GLOBAL GOVERNANCE

In sci-fi movies and television shows, the earth and other planets with intelligent life-forms are either part of  a federation of planets or galactic empires.   If Earth is included in such fantasies, there is the question of how we humans became unified enough to form a global governing entity that eons from now could belong to a federation of planets.  The hinted or suggested answer is that it took some natural or man-made disaster to get the remnant of humans who survived to realize that we needed each other (what I have referred to in earlier posts as the Impulse of Religion) to create a form of governance that permitted us to speak as one planet within a federation of planets.  The other suggestion is that as a planet we were faced with a hostile extraterrestrial threat from another planet in a different solar system or galaxy.

What I find interesting in such sci-fi fantasies is the accepted insight that global governance is hypothetically possible but largely made so because the nations of the world finally woke up to the fact that failure to get along with each other as independent nations would lead to the annihilation of human life on this planet.  This awareness, however, is not something that writers of science fiction came up with.  The idea of nations coming together to establish some form of global governance has been around since the early20th century as response to the devastation to civilian life caused by wars.   The League of Nations, the Geneva Conventions, and the establishment of the United Nations were all a response to the increasing threat of global annihilation caused by war.  Today we face an immanent threat to our mutual wellbeing, climate change.  

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While climate change is not new to our planet, its cause being linked to human activity is and that cause is not merely linked to spewing carbon from fossil fuels and the mass production of methane gas and other chemical being released into the atmosphere which are all factors, but what gives rise to these factors is the drive to accumulate wealth; in short, money.  In my last post, I suggested a new form of economy, Survivalism; named so because the survival of life as we know it on our planet should be and must be given the highest priority of every nation. Unfortunately it is not and that it is not largely due to the conflict it runs into with monetary economics which, as I have mentioned in my last post, has weakened the will of nations and corporations to effectively do something about climate change.  The pursuit of monetary wealth is a will-killer.

Survivalism as an economic system requires governance.  As the world needs to switch its focus from economic wealth to planetary health as the goal of a global economy, there is also a need for global governance.  This begs an important question, "If we can't get along now, how can one ever expect to get along enough to switch both economic and political gears to act as a unified people who sole purpose is the preservation of life on this planet?"  

The movie and television industries have done their share of producing movies and documentaries presenting us with a doomsday scenarios of what will happened if we don't immediately start addressing the host of problems that exist because of climate change; such as, mass migrations, food shortages, and the specter of world war.  It is only after such situations decimate most of the earth and its human, other animal, and plant populations will a remnant of those who survive start to rebuild a new and hopefully much different world.  

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The Book of Genesis and other ancient religious writings talk about natural cataclysms that reduced the population of the world to a mere handful of people.  The book of Genesis also tells us how an attempt to global governance fell apart as people tried to build an empire that would reach heaven and the very throne of God.  Of course, such stories are myths, but they reflect an intuition about the result of human hubris that ultimately leads to global chaos. I would venture to say that such mythic stories are based on long forgotten historical facts that only survive in their mythic retelling.   

Anthropologists are consistently finding remains of civilizations that predate what was thought to be the earliest remnant of the beginning of civilizations as we know it.  We also know from anthropology that there may have been a period of time when our species faced extinction in the distant past, some 120,000 years ago, when it was estimated that there were approximately only 1,300 humans who lived after a world wide population of hundreds of thousands suddenly disappeared.  Anthropologists do not know what might have caused such a drastic decrease; climate change, food depletion, or a pandemic.  We don't know how such an experience might have led to the mass migration of survivors and their offspring to venture into new areas in search of a more life sustaining environment.

The fact that we do not know anything about them, how they created monolithic structures such as Gobeklitepe in Turkey and elsewhere throughout the world long before we thought humans were capable of making such structures, should give us pause to consider what conditions led to their being lost to human memory.  Why did their stories fade away, only to emerge in the ruins they left behind?   As much as we feel too advanced to succumb to a like fate, the reality is it could happen to the world as we know it today by any number of natural or manmade disasters.   

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Mutual self-destruction is a topic I addressed in a series of posts entitled, "Mutual Self-Destruction and the Pursuit of Peace" back in 2017.  In those posts, I addressed the obsolescence of war and the embarrassing lack of motivation to address the human causes of climate change; especially, amongst industrialized nations like the United States, China, and India.  There are some nations trying to make a concerted effort to mitigate the human causes of global warming and climate change, the nations who are making such efforts are for the most part small nations; such as, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, the Netherlands, etc.  

One factor that these nations share is that they are not as obsessed with preparing for international conflict as they are for preserving the planet.  On the other hand, the economic/industrial nations like the United States,  China, and India continue to show blatant disregard to the survival of the planet we all live on as their attention is focused on economic and military security.  Economic and military security are real concerns as the war in the Ukraine and elsewhere in the world demonstrate.  I am not trying to downplay the importance of economic and military security, but they are largely treated as national concerns that distract attention from the one overriding global concern that every nation large or small should be focused on at the moment and that is planetary survival.  

To be humbly honest, the one species our planet could live without, is probably our own, as we have largely contributed global warming which has accelerated climate change and is threatening life on this planet.  The good news in all of this is that we can do something about it if we collectively put our minds together to do so and to do so quickly.  The bad news is that amongst the largest nations, which are also the largest contributors to global warming, there is not much of an effort to do something about it due to being caught up in their endeavors for world prominence, if not dominance.  All of which makes the case for the need for some form of global governance that overrides the interests of any nation who steps out of line in preserving our shared planet home.  

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That economic sanctions are the most often used international response to a country that is stepping out of line by being an aggressor of some type, points to monetary economics as a contributing factor to such a nation's aggressive behavior.  That is why I began this series of posts on planetary survival talking about the need for a moneyless global economy, but how is that accomplished?  I made some vague suggestions in my last post because offering vague, broad ideas is about all I am personally capable of suggesting.  It will take well-versed and competent economists to tackle the enormous task of converting the global economy to a moneyless one and convincing the nations of the world of its necessity.  

The world, as we know it, is largely a world of our making.  Nations need to come together to decide what are the basic necessities and the unnecessary blockades to preserving life on this planet.  The world needs the equivalent of Global Constitution that defines global governance in the preservation of life on Earth.  To that end, the first order of business would be to abolish the necessity of war and the means to wage war, which I can honestly see leading to world war due to the immense distrust that exists among nations.  Such a massive goal at disarmament would require the utmost diplomatic effort and offerings of goodwill to those most reluctant. Political diplomacy will be vital to establishment of a new type of leadership that is both powerful enough to ensure action and humble enough to avoid demagoguery and capitulation to populist democracy that could easily engage in global denialism.  This is not to say that democracy is to be abandoned, but rather that democracy as a governing tool, in this case, must be designed to refine and fine tune governmental processes in attaining the well-being of our planet home and its recovery from the human effects that contributed to global warming and climate change. 

The second order of business is world-wide conversion from the use of fossil and carbon based fuels to clean energy sources.  As such, it will likely require that all life-giving endeavors will fall directly under global governance.  Free-enterprise, which is so valued in the industrial nations today, must give way to government control for the sake of planetary preservation.  With survivalism as an established economic reality and the foundation of global governance, credit (income) leveraging, if carefully monitored and policed  should ensure no one should become credit-rich nor credit-poor since credit is given for the life and livelihood of all life on our planet home.

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Today's world seems lightyears away from even considering the notion of global governance.  The world, as a whole, is too polarized as nationalism is on the rise and nations are polarized within themselves to think beyond their borders, much less open them and their collective minds to need of breaking down the barriers of borders and evolving from the tribalism inherent in nationalism to seeing the value of embracing a one world government.  The notion of a one-world government is too heretical a notion to be given any possible consideration, given the immediate concerns of the most powerful nations to be the most militarily and economically powerful nations in the world.  

As unlikely that all the nations of the world would consider coming together under a binding global constitution, there has been recent examples of a willingness to do so in the creation of the European Union which can be understood as a preliminary if not a tentative step  towards global governance.  The greatest fear associated global governance on a national scale is the loss of power and the money that fuels power and influence.  This is why there must be a fundamental shift away from the value of monetary wealth in the long run.  

In the short run, however, it is important that the monetary wealth of nation is focused on eliminating the human causes of climate change.  The Paris Accords was a vital first step, but there needs to be much more done.  The world is literally on fire in many places, which is only fueling climate change even faster.  The chances of reversing a world-wide cataclysmic event that will cause food and water shortages, mass migrations, and open warfare is passing us by.  Should such disaster continue to occur on a global scale, the chances of any national government surviving will be unlikely, as human populations will be drastically reduced and the likelihood of human extinction becomes a probability.

The leaders of the world must face the gloom and doom of such a real-life scenario in order to put aside their national self-interests and embrace the goal of human and planetary survival.

Until next time,  stay faithful.

Norm