DUCKPOND

There are no doubt other predictions made for 2008, which are probably more interesting than mine.
1. On ABC Unleased, Mark Pesce is prepared to make predictions while the roulette wheel is still in play. This year he anticipates that cost effective solar power generation will come online, that the first artificial organism will be created and that:

Finally, in the second half of 2008, we’ll see the traumatic collision of representative politics with the growing power of social networks. In our recent federal election, we caught a few videos on YouTube, and perhaps visited the Facebook profiles of the candidates.

In the United States (which has been gearing up for its Presidential election for eighteen months, and still has ten months to go) activists on the right and left are using social networks to promote candidates and causes.

. . . This election will be more chaotic and more unpredictable than any in the history of US politics because special interests are more empowered now than ever before.

The power of technology, such as the internet, and specially blogging, is expressed in what we do with them. Take the history of television since the 1930’s or the earlier example of the history of printing. Technological changes has increased in speed, but social and political change has not reached its full potential, despite the new potential for social networking, which in the prosaic instance of finding foster homes for lost dogs can be awesome.

We might transform politics on both levels of political campaigning for office and the continuing process of petitioning and advocacy. For that to happen their will be a creative merger of new and old technology. Bill McKebben, an environmentalist concerned with global warming, recognizing the need for cultural change, as distinct from the superficiality of the adoption of new technology or changing the seating in the parliament, or the deck chairs on the Titanic, discovers and implements the political method of Gandhi and combines it with the earlier example of truth in the face of political consensus in his article, Gandhi, A Man for all Seasons. He observes:

I’d always loved the story of Gandhi’s march to the sea to make salt. It seemed to me that the time had come to march here too, odd as it seemed in an Internet age.

I emailed a few friends, and they emailed a bunch more, and we had some meetings, and three weeks later we started out, leaving from Robert Frost’s old summer writing cabin in the Green Mountains.

When we stepped off on the first day of this walk we were perhaps 300 strong, carrying signs with our basic demand: Congress should pledge to cut American carbon emissions 80 percent by 2050. We wound our way in joyful file-it was a gorgeous late summer day-down the shoulder of the Green Mountains and into the broad Champlain Valley, and then for five days we hiked north, often along the shoulder of the two-lane state highway. . . And by the time we got to the outskirts of Burlington, the state’s one small city, there were a thousand of us marching.

Of course, such political actions can always bloom like flowers in the desert after rain. and fade away without trace. The problem, we see around us, for community action is sustainability in contention with established corporate power, government or private.

Bill McKebben goes on describe how a nation-wide set of independent local actions could be organized by the internet – emails, web sites – and how that had a political effect. He further observes:

We’re used to thinking of protest as something from “the ’60s,” but that’s wrong. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a student of Gandhi’s-and their techniques work as well now as they did then. New tools change the ways we organize: We couldn’t have reached people without the Web, nor uploaded the pictures of their rallies for everyone to see.

But the essential idea-people coming together to shed their fear and despair in the company of their neighbours, to work against concentrated power with the force of hope, to put their bodies on the line if only by marching for a few days-is as powerful as it ever was.

But that’s not the only, or perhaps even the main, thing that Gandhi offers a world now driving itself off the edge of a cliff. We tend to forget what he considered the core of his work: re-imagining economic life so it makes human sense.

The future has happened in genesis. As ever the problem is not technological change, although the ethical and other issues are important, but harnessing the potency of social change, which will be fort at every step, if the the power structure is at all perceptive, even if their methods are crude as they are old fashioned, despite the armoury of the newest technology. Power lies in the transformative potential of a new paradigm implying change in perception, thought and action rather than in the adoption of new technology per se.

My formulation is that culture is the “reification” of consciousness. Very briefly, that is the reason that indigenous thinking is relevant, since if we take those of us, consciously or not, embedded in Western Civilization, are separated from our indigenous roots by a series of cultural paradigm shifts. These changes are cumulative, if not complete in their expression or as thoroughly anchored throughout the general population as the institutionalization of formal education would suppose. We typically mistake paradigm shifts for tipping points.( I am not sure whether this is quite right. The image I have is of the Taliban riding in their white Toyota Landcruisers with their turbans and shoulder rocket launchers.) Culture is after all an exploration of human potential. ( I know I have not full explained myself.)

2. Also at ABC Unleased, Mark Thompson foresees a more independent foreign policy under Rudd concentrating on specific Australian interests, in particular the adjacent small, vulnerable nations, and perhaps with the ambition to be a honest broker between the US and China. Afghanistan remains, in my view at least a problem, not least with the development of the recent expulsion of two diplomats, supposedly at the behest of the Karzai Government. Now if the Opposition could develop a critique of Government foreign policy independent of its traditional friends and entrapments, that would be something, and something we are not likely to see or hear.

3. John Quiggin makes some good, but optimistic suggestions:

* The Pakistan crisis will lead to a reassessment of the wisdom of keeping nuclear weapons by middle powers such as Britain.

* The Republican Party, or specifically the coalition, will go into a political eclipse following the 2008 elections.

* The Rudd Government will successful implement changes to workplace relations, education and global warming.

* The economic unfolding due to the loans crisis in American financial institutions will stabilize. ( I disqualify myself from economic forecasts.)

I hope they happen, but I am scepticial about the prospects for this year. It would not surprise me to see fundamental changes in the US electoral system. In my opinion such change occurs when the population refuses to accept the prevailing political wisdom. Such change occurs despite the leaders of the major political parties, not because of them.