A Gift for Future Generations
by Professor C. West Churchman
June, 1996
This is a proposal to celebrate the coming of a new century and a new millennium by publicly sharing the joys and sorrows of the whole of humanity, and talking with our near progeny about our hopes for their future.
Since it's about the whole of humanity, this celebration is global. Since it's about the good things and the bad things in human life, the celebration is ethical. And since the overall condition of humanity is the result of our decisions, the celebra
tion is management. The acronym is gEm, a jewel with plenty of sparkle and a lot of flaws.
We are proposing a certain kind of celebration of the new century and one that reviews the past century and the past thousand years, but mainly one that tries to create a solid hope for the future, for all future generations. The hope is for a global
ethical management of all human activity, but like all hopes the proposal is also for a realistic systems approach.
Our hope is like a handful of seeds. Our celebration suggests how the seeds can be planted in the soil of ethics by means of a careful and caring management. We choose as a label for our endeavors the word "seminar", since the origin of the word come
s from "seed". Our vision involves the cultivation of seeds, plants and fruits; cultivating them so that they continue to evolve into a very special gift between now and the beginning of the next century, the beginning of the next millennium .
We've chosen three key words to describe our purpose because they convey best the notion that our gift to those who will live in the next millennium should be as nearly as possible a fulfillment of what they will need to lead better and better lives,
i. e., ethical lives.
Our present plan is to present a seminar, a seed planting course, over the internet, because we want the broadest possible audience worldwide. We don't believe that only "experts" know how to design and disseminate our gift; we are certain that many
people can help us in our endeavor. The more important requirement for seminar attendance is enthusiasm to secure improvement in the welfare of the humans in the next millennium.
We hope that the suggestion of a gift from one century's inhabitants to the generations to follow will ignite the enthusiasm.
Our present plan is to begin our first seminar with a consideration of the first three seeds of our present thinking. We will try in this seminar to explore what global, ethical and management mean. But the objective of the seminar is to provide fert
ile soil for the plant we're growing, and not just information. We believe that the roots of the plant are ideas, which the first seminar will try to explore. But the main purposes of the roots are to provide stability and to enable the plant to draw nour
ishment from the earth so that the plant can grow strong branches and healthy fruits, which are actions.
Simply put, we want to grow a plant that will have thousands of branches of a precious, delicious and highly nutritious fruit of human kindness. The growth process requires that we describe a great deal, the nature of the world problems and world joy
s, but the plant remains fruitless if there are no actions.
We believe that humanity in the past has created the ideas and sometimes the implementation of better health, better houses, better food, better transportation, better music and art, better education, better living, etc. But not globally. We don't kn
ow how to care for all humanity at the end of this century. The first step in constructing our gift for the next century is to admit this fact. It's a perfectly serious admittance. We were very smart in inventing marvelous technologies, better lighting, b
etter motor driven conveyances, better homes, better medicine, but we had no idea how to use these for everyone, or how to control their misuse.
We admit that the inventions our last century created, like phones, computers, airplanes, medicines, were never once intended for everyone; just those who could pay for them or had the power to acquire them. Most houses in the world have no electrici
ty, 35,000 children die every day in poverty, most people have no education to speak of, the huge majority of humans go daily to work in utterly boring and uninspiring jobs.
We in gEm don't believe that simply being served by technologies constitutes success or enables anyone to be "happy". But we do admit to being unhappy about the lack of success in equality of access to technology (and its benefits) throughout the var
ious systems of human activity. Such an admission is essential in any effort to secure improvement in the ethical management of global human activity.
Hence, we in gEm believe that admission is the key to global management and that the main purpose of our seminars will be to create an environment in which people can experience a healthy admission; to admit that as of yet, we do not know how to care
for all humanity.
How does one century present a gift to the next? As far as we know, nobody has ever asked this question in the way we are asking it. Our guess in general to all gift givers is that the gift giver should know what kind of gift he's giving, why it will
be pleasing and beneficial for the gift receiver, and to explain to the receiver how to use it in an ethical manner, and finally, in our case at hand, how the underlying idea of the gift can be passed on to future generations.
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