The world is too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love.
Rev. William Sloane Coffin, Jr., 1924 – 2006,
 was a liberal Christian clergyman and long-time peace activist with international stature. He was ordained in the Presbyterian Church and later received ministerial standing in the United Church of Christ.  In his younger days he was a superb athlete, a highly talented pianist, a CIA agent, and later chaplain of Yale University, where the influence of Reinhold Niebuhr's social philosophy led him to become a leader in the civil-rights and peace movements of the 1960s and 1970s.  

Have you thought about getting away, about being left alone and leaving others alone?  As the population of our planet increases and the amount of land upon which we can live remains unchanged—if not, in fact, decreases—this dream of many people becomes a fading, wistful thought.  

In the previous part, we saw that technology could help keep other people’s problems from becoming our own.  But we saw that technology was dependent on the people who controlled it, and those in control did not always use technology to benefit the public.  

What then would be the solution?  

There is only one solution, that the control of technology be changed so that the technology not be used for nefarious ends.  The only way in which that could happen is  

·        if control were shared by many people;

·        all the controlling activities of those people were publicly known, immediately known;

·        any controlling activity could be challenged and halted by another group of people, akin to our American system of checks and balances.  

It would be necessary for the three points above  

·        to be based on rules agreed upon by people around the globe, much like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights;

·        to include people of different economic status, different faiths, different culture;

·        to be enforceable by a group pledged to uphold the rules, much like the United States armed forces upholds the Constitution, with this group under transparent civilian control.  

If there were an attempt to set up such a structure, from where might resistance come?  

·        Industrialists, inventors, and shareholders who wanted to control technology for profit.

·        Governments wanting to use technology to resist opposition and rebellion.

·        Rebels who see technology as the means to gain negotiating strength vis-à-vis governments.  

Such resistance would be considerable, probably insuperable.  What, then, could be done?  

May 29, 2008