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From here to eternity? In the first instalment of a two-part essay, Geoff Sharp argues that the technosciences are creating a radical discontinuity in human social life.

Article Excerpt
In the final sentences of the editorial which introduced the December-January issue of this magazine, Paul James pinpointed the single issue that has rapidly moved into the foreground when most Australians give thought to the future wellbeing of themselves and their children:

And if we don't start acting upon climate change mitigation, life as we know it in our relatively comfortable metropolitan centres will be swept over by a chaos hitherto unknown since Noah counted the animals.

Spot on. That's the scale of the transformation we are facing. Just for the present climate change is the main point of focus of the now widespread sense that our civilisation is at risk. Running a close second is the more domestically immediate awareness that we may be approaching peak oil. And quite apart from the way the present mode of oil consumption feeds into climate change, its short supply would have quite direct social consequences as well. For instance, unless there is a rapid turn towards alternative transport, a major increase in fuel prices would tend to immobilise the hundreds of thousands of people in the new suburbs of the outer urban fringe.

Then again, in close interaction with climate change, as well as the consumption of oil, there is the issue of the global population explosion with its potential to uproot settled ways of living and to prompt mass migrations on a global scale. Nobody talks about that much in Australia. It is as if, just because it is not close to home, we can continue on as if it carries no risk for us.

When the availability of clean air and water, or an accustomed climate, can no longer be taken as given because change is biting into basic conditions of existence, one basic reason for so many people being slow to react is exactly because those conditions are so profoundly taken for granted. When that assumption is placed in question people are left nonplussed. Especially in the short term, a sense of powerlessness is engendered. A deeper sense of being that we take to be the more or less stable ground of experience is affected. We can no longer simply take for granted the ground upon which our individual actions, along with our whole culture, is based.

At least in an historical register, shifts of this order have not been uncommon even if their sources have been distinctly varied. There is clear evidence that natural cycles of climate change have destroyed past civilisations. But the more immediately relevant issue is the way so many civilisations have destroyed themselves. Jared Diamond, in his recent book, Collapse (Allen Lane 2004), has set out numerous examples of how they have done so by over-consuming the natural resources upon which they depended.

Nevertheless ours may be the first civilisation that, while it has developed means of estimating the longer-term availability of the conditions and resources upon which it depends, is doubly unable to curb the way it is undermining them. Doubly so because, while it resembles past civilisations in the sense that it undermines its natural conditions of existence, it is quite radically set apart from them by normalising a radically different overall form of life: one that appeals to short-term gratification as well as to our sense of mortality.

In this, the first half...

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