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2020 (the year) hindsight
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Published: March 25, 2009
In the words of the old Chinese curse, we are likely to "live in interesting times" during the next decade. On reflection, I can't think of a decade that hasn't been pretty interesting in that sense.
Those who came of age in the psychedelic 60's thought Eisenhower's decade had been tedious. But the institutionalized innocence of the post World War II years was an understandable grasping at an illusion that "all will be well" in a time when Europe and much of Asia still lay ruins, the ashes of Holocaust still glowed, and Stalin ?? a mad atheist with nukes ?? had the power to vaporize us on a whim.
It's instructive to contemplate what's in store in the next decade, perhaps even more so to imagine how those who've lived through the 2010's will view the experience.
The year 2020 may be a time of confidence in an economy in mid-rise out of a periodic slump in the late 20?teens. The term "world economy" will be out of use by then, a redundancy like "pizza pie."
Having rebounded by 2010, the only economy will have grown excessively for few years as investors fled to stocks from fixed-return assets threatened by the looming inflation that the money-printing recovery process set in train.
Russia will be a dissatisfied nation in 2020, having reached and sustained a moderately comfortable standard of living but also having reached an economic "monoculture plateau" by mid-decade. The penalty for excessive reliance on energy exports will have come home to roost by then, leaving Russia exposed like a tree that's been too heavily fertilized near its trunk when an extended drought comes along.
After a frightening brush with political chaos in the wake of the 2008-2009 recession, China will have resumed economic growth but at a more moderate pace than in the first decade of the 21st century. Recoiling somewhat from unbridled materialism, China will have taken to heart something like the lesson Macbeth learned: "Nought's had, all's spent when our desire is got without content."
In China, the spiritual fatigue that comes from sustained excessive personal and business competition will have sparked a borrowing of mechanisms of civil collaboration from the United States.
In 2020, China will have come to understand that scorning religion as an "opiate of the masses" only worked to numb human empathy, opening the door to the horrors of Mao's Cultural Revolution. No opiate now, spirituality will have become a welcome aspirin––taking the edge off the pain of Communism's corruption and cold, arbitrary power.
Surprisingly, economic interaction with the Third World––especially Africa and South America––will have been an indirect channel through which American Evangelical Christianity has reached China. If China's historians are allowed to disclose it, the wide influence of American and European missionaries in pre-Mao China may be acknowledged so that markets are not the only historic Sino-American link understood.
By 2020, a secular altruism of the American stripe will have been growing in China as well. By the mid 20-teens, a natural human hunger to trust others and feel good about one's self will have––if tolerated by the party––made service clubs welcome sanctuaries from the double menace of communist totalitarianism fueled by frenetic commerce.
Rotary International Clubs are already established in a few of China's major cities. By 2020 they should be fairly widespread. Most Chinese will have perceived––and will have at least begun to recoil from––the power of commence untempered by compassion. Applying one the Rotarians' Four-Way Tests ("Will it be beneficial to all concerned?") would have scotched the idea of using toxic melamine as an export pet food extender.
Back home, by 2020 the 1990's folly of conflating political conservatism with Christian fundamentalism to the detriment of both will have become sadly obvious. Parties and politicians of a secular bent, who would otherwise have simply ignored religion, will have had two decades to hone strategies for recruiting the rebellious young by lampooning the censorious religious and casting the gentle as naïve in pop culture. Thus Asia and Africa may be emerging as areas where faith is needed and esteemed just as the US slips in the opposite direction, following Europe's lead.
Barack Obama and other world leaders will, if they stick to his vision, have broken the hold of oil on the economy by 2020. To do so, they need only get 15 or 20 percent of American vehicles (not just cars) running on renewable fuels and off extracted carbon.
At that point, the paradigm will have shifted irreversibly. Feasibility will no longer be in doubt and capital will be flowing fast into the new technologies while investment in an over-saturated oil market dries up.
Mooresville's Stan Thompson is a retired strategic planner and environmental futurist for BellSouth Telecommunications. His column appears every other week in the Tribune. Email him at: HST2nd@aol.com
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