By Jim Selman | Bio

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Since Alvin Toffler published Future Shock in the 1970s, futurists have been speculating what will happen in the coming decades. As with most attempts at long-range predictions, the proof is in the pudding. Most turn out to be somewhat accurate, along with lots of unpredictable ‘surprises’. No one, for example, anticipated the Internet, globalization, Google, global terrorism, cell phones or the unimaginable cost of energy. The future continues to be a fickle mistress and pretty much does what she wants to do, regardless of our prognostications.

Behind our fascination with future scenarios is our belief that if we know what will happen, it will inform our actions and choices and we will be more successful, happier or merely survive. In the Michigan Citizen last week, environmental leader Maynard Kaufman was quoted as having predicted that we are going to again become an agrarian society. In another piece in the same paper, Shae Howell is speculating on the future of globalization following the recent collapse of the trade talks over protectionism in the agricultural sectors.

These along with hundreds of other ideas are all around us. Whether we agree or disagree with a particular piece of what appears to be a falling sky, it is pretty obvious that life and civilization are undergoing some massive changes and even transformations unlike any that we’ve known in the past. To be sure, there have been periods where society or the world stood on the brink of cataclysms or tidal shifts. For example, World War II could have gone either way for a while and had the Axis powers prevailed we would be living in a very different world. Had our leaders during the Cold War been a little less competent or perhaps just more afraid, someone could have pushed the nuclear button and we’d be lucky to have a world at all.

Today, however, (Iraq and local skirmishes not withstanding) we are fighting another kind of war that could have consequences far beyond the loss of life and property. We are fighting a war of worldviews—a clash of paradigms—a contest of ideas. What is at stake is our humanity and what it means to be a human being. On one hand, we can continue to pursue the Cartesian notion that success is the result of prediction and control or we can learn to live in an evolving context of absolute responsibility and a vision of a world that can work for everyone—a world without control, just commitment and relationships.

Martin Heidegger (the philosopher that has most influenced my thinking) speculated that we have created a world in which we are trapped in a worldview in which we are constantly reacting to everything and therefore are creating more and more of what we don’t want, leading to a downward spiral that at some point destroys the human capacity for creativity and invention. His last words were “Only God can save us.”

I either don’t share his bleak prognosis or have sufficient faith in a “Higher Power” to believe that at the end of the day “God” will win. This thesis is grounded in the logic that when two or more worldviews conflict, the one that will win is the one that can include the other—the one that is most ‘inclusive’.  I am reminded of an Edward Markham poem: