In the twenty-first century the question “Where are we going?” looms larger for us than ever, because we live in a time of upheaval. The age of Western domination of the world is drawing to a close. At the same time climate change threatens our ecosystem. The AI revolution is driving us into a state where it is hard to gauge how the future will change.
The arrival of a new paradigm, the Industrial Revolution and the globalisation of trade, made human life comfortable and opened many possibilities for the future. At the same time humanity set out on the road of greed that the Industrial Revolution and the spread of trade set off. In the past we held the optimistic view that the whole world could develop together: the twentieth-century age of ideology, with its many promises of the future, was that. But now we must not only give up that optimistic view; we have come to a situation in which we worry about humanity’s future because of human greed.
Before the Industrial Revolution, human economic activity was carried on under the great premise that human beings could not harm nature. Within these bounds the political-economic thought of East and West developed as two different patterns, each showing its strengths and weaknesses. But now, two hundred years after the Industrial Revolution, we are for the first time directly facing, without our knowing it, the problems the Industrial Revolution brought to human beings. With the sudden rise of problems on a world scale, human beings have reached a situation in which they cannot properly prepare measures against them.
Before the Industrial Revolution, trade stopped at exchanging goods to mutual benefit. But after the Industrial Revolution, as advanced technology and science were put to use, the relations among human beings, nature and nations changed in revolutionary ways. First, human beings are using the earth’s resources on a massive scale and driving them rapidly towards an unsustainable state. The greed that human beings alone have, which no other animal has, is at work. At the level of nations, resources and goods have gone beyond mutually beneficial exchange into a relationship in which they are objects of greed. The widening gap between rich and poor between developed and developing countries, global warming, and the pandemics that follow from it all have as their background the greed that human beings alone possess. After the Industrial Revolution, as vast capital joined with national power that had the strength to back it and reached out into the world, ruthless profit-seeking became possible.
Climate change, a problem human beings made, directly affects how human beings survive and, beyond that, whether they can survive. Human beings are part of nature. Each generation living on earth must protect the environment well and hand it on to the next. But the present generation is failing utterly in this role. It is handing on to its descendants a situation in which the damage of vast climate change has now become everyday. It sets its selfishness to work by “exploiting” nature, and cannot control it. This tendency works strongly above all in Western civilisation, which made nature “an object of conquest and management.” Revealed religion’s doctrine of the conquest of nature carries on into Descartes’s thought that “man is the master of nature.” Eastern thought takes a different direction in this relationship of human beings and nature. The East understands human beings as part of nature and stresses harmony and mutual flourishing between human beings and nature.
The importance of the East’s role did not arise suddenly in a century or two. It is bound up with Eastern civilisation. The East had already formed nation-states almost two thousand years before the West. (Of course, since the East learned from Western democracy the institution of the peaceful replacement of leaders, nation-states and democratic states must be distinguished.) The forming of nation-states necessarily gives rise to, and develops, a political economy of minben (民本主義), government for the people. The West began to form nation-states only after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Looking at the West, Greece and Rome were systems for running conquest states, and the thousand years of the Middle Ages were lived under a system of revealed religion. Only in the Enlightenment did the West open its eyes to Eastern thought. At that time Western thinkers were captivated by the East’s “natural philosophy.” In political economy the West was deeply influenced by the Daoist idea of wuwei (無爲, non-action) and established laissez-faire. The influence of the French Physiocrats was great.
In this process the political-economic systems of East and West took different shapes. The East put forward the idea of wuwei, which manages individual autonomy on the principle that private and public interest conflict. The West, avoiding state interference, left individual autonomy to itself. Adam Smith’s theory of the “invisible hand” came to represent this: the theory that public and private interest converge. The political economy of the East puts forward not an invisible hand but how to manage “the grabbing hand” so as to guarantee individual autonomy. This is the very essence of the idea of wuwei.
The gap between the political-economic systems of East and West slowly came to show its results. In the West the gap between rich and poor grows by the day, polarising society. It is becoming the greatest stumbling block of Western politics and economics. Some predict that widening polarisation will in the end weaken the liberal democratic system the West stands for.
The pursuit of greed, in which the winner of competition among nations takes all, was in the limelight above all in the age of the West’s conquest of the world. As this coincided in time with the Industrial Revolution, the West came to rule the world. The last few centuries have run on as the West’s domination of the world. But now, in the twenty-first century, the world has entered a new phase. Amid the West’s conquest of the world, the rise of the East has put the world in a new phase. As a result of the Industrial Revolution, trade expanded worldwide and brought on climate change. At the same time the expansion of trade has led to a pursuit of greed for human and material resources across the world, and is now passing into the age of the AI revolution.
The West’s domination of the world, which began with the Industrial Revolution, is weakening greatly as we enter the twenty-first century. What will the world of the future be? The rise of the East plays a great part in picturing the world to come. The Industrial Revolution, which made the West’s domination of the world possible, was the West’s exclusive possession. But the AI revolution now rising is hard to imagine without the influence of the East: China, Korea, Japan. If the Industrial Revolution was a “muscle revolution,” the AI revolution is a “mind revolution.” Many outcomes and interpretations are possible, but one phenomenon runs through both revolutions: rising productivity together with a deepening gap between rich and poor, that is, the polarisation of society. How shall we deal with the AI revolution, likened to a double-edged sword?