with our technology. The limits related to all fossil fuels (including, ultimately, coal), fresh water, arable land (and thus food production), phosphates, some essential ores, and in a different way, the atmosphere and the oceans. Pollution, especially carbon pollution, is now a problem because we have run out of air and water to suck it up and safely store it.

In other words, the massive production and consumption machine that is mass-industrial civilisation, which relied on ever growing  (indeed exponentially growing) use of resources and generation of wastes, has begun to hit the limits of its operations on a finite planet. This was always going to happen at some point, and that point happens to be the early twenty-first century.

The question of our runaway technology is little discussed but central to a number of growing problems. The nuclear proliferation issue is just one example. The threat of pandemics, spread globally in short time by jet travel, is another. The growth of threats to our basic infrastructure by computer viruses, worms, bots, etc, is another. The general complexity of modern civilisation, and the uncomfortable feeling that everyday life is just too hectic and confused, is another.

The two blades of the pincers, material limits and runaway technology, which are two aspects of the long process of mass-industrial development, have been steadily closing on our institutional structures for decades. In 2012 they will really start to cut; who feels the pain first and most, and whether and how that pain is addressed will be key questions in coming years.

So the emerging crisis has been caused in part by the erosion of core institutional structures. Institutions are arrangements - partly made up of people, buildings and other assets but mostly concepts – that enable relative stability in which to live out our lives. They include ancient ones, like marriage and religion, old ones like empires and markets, and newer ones like nation-states, corporations and global markets.

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Some of these institutions have been eroded in recent decades by the actions of two waves of solvent, the first financial and the second technological. In particular, since the late 1970s the growth and spread of financial flows have undermined the nation-state and transformed the business firm. The other wave was digitisation which has transformed government, business and just about all social life.

In 2008 financialisation came undone as too much risk was built into markets. Profits initially soared, and then the inherent instability of the new paradigm kicked in and disaster was narrowly averted. The underlying problems remain, merely shifted from private to public cost, and require structural reforms to the way our global economy functions.

We can’t expect any process of control over technological advances to occur, because we just don’t have a way of thinking about it other than when related to arms proliferation of medical ethics. We can hope that government intervention will shift the resources and money into what we need, like efficient renewable energy technologies.

Some restraints on financialisation are likely. National governments, either individually or in collaboration through entities like the G20, may begin to limit risk-taking. In addition a Tobin tax or something like it is now under discussion to reign in speculative finance operations.

It looks as though, just as they eventually did in the last great socio-economic crisis, the Great Depression, governments must step in to clean up the mess made by rampant markets. The underlying reality is that governments are still the final authority. The irony of the US losing its triple AAA ratings because the ratings agency Standard and Poor’s argued that Congress could not get it together to bolster the national economic condition is exquisite.

But in both the US and Europe governments have been slow to take up a more interventionist role. In part this is down to the spread of neo-liberal ideas which pushed governments into the background, but is also due to more specific reasons. In the US it is the corruption of Congress and the electoral process generally by vested interests, mixed with the toxic politics as the ideological split between left and (increasingly religious) right. In Europe it is the long standing differences between different cultures shoehorned into the unwieldy EU structure.

Underlying all this is the problem that all democratic governments now face: to take serious measures to clean up the economic mess means almost certain electoral defeat. Most fundamentally, it is the electorates that fail to accept responsibility to direct governments to act through their vote. This is really no wonder given that the developed world has become dominated by a materialistic individualism that recognises only rights, not responsibilities.

In fact, the only governments that look good are the more authoritarian ones, like China, Russia and the east Asian pseudo-democracies. But such systems are inherently unstable, as shown by the lengths China goes to in order to stifle dissent.

Governments collectively have also been badly hurt by their incapacity to deal with global warming. This is indeed a diabolical problem, but it must be faced, and sooner rather than later. 2011 ended with a series of warnings about global warming from various authorities. The US Department of Energy reported that greenhouse gases grew a greater rate than predicted, up 6% in 2010 over 2009. After another year of record extreme weather around the world, the IPCC released a report on the role of global warming in generating such weather. The International Energy Agency warned that we have five years before we lose the ability to control global warming.

The transnational Occupy movement is essentially a reaction to this impasse. This development highlights a number of issues, from foreign wars to inaction on global warming, but is focused squarely on the shift of power from people to business and markets. There are parallels with other movements for change – the earlier Iranian revolt, the Arab spring, riots in Greece, Spain and even the UK – which suggest a new sentiment is growing around the world, still inchoate but potentially powerful.

Again technology has been critical, this time the use of so-called social media to organise resistance. Social media is effective for  aggregating otherwise dispersed people into massed formations, but we have yet to see whether it can play a role in organising that sentiment into coherent programs of reform.

If things go bad 2012 will be dominated by a growing global crisis of many dimensions. It will include: increasing tensions between the US and China; growing tension and perhaps military action involving the US, Israel and Iran; European and then global economic meltdown; and a growing food crisis. All as global warming gets worse and peak oil approaches.

If things go well we will see a new era of collaboration between governments to manage the raft of challenges facing our now global civilisation. Their actions might include: cooperation to generate a global New Deal to stabilise the global economy; new agreements to ensure nuclear disarmament; agreements to manage resource depletion; agreements to integrate disease control and other emergency measures; and agreements to manage food shortages.

In the later scenario, once we get the hang of cooperating to solve problems, we can then continue to make things generally better for people everywhere by further cooperation.

So we have a really important year coming up. A year when we start to behave like adults, as one species with appropriate global institutional arrangements, or we begin to really pay the high cost of not doing so.

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About the Author

Dr Peter McMahon has worked in a number of jobs including in politics at local, state and federal level. He has also taught Australian studies, politics and political economy at university level, and until recently he taught sustainable development at Murdoch University. He has been published in various newspapers, journals and magazines in Australia and has written a short history of economic development and sustainability in Western Australia. His book Global Control: Information Technology and Globalisation was published in the UK in 2002. He is now an independent researcher and writer on issues related to global change.

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