The Present Through the Lens of the Future – Part 4 – Evolving Our Values

June 4, 2018
Musings

Imagine it is 500 years in the future and there is a student whatever-the-equivalent of ‘reading’ whatever-is-the-equivalent of a ‘book’ of history*Given that ‘history is written by the victors’ and the narrative recorded in the ‘book’ will thus depend on the path society has taken, we are necessarily predicting the future when we seek to answer the question.  But absurd idealizations of objectivity aside, how might the present moment be viewed? about our present. What will be considered the grand challenge of our time*One boundary condition is necessarily that there is someone to ask the question, thus some degree of ‘victory condition’ must have been met (from an existential perspective).  So in answering the question, perhaps it is impossible to avoid the bias of our own perspective on what must be true if we are indeed going to survive.?

The contenders:

  • Climate Change
  • Finite Resources
  • A World Without Growth
  • Evolving Our Values
  • Expanding ‘I’
  • Coping with Acceleration
  • Digital Life
  • Polarization vs. Homogeneity

Evolving Our Values

If the ‘age of growth’ is coming to a close, what will fill the vacuum created by our prime metric (GDP) ceasing to be the principal means by which we measure our progress? Finding a way of measuring, and ‘valuing’, what we value (and creating the boundary conditions for society that enable these values to propagate) is surely a candidate for our grand challenge.

I am far from the first to voice the idea that perhaps it is time to revisit the metrics that we use to measure our society. One might argue that our present climate challenge stems from a failure to negatively value the externalities on our environment, which in turn is evidence of a failure to value what is indeed valuable in the natural world (even if only from the lens of valuable to people). The sets of policies and regulations embodied by governments serve as proxy for our collective values, and the boundary conditions policies impose on markets serve to enable them to align with these values. We should be unsurprised by a system that has been selected (naturally and synthetically) for efficiency fulfilling its obligate mandate to the greatest extent possible – it’s our role to ensure that this mandate aligns with our needs, present and future.

It is high time to have a public discussion of the values by which we wish to organize society, and to ‘internalize’ these values in our policy and in our markets.