De-globalization must be stopped, environmentalists argue, because only a Global World has the institutional power to stop Climate Change. Without world government the planet is doomed.
Conventional wisdom since Brave New World held that technology would make it easier for hierarchies to control things. What was less appreciated was technology would also increase complexity and surprise hierarchies with emergent phenomena. What is the net effect?
The recent results of the global world vs Covid are significant because they are a reasonable proxy and predictor for the outcome of World Govt vs Climate Change project, except that Climate is a far more complex system than Covid.
De-globalization, to the extent it has happened, is a risk reduction reaction to overextended supply chains, energy flows and client-agency conflicts in the status quo. This suggests we are better off facing complexity with adaptive systems and subsidiarity than World Govt.
We passed a period that posited global existential problems as an intellectual excuse to implement total control, only to learn when facing a pandemic, that even a Red China armed with unlimited ruthlessness, AI surveillance etc could not stop it.
What we should have learned from Covid is that a certain amount of chaos in humanity is necessary to match the inextinguishable chaos in nature. Evolution for evolution. The eugenicists, population controllers and five year planners with all their linear plans have had their day.
Technology should be used to adapt, not to coerce; to ride the wave that we cannot dam up; to venture forth without assurances, for there are none. In a word, to live in the solar system as man has lived on the planet, happier with discovery than dead order.
The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human by Siddhartha Mukherjee. The book tells the story of how scientists discovered cells, began to understand them, and are now using that knowledge to create new humans. Told in six parts, it is panoramic but is also intimate, laced with Mukherjee’s own experience as a researcher, doctor and prolific reader.
The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power by Daniel Yergin. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, The Prize recounts the panoramic history of the world’s most important resource – oil, the struggle for wealth and power that has surrounded it for decades and that continues to fuel global rivalries, shake the world economy, and transform the destiny of men and nations.