Fight the Future
The Changing Face of Global Risk
Josh Yates
October 1, 2001
The Word of the Lord came unto me, saying: O miserable cities of designing men, O wretched generation of enlightened men, Betrayed in the mazes of your ingenuities, Sold by the proceeds of your proper inventions … -T.S. Eliot, "Choruses from the Rock" Life has always been a risky business. Throughout history, hazards and uncertainties-famines, wars, and plagues, as well as the more mundane vicissitudes of living and dying-have been defining factors of the human condition. And yet, paradoxically, the human condition has been, in its way, remarkably stable. Every age has had its perils, but every age has also had its attendant sages and prophets-men and women who have interpreted life's uncertainties, spinning life's very instability into a common human thread. That we still quote Socrates, Augustine, Buddha, and Confucius speaks not only to the keenness of their individual visions, but also to the universality and timelessness of the most basic questions of human being-put most succinctly by Tolstoy: What am I? Why do I live? What am I to do? Despite their timeless nature, however, these very questions have undergone a remarkable metamorphosis in our age. What is novel about our time and place is not that we don't care about the same ultimate issues, nor even that that we lack sages and prophets (in America at least, prophesy has become remarkably democratized). What is new is that over the past century we have come to live in a world where dangers we ourselves have created are as consequential as those that come from the world around us. Our age is no more uncertain than any other, but the nature of the uncertainties we must confront-and the means by which we make that confrontation-have been transformed by the modern science ...
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