Ethics of future remedy, past and present

By Jerome Binde

PARIS: Five years after the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Agenda 21 remains, for the most part, a dead letter. "Rio plus five" looks embarrassingly like "Rio minus five". How long can we afford the luxury of inaction?

"We are hurtling into the future, without any brakes and in conditions of zero visibility. Yet, the faster a car goes, the brighter its headlights must be", says Federico Mayor, director general of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.

Without proper attention, future generations are in danger of becoming the prisoners of unmanageable processes such as population growth, degradation of the global environment, growing inequalities between the North and South and within societies, rampant social and urban apartheid, threats to democracy and mafia activity.

Modern societies suffer from a distorted relationship to time. A major contradiction is at work in which on the one hand societies need to project themselves into the future in order to survive and prosper.

On the other hand, they must increasingly act in 'real time' and adopt short-term policies to cope with the challenges of globalization while facing the onslaught of new technologies.

There is no escape, it seems, from the tyranny of emergency: financial markets, the media, politics (especially come election time) and development aid all march to the same tune.

As for Dilbert, a cartoon character lost in his cubicle world, the horizon of modern societies has shrunk, in time and in space.

Far from a passing phenomenon, the logic of emergency is fast becoming a permanent feature of our societies and of our policies. And yet, as evidenced by the contradictions of humanitarian aid or, in Europe, of the struggle against unemployment, short-term and emergency measures have little impact on long-term problems.

Development in the 21st century will require long-term vision and long-term investments, such as in education and health for all, science and technology, especially new information and communication technologies, and infrastructure.

Rehabilitating with a long-term vision means that social players and decision-makers will have to stop tinkering with the present and start anticipating the future. Shaping the future is by no means an easy task: several generations may elapse before we can reap the fruits of our labor.

"The ethics of the future", says Federico Mayor, "is an ethics of farmers. It consists in transmitting a heritage." The reinforcement of anticipation and preventative measures is therefore a priority for governments, international organizations, scientific institutions, social players and the private sector.

UNESCO has taken steps in that direction in the past years in setting up an analysis and forecasting unit with the cooperation of Candido Mendes, president of the senior board of the International Social Sciences Council. It convened an international meeting in July 1997 in Rio de Janeiro on "the ethics of the future".

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan also recently set up within his office a strategic planning unit to identify emerging global trends and issues, and proposed the convening in 2000 of a millennium assembly to prepare for the 21st century.

An ethics of the future means more than a long-term vision. It means, first of all, that responsibility should now be turned toward the distant future.

What has been entrusted to us by nature and by past generations is fundamentally fragile and perishable: life, cities, the Earth itself.

We need to broaden the social compact to encompass future citizens. Our sense of responsibility toward them is a condition of their survival.

Second, it also means the exercise of the principle of precaution, to take into account the possible consequences of our actions and also the uncertain, and even the unforeseeable -- in other words, we must learn to manage risk.

Third, it means that heritage extends beyond stones. It encompasses the intangible and the symbolic, the ethical, the ecological and the genetic.

In this spirit, UNESCO's International Bioethics Committee has prepared a draft declaration on the protection of the human genome.

Heritage thus becomes a foundation of human responsibility toward future generations, for "in the absence of a link between the past and the future, any reference to tradition is doomed to appear as an ideological conceit, or worse, as a regressive fundamentalism," says Belgian philosopher Francois Ost.

Caring about the future has profound political implications. Max Weber warned that "the proper business of the politician is the future and his responsibility before the future."

We must steer a path that will bring closer to us the horizon of the future, through the formulation of intermediate projects still within our reach. An ethics of the future is quite simply an ethics of time, which rehabilitates not only the future itself, but also the past and the present.

Those who would have us ignore the plight of the poor and the excluded are usually the same who would have us turn a blind eye on disappearing languages or ignore the hole in the ozone layer. Sharing with present generations and caring for future generations are intimately related.

An ethics of the future would be useless if it is not translated into educational, scientific, technological, economic, financial and political measures, laying the foundations for a genuinely human and sustainable development.

For millions of human beings, many of them children, an ethics of the future would bring the promises of the future closer to the present. As Craig Keilburger, the 14-year old founder of Free the Children, put it: "it also takes a child to raise a village". To paraphrase a great lawyer, the future delayed is the future denied.

The writer is the director of analysis and forecasting unit of UNESCO.