The Commission did some good things. It was woefully underestimated-as an organisation but most of all as an idea. Paradoxically, it came before its time.

There were many attempts, as we approached the millennium, to look to what we could expect from the 21st century. Lots were replete with buzzwords, corporate-speak and hype, all of which faded to very little when you tried to tease out the content. The work I found most interesting was by a fellow I actually interviewed for the first-ever episode of the Science Show back in 1975. He was Herman Kahn, founder and director of the Hudson Institute.

I met Kahn at the Hyatt Hotel in Vancouver. He was sitting on his bed in his underwear eating grapes, looking like a gargantuan Jewish Nero at a kosher Roman banquet. He was casually polite but characteristically acute. When I asked him why the West needed enough nuclear bombs to blow up the world hundreds of times over, he retorted that we don’t look at machine-gun belts and assume each bullet will kill a man. He was casually, analytically precise. His book, Thinking the Unthinkable, had explored this theme.

Two years later, in 1977, came his book on the future, The Next 200 Years. It was outrageously ambitious, but typical of Kahn the number cruncher, the physicist, the conservative sceptic. When read today, exactly 30 years after it was published and decades after his death, it is a revelation and worth re-examining to see how much he was on track.

He divided opinion into four categories. Do they apply today? They were: Convinced Neo-Malthusian, Guarded Pessimist, Guarded Optimist, Technology-and-Growth Enthusiast.

To elaborate:

Convinced Neo-Malthusian

Current estimates show we will be running out of many critical resources in the next 50 years… Because the pie shrinks over time, any economic growth that makes the rich richer can only make the poor poorer… Proposed technological solutions to problems of pollution or scarce resources are shortsighted or illusions… All signs point to catastrophe for the medium-and long-term future… Future economic growth will hasten and increase the tragedy… Prudence requires immediate restraint… Further industrialization of The Third World will be disastrous… The quality of life ruined…

You get the picture.

Guarded Pessimist

Excessive conservation poses small risks while excessive consumption will be tragic… If we don’t reform voluntarily, more painful political and economic changes may be imposed on us by the catastrophic events made inevitable by failure to act soon… A more cautious approach to growth seems clearly desirable… Unless we take drastic action soon, mankind may be overwhelmed by climate changes, destruction of ocean ecology, excessive pollution or other disasters.

Not bad for 1977!

Guarded Optimist

As the rich get richer the poor also benefit… Despite some dangers, only new technology and capital investment can increase production; protect and improve the environment… With rapid progress and good management generally, even higher economic levels and an outstanding quality of life become possible… There seems to be more than enough energy, resources and space for most populations, assuming that a relatively small number of people put forth the necessary efforts and others do not interfere.

Technology-and-Growth Enthusiast

The important resources are capital, technology and educated people… Man has always risen to the occasion and will do so in the future despite dire predictions from the perennial doomsayers who have always been scandalously wrong… There is little doubt that sufficient land and resources exist for continual progress on earth… We flatter ourselves that current issues are more important and difficult than ever. Actually there is nothing very special happening. Economics and technology can provide superb solutions. No obvious limits are apparent… Man is now entering the most creative and expansive period of his history. These trends will soon allow mankind to become the ‘master’ of the solar system.

ONWARDS!!

So which of the four did Kahn choose as most likely to fit the future? Again I quote:

We believe that plausible and realistic scenarios can be written consonant with a view that sees the world moving from C (Guarded Optimist) to D (Growth Enthusiast). We argue that there is both need and opportunity for growth, and that because America and the rest of the nations of the developed world do use resources so intensely, there will be stimulation, not depression, for the economies of less-developed countries.

But Kahn gave two qualifications, again insightful: ‘We would like to stress that in no sense do we wish to play down the importance of the issues raised by neo-Malthusians or to assert that there are no serious problems.’

One of the problems that is starkly apparent in 2007 is that, as Kahn predicted, America has become unevenly but spectacularly wealthy. As a result many Americans have forsaken their traditional values. It is worth quoting his exact words:

It is clear that the world of the immediate future will be confusing, complex and very difficult to cope with. Among the features cited in this short-term projection that concerns us most-and one to be considered a central issue for the transition, and possibly for the long term as well-is the erosion of the traditional societal levers and their replacement by other values, both transient and relatively permanent. It is primarily the upper middle class which has begun to experience this erosion at this point; perhaps three fourths of the American people still share traditional values. We believe, however, that erosion may eventually affect the rest of society… But if we are correct and traditional values cannot be restored, then Americans will have to import, invent and inculcate new values.

Other nations would look at them askance, see the avarice and indulgence, piety and vulgarity-and become antagonistic. What Kahn does not mention is the incendiary role of religion in this new standoff. He pictures his countrymen and women, instead, as victims of riches:

Americans are going to be enormously wealthy, so they must learn how to spend their wealth without becoming satiated, disappointed or fashionably antimaterialistic. They have to learn to take certain everyday affairs seriously (without becoming obsessed with them) in order to avoid boredom, and to compensate for the fact that they no longer have life and death struggles to engage their emotions. They have to learn to be gentlemen and ladies who pass their time doing difficult-if not useful-things well.

Remember, Kahn was writing before the fall of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, before anyone had heard of AIDS and before the enormous increase in disturbing knowledge about ‘ecology’. This was nine years after Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb and only five years after the transforming UN Environment Conference in Stockholm in 1972. He had the four ‘types’ taped, though, and could understand our complex need for both cautious optimism and wary concern.

The future will be determined by each of us being able to incorporate elements of all four types. I can imagine an enlightened businessperson, who understands how markets work best, setting up the choice of the new technologies to solve problems of production and remediation, all in cooperation with the most able of our conservationists looking sternly at the pitfalls.