A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 2007
"We are all leaders or none of us are."
James R. Fisher, Jr., A Look Back To See Ahead (2007)
What I've learned, from my recent book tour back to my hometown of Clinton, Iowa, is that we have a propensity to look to others to solve our problems. Volunteerism is quite healthy in my hometown, and I applaud it, but that is again a case of the few ministering to the many. There is however a grain of encouragement in this elemental goodness, as I reflect on a larger issue.
If you are a student of history, you know the Indians once owned this continent. Russia made a venture into the Aleutians and what is now Alaska more than two centuries ago, and there are remnants of the Russian Orthodox Church still there today.
This part of the North American continent has not grown as the rest of the continent has, but that appears likely to change as we climb the slope of the new century.
One day soon because of the melting of the Arctic Circle, and the polar ice cap, the Atlantic and Pacific oceans will be a common sea way of commercial, industrial and strategic development. This natural waterway is soon to change the ecological, economic, political and social context of the "new world" in ways never before thought. It is conceivable in another hundred years that 500 million people will live in this remote tundra with all the implications of such development.
How so? There are estimates that the oil reserves in the Arctic Region may be as great as 100 to 1,000 times those of the Middle East. If so, this looms to change the geopolitical calculus of the world, and reduces the strategic nature of the Middle East to an ephemeral dream.
This melting away of what was once considered an impregnable ice barrier to man's exploration is likely to prove the most momentous change since 1492 when Columbus discovered America.
Man is not ready for this change because he is blind to his own history and is likely to become once again lost in his cultural and conflicting confusion, repeating and replicating his erroneous ways.
In the next fifty years, we are going to see such change that the previous fifty years will appear as if running in place. It therefore augurs will for us to give pause now to what that change may be.
THE WORST-CASE SCENARIO
The worst-case scenario is that Russia, China, Canada, the United States, and Europe will come to a juggernaut over ownership of the Arctic Circle. As a consequence, the threat of nuclear holocaust may no longer be a threat but materialize into threatening all life on planet earth.
The times require a kind of sophistication, a tolerance for differences, a kind of maturity that is beyond the nature of present man to this point in his history.
I sense this from a very limited perspective but one that is indicative, at least to me, of man on a wider scale. To be more specific, I've attempted to nudge the leadership of workingmen and women into an appreciation that everyone is a leader or no one is in a series of books and articles.
As matters now stand, whatever the culture or country, people everywhere abdicate this responsibility by looking for it in a boss, priest, spiritual or temporal leader, an ayatollah, king, queen, president, government, or in some other mystic remnant of the distant pass, not in themselves. People as persons do not perceive themselves as leaders, not even of their own destiny. They leave that to others, and hope for the best. And so it has been throughout man's history.
My most recent travels this past summer to England, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Poland, Estonia, Russia, Finland and Sweden remind me that we are not ready to encounter a new phase of personal identity or civilization. We are too busy becoming having no time for being. No one is less well known to ourselves than ourselves.
We are too full of the moment to think beyond it much less to act differently towards it.
Everywhere I went I encountered nostalgia for the royalty of the past. Indeed, in many places, although essentially titular, it was still being maintained generously at the public coffers. It was apparent that the people, who were enjoying a kind of comfort that Americans have enjoyed for the past fifty years, had likewise retreated into complacency. After all, this is the longest period in European history without a major war. It is a time for self-indulgence, not reflection.
Europeans are building, optimistic, energetic, and mainly obedient, polite, submissive, and reactive, surrendering to the will of the leadership, again, reminiscent of America.
Leadership has retreated into the complexity of its problems. It has found sanctuary atavistically in terms of nostalgia, and anachronistically in terms of seeing its leadership as reflective of a romanticized distant past, which has little to do with reality.
Visit the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia, and you see it glorifies its monarchs while allegedly celebrating great artists, forgetting that more than ninety percent of the people were peasants without rights or property when such monarchs reigned supreme. It is this idealized nostalgia that is a societal sickness on both sides of the Atlantic.
The result of this is to be stuck in complacency that replaces reality with activity and the quest for more with security.
THE BEST-CASE SCENARIO
The best-case scenario is that people look past their animal needs and find a maturity to take charge of their lives, their times and their circumstances.
This suggests a radical departure from the norm and a transformation of the institutions designed to serve man but which have come to be self-serving and self-generating, and therefore self-negating, or hostile to the intended design.
Look at any aspect of institutional life and the evidence is palpable.
Sexuality has come to trump marriage as the stabilizing construct of society. Preoccupation with it has reduced the institution to playing house, exchanging biological fluids, and selling sexuality on the pleasure derived from the exchange, or as a performance construct, and not as an institution to preserve the species in terms of moral, spiritual, intellectual and physical development.
Temporal power has replaced institutional religion, using fear and ignorance while exploiting latent biases to maintain itself in a world that has gone mad and has lost its moral compass.
Education has become a factory. It prepares students to make a living, not to make a life, to fulfill an economic dream, not to bridge the gap of misunderstanding and hostility between people of different circumstances. Nor has education continued the liberal tradition of appreciation of the natural world but instead reified machine age thinking into the sophistication of a new technological age.
The military has become the laboratory of peace by developing nuclear arsenals of annihilation in the hopes that they may never be used. It has come to appear pusillanimous to splinter groups of terror because they operate outside its design.
Meanwhile, the political system, whatever its orientation, fears most a constituency that solves its problems from below, with a marriage of topdown and bottom-up thinking in which the problem solvers anticipate and deal with chronic problems before they become nightmares. There is no place for terror groups when the people are in charge, not remotely or symbolically, but literally and strategically at the level of everyday life.
We have billionaires because they are focused and curious about ordinary things, which is a freedom that belongs to us all. Likewise, we have geniuses in the sciences and the arts for the same reason.
The time has come when the world needs its greatest natural resource, the ingenuity of man to rise to the challenge of the times and become manifest.
This will not occur without sacrifice and change, without danger and risk, pain and loss, as it means destroying most of the institutions as we know them and upon which we have relied.
It is such a radical departure that the alarmist will call it anarchy, but it is necessary and it is the emerging new chapter of man, whatever the language used to describe it.
As each of us assumes the role of leadership, not looking elsewhere for it, our focus, too, will be directed at the process, not on the product of our efforts. It will be directed at using the past to mold the present, letting the future take care of itself. And it will find us departing from our normal inclination to repeat the past ad nauseum.
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A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD is available from your local bookseller or on line, or from the publisher, www.authorhouse.com.