Wanted: “New and Unique Ideas” to Address World Energy Policy

According to the Writer’s Almanac:  It was on this day in 1837 that Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered a speech titled “The American Scholar” to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard University.  The speech was the first time he explained his transcendentalist philosophy in front of a large public audience. He said that scholars had become too obsessed with ideas of the past, that they were bookworms rather than thinkers. He told the audience to break from the past, to pay attention to the present, and to create their own new, unique ideas.

If we are to take Emerson’s advice and try to divorce ourselves from conceptual constraints of the past, one of the most important new ideas is a world that solves its problems in ways that don’t involve war.

When we look around the globe, we see immediately that war is the paradigm of world relations.  Someone wants something that someone else has, and takes it by force.  In retaliation, we have a reprisal in the form of an equal and opposite show of violence.  A bunch of old men order a bunch of young men to go kill one another.

Humankind really needs to get past this, and move to a new framework of thought in which war isn’t the go-to solution to all international issues.  War just needs to go out of style; it’s so “last-millennium.”  Yes, this is going to be bad news for John McCain and his weekly speaking gig on Sunday morning television here in the U.S., but it sure will be a welcome relief to the other seven billion of us.

Having said all this, let’s acknowledge that replacing war as the number one tool to manage world affairs will be a heck of a lot easier in a day in which resources—especially energy resources—are more abundant than they are now.  Arguably the most horrific single effect of our current energy policy (i.e., burning an ever-dwindling supply of fossil fuels, which causes climate change and other forms of environmental degradation, which in turn results in increasing shortages of food and water) is that, when layered on top of population growth, we have heightened scarcity, and thus even greater motivation to go to war.

This forms the main imperative for new solutions here, which, again, takes us back to Emerson’s challenge.  Let’s take it seriously.