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Tuesday, February 5, 2013

Futurama: Al Gore’s Mistaken View of 'The Future' - Newsweek and The Daily Beast

Futurama: Al Gore’s Mistaken View of 'The Future' - Newsweek and The Daily Beast
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  1. RAYLOKEFebruary 5, 2013 at 6:04 PM


    The career trajectories of the two have been very different. Carter had the advantage of having been the president. Carter therefore had political success on his CV. But Gore, a man of exceptional talent, had failure on his; and that surely lit the fire under him for overarching success in some other way. So while Carter continued working for human rights, as in his bold writings on the Middle East peace process, and even went so far as to build huts for the poor in Central America, Gore chose a different career path, deciding to think and write big.







    He surely succeeded beyond his wildest expectations as the author of An Inconvenient Truth. But his phenomenal success had little to do with science (which has remained somewhat controversial: many of us remember for instance the not-too-distant scare about global cooling, also from climate scientists) and much to do with the photographs of polar bears caught on drifting ice as glaciers melted. An image like that is what we all need when we push our pet agendas. Alas, none of us is so fortunate. Nor is Gore as he turns now to writing about our future.


    Speculating about the future has attracted the likes of Jules Verne, whose many outlandish fantasies eventually came to life. These writers let their astonishing scientific imaginations run wild. However, there are also those who entered into profound speculations on the future progress of mankind. Would it be marked by progress or would we descend into a dystopia instead? Darwin had captivated his contemporaries in science with the theory of the “survival of the fittest,” and this had influenced deeply social philosophers such as Herbert Spencer, who remarked drily that “the ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.” He thought that society left to itself would travel down the path of progress, ushered in by successive scientific advances. But then we also had the inevitable opposing reaction, signified most eloquently by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World and George Orwell in 1984; they debunked the very idea of progress.


    But the dominant approach to future gazing today is different. Many want to forecast the future with a view to corrective policy action. If lemmings are moving toward a chasm, you want to predict that they will go over the cliff if they do so; the corrective action then is to set up a diversion so they will go down a different path and will avoid the disaster. This is what Gore sought to do with An Inconvenient Truth: he identified a future where global warming, unchecked, would produce several disasters, and then he proposed remedies. It is also his main motivation for divining the future, if no action is taken, in several areas of interest to him, such as the globalization of the world economy.


    The problem Gore faces in the bulk of this book therefore is that his identification of problems, and his proposed solutions, are not compelling. His erudition is considerable but is necessarily limited since he casts his net wide, and he is both unfamiliar with important issues pertinent to his analysis and also shallow in his prescriptions for remedial policies. I will illustrate with two prime examples.
    ... cont/-

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