In reviewing the 2R white paper, the metaphor of “cracks” kept recurring. Examples:
”visible and growing cracks are appearing in planetary civilization.”
“growing cracks go to the foundations of our societies:”
“Recently however, you’ve started noticing cracks appearing in some of the walls.”
The line about planetary civilization in particular, got me thinking - was there ever a prior time in which a unified planetary civilization was running smoothly, meeting everyone’s needs, and working quite well with no evident cracks? A cursory examination of the history of warfare, empire, colonialism, etc. exhibits mostly cracks. From a statistical standpoint, cracks are one of the most obvious features for a structural analysis of historical events and movements. So we are surprised that society is cracking now? Why?
In the case of the Fukushima disaster of March 11, 2011, cracks in civilization quite literally appeared due to deeper cracks in the bowels of the Earth itself. Plate pushes on plate. Pressure builds. Fault lines fracture. Energy releases. Earth shakes. Tsumanis arrive. It strikes me that if societies are cracking all over the place today, perhaps there is a cultural analog to the tectonic forces at work in the Earth. Perhaps there is a force or pressure shoving cultural formations into one another, resulting in folding, thrusting, fracturing, subduction, or metamorphic transformations.
To extend the geological metaphor a bit more, continents were once tiny islands of granite drifting in a sulphurous sea. These bits of emergent lightweight crustal area amalgamated to one another over time, resulting in the larger continents we currently inhabit. Mountain ranges, rift valleys, and volcanic island arcs today testify to the dynamic forces rearranging continental landscapes over geologic time. But did not human civilization work essentially the same way? Tiny urban outposts accreted neighboring marches. Territories grew and spread. Civilization collided with civilization. Fault lines arose. Violent episodes rearranged the cultural landscape time and time and time again. Today’s national borders bear witness to these collisions and fractures of bygone eras.
It seems to me a “planetary civilization” which arguably we do not even have yet, would be a sort of cultural Pangea, the result of everything cultural accreting to everything else. Forces like human population growth - and the technical advances that supported such population growth - seem motive enough to smash every group into every other group, with cracks and conflicts appearing at every such encounter. The history of cracks is approximately the history of history itself.
Can we imagine a world without cracks? The moon is a world without tectonics - not enough core energy to keep dragging its crust around. The Earth’s core may cool that much too - eons from now. But how about culture? Will the core of culture ever cool down enough to obviate cracks? Seems unlikely in the near term. Perhaps crack management or crack remediation are the practical disciplines we might most practically focus on now.