Imagining the Future

Another way to consider progress is to look at our commitment to reach certain objectives. At the Millennium Summit in September 2000, 189 countries adopted a global to-do list. The eight goals are to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger; achieve universal primary education; promote gender equality and the empowerment of women; reduce child mortality by two-thirds; improve maternal health; combat hiv/aids, malaria, and other diseases; ensure environmental sustainability; and cultivate a global partnership for development. The fact that we have come together to articulate these goals, and committed ourselves to meeting them, gives a sense of the true nature of our human project.

Are we on target to get through the list by the deadline of 2015? No. Are some places getting worse, not better? Certainly, but very few. Are some developed countries negligent in meeting their obligations? Yes. But are we making progress? Absolutely. We may be behind schedule but we are mostly moving forward. For instance, based on current trends, child mortality rates will be 15 percent lower in 2015 than they were in 1990. If the trend continues, we won’t meet the Millennium goal until 2045. Thirty years late — but still a staggering human accomplishment, made possible by collective global collaboration.

Another way of measuring progress is to look at not only what we have defeated but what we have embraced. We have embraced wealth in all of its dimensions. In fact, one accomplishment of Massive Change was to reconfigure notions of wealth to include freedom, education, literacy, mobility, human rights, health, sanitation, communication, collaboration, science, technology, knowledge, and now, increasingly, sustainability.

To a large degree, the greatest challenge we face as a global culture — sustainability — is a consequence of our great success. We are six billion people today, not because we have failed in designing solutions to the problems we have faced, but because we have overcome many of the worst problems afflicting people around the world.


In the course of our work on Massive Change, we met an extraordinary man named Stewart Brand. An innovator and entrepreneur, he was the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, a countercultural landmark in the late sixties and early seventies. He led a campaign to convince nasa to make a photograph of the Earth from space, an image that has become a defining icon of our age.

Brand is also a founder of The Long Now Foundation, an effort to expand our cultural time horizon from the next fiscal quarter to the long term. He believes that when people think things are bad and getting worse, they do the usual things people do to protect themselves: They circle their wagons, hunker down, and close the border. They move to gated communities in their cities and in their hearts. They take what they can get while they can still get it.

However, if they come to understand that things are improving — that we are working together to make things better — they will invest in their communities and their businesses, in their children and their family, in their culture and education. They will do so because once they discover that things are actually getting better, enlightened self-interest will make them want to be part of the improvement.

I think we have been missing something quite important in assessing where we really stand, and this gap limits our forward momentum. We have been missing it because the old politics of Left versus Right are no longer relevant or helpful. A more collaborative approach is emerging. Rather than seeing things in terms of Left or Right, this approach seeks indicators of social and economic progress along a continuum running from retrograde to advanced.

To grasp the approach, think of an image whose pixels have been distributed to a million citizens worldwide. It is an image of collaboration, shared problem-solving, accessibility, and collective enterprise. It is a complex and beautiful image, perhaps the most beautiful image of all time. In contrast, our understanding of the world is driven by a media culture obsessed with violence and conflict. The tenor is one of negativity and crisis, which translates into pessimism and cynicism, and from there to apathy and paralysis. This negative world view can erode human agency — and without that, we’re basically sunk.

As a global culture we are beginning to outgrow polarized and binary divisions but we still confuse the media with reality. If we were to publish a newspaper called Reality, it would be a mile thick. The first quarter-inch would arrive on your doorstep, scare the hell out of you, push the worst of human possibility into your world, make you want to lock your doors, inhibit your impulse toward community, and drive you to xenophobia, resentful and fearful of all the violent others determined to ruin your life. The rest of the mile of newspaper — the reality of our world, the part that never gets published — would be Massive Change, the story of how millions of people from every part of the world are working together to confront the dilemmas we face as a global society.