Now is the time

Abstract

AbstractWithin the next few years, our increasing international stresses seem likely to lead either to catastrophe or to major structural change. Our global technologies and global problems are pressing us inexorably toward a global level of human organization. But most of our current thinking about such problems is limited to the context of the present unstable system of more or less independent nations. It does not deal with the question of what new kind of global management structure we may have to adopt in order to get more security and more stability. “We are floundering for lack of a long‐run vision of where we want to be.”Could we begin to design such a structure? There have been brilliant advances in “social technical knowledge” in the last 40 years, for example in cybernetics, systems theory, game theory, psychology, management theory, micromotives and macro‐behavior, and the science of negotiation. These new disciplines might make possible the invention of various kinds of new self‐stabilizing social structures with democratic or mutual self‐management by the nations and peoples involved. Such forms based on modern principles and experiments might actually work much better than most of our present old‐fashioned and patchwork political arrangements.A discussion is given of the basic requirements for a global peace‐keeping system of this kind, if it is to be both effective and acceptable, with minimum interference with existing governments. Many variations are possible (as with biological organisms) as long as certain stability rules are not violated. If an experienced multinational group representing several disciplines could work out the principles of such a global management structure—one that offered a hard‐headed improvement in security and positive advantages to the major powers—it might give a larger view that would change the context and the thinking in many of our confrontations today.At crucial times in history, there have been astonishingly sudden step‐ups to new levels of organization, sometimes by deliberate design. In the next few months or years, at some moment of crisis, with international shock and public pressure, it could happen again. Now is the time to apply our new social knowledge to the drafting of a new global peace‐keeping design that could be ready for consideration when that moment comes.