Five Centuries

of the Future

Eamonn Kelly

The Scottish Parliament Futures Event

December 6, 2004

The Futures Event, held in the Scottish Parliament on December 6, 2004, was hosted by and
at the invitation of presiding officer George Reid MSP, with the assistance of the International
Futures Forum. The all-day session, attended by 150 invited participants, was held to consider
what it might take to make Scotland a leader in anticipating the future. Most of the discussion
took place in smaller groups in a variety of settings in the Parliament building, with a final
plenary discussion in the chamber itself. Eamonn Kelly, CEO and president of Global Business
Network, gave the opening address, a “warp-speed” tour of five centuries of the future.
Five Centuries of the Future
It is truly a great pleasure to be here. I have seldom expressed that sentiment with greater sincerity
than I am doing this morning. The quality of the people in the room is extraordinary. So many of
you have been fellow travelers with me on my journey over the last 12 years in trying to think
better about the future; indeed, many of you have been guides to me, and I am deeply indebted. It’s
a wonderful community to see assembled in this place, which is tremendously symbolic in itself.
Finally, the purpose of the event—the initiative that the International Futures Forum and others
have been working on for a long time—feels to me a moment just ripe with opportunity. So it’s a
real pleasure and privilege to be here, and I genuinely look forward to spending today with you all.

I was asked to offer some reflections based on my experience of thinking longer term about the
future, in particular regarding the “big picture”—the main thing you’d like people to be thinking
about. That’s a big, broad territory. The other thing I was asked to do was to be brief. This is a day
of dialogue and interaction, not of speeches. So I have been asked to constrain my comments about
this fairly infinite topic to about 20 minutes, and I commit to doing so. I will try to take this huge
picture—everything in the world—down to some brief observations by reflecting on the three
major ways in which I’ve changed my mind, my perspective, over the last 12 years of thinking
about the future.

The first way I have changed my mind is that I started out, like quite a lot of people in this room,
with a strong focus on the future of the economy. A lot of my work was about the emergence of a
new, intangible, post-industrial, knowledge (take your pick of the jargon) economy. I was very
concentrated on trying to figure out what sort of global knowledge economy we are going to be
working in and how Scotland would compete in that economy.

As I’ve spent longer and longer working with the theme of the future, I’ve become increasingly
persuaded that there are many other key issues. To invert Bill Clinton’s electoral mantra from 1992:
It’s not just the economy, stupid. There really are a lot of other looming issues that require our
attention and concentration.

The second way in which I’ve changed my mind is that I started out by thinking about the longer
term trends and what’s going on in the world in order to create a better future for Scotland. But
increasingly I’ve concluded, with the issues that are in play at the moment in the world, that it’s
important for Scotland to engage with the global conversation, not just to create a better Scotland.
Because I truly believe that Scotland has a role in creating a better world. It’s a major shift in my
thinking in terms of the aspiration for a group of this sort. The world is in flux at the moment and
it’s going to be recast and reshaped in the coming decade or two. I truly believe that Scotland and
the Scots can play a significant role in helping to recast and reshape the future that we are all going
to exist in globally.

Finally, I used to think that insights into the future came from understanding the dynamics of
technology, demography, culture, politics, and economics. That was the way in which we could
figure out what the future was going to look like. In other words, as some of the speakers have

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already observed, don’t try to drive the car by looking in the rearview mirror but by taking a fresh
look through the windshield. I’ve really changed my thinking about that fairly significantly in the
last few years, because I increasingly found myself contending with issues where I really didn’t
understand enough history to figure out where the future lay. I came to understand the fairly
obvious point that the future’s roots are in the past and that if we don’t understand history then we
are not going to understand how we got here in the first place or where we might be going in the
future. So I really started to pay more attention to
thinking backward, not to see the future through the I came to understand the fairly
lens of the past but to understand the roots of the past
obvious point that the future’s roots
that will inform and help shape the future.
are in the past and that if we don’t
Bringing those things together, I want to share with understand history then we are not
you in the remaining time a kind of warp-speed tour going to understand how we got
of five centuries of the future. here in the first place or where we
might be going in the future. So I
I’m going to start with the seventeenth century, and
really started to pay more attention
the issue from that century that I think we will be
dealing with in the twenty-first. In 1648, in the Treaty to thinking backward, not to see the
of Westphalia, we essentially invented the notion of future through the lens of the past
the nation state. In the twenty-first century I think the but to understand the roots of the
nation state is becoming an increasingly meaningless past that will inform and help shape
concept—yet it’s the only real form of government the future.
we have in the world. If we look at what’s happening
in Iraq right now, for example, we are absolutely dedicated to retaining that nation with elections
for the whole nation. Nobody is talking about whether we could do elections in cities. Nobody is
talking about whether Iraq should be split into regions. Nobody is talking about anything other than
the nation state. It is completely locked into our consciousness as the form of government.

Yet we live in a global economy, in a world confronting the looming issues of climate change,
terrorism, infectious disease. Which one of these challenging issues conforms to national
boundaries? None of them. National boundaries have become increasingly meaningless in a
globalized world, yet our sole means of thinking about government still resides at the level of
national governance. Well, I think that is going to change. I think we are going to see the
emergence of nongovernmental forms of governance—of an important distinction between
government and governance. The role of corporations has already increased considerably. We are
also going to see the role of civil society increase significantly. I think the future of global
governance will have nation states, but it will also have a lot of other actors and a lot of new
instruments.

Scotland can play a role in all kinds of ways in being part of those instruments and part of those
communities that will emerge in the future. And let’s face it, Scotland has a pretty unique
perspective on being, but not really being, a nation. Our relationship with nationhood has been
complex, sophisticated, and subtle, and we have something to teach the rest of the world about that.

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Let’s move on to the eighteenth century. The theme I want to look at from this century is the
Enlightenment. I want to call out the rationality of reason, the power of science, materialism, the
dominion of man over nature—all of which appeared in the eighteenth century Enlightenment and
together really created secular modernity. I think in our lifetime the dominance of secular
modernity is coming to an end. We are now seeing the reemergence of the sacred worldview
alongside the secular worldview. Most of us have always assumed that the progress of mankind
was such that as education increased and prosperity increased the religious and sacred world would
decline. That’s been true in Europe but not in the United States, and we are not sure where it’s
going to go in the rest of the world.

We have been making an assumption that now has to be challenged. We can see in the U.S., with
Christian fundamentalism, and in other parts of the world, including where there is Islamic
fundamentalism, that the sacred world is very much back in play. Not just at the fundamentalist end
of the spectrum—it’s also emerging at the spiritual end; a rather more tolerant and inclusive
approach. Clearly more people are finding the materialism of the secular worldview insufficient to
deal with life.

So I want to argue that we are going to see in the coming decades a strong requirement for those of
us, and I include myself in this, which is firmly of the secular mindset, to have to figure out how we
accommodate the sacred mindset. It hasn’t gone away as we thought it might. It’s very much back
and going to be in play in the decades ahead. Scotland potentially has a big part to play in this
reintegration. Scotland really was home to the first Enlightenment, and maybe it can be so for the
second.

Let me move to the nineteenth century, where we saw the rise

of global power and the development of global rules, Although the U.S.enjoys
culminating in the power and reach of the British Empire. We unparalleled and
also saw in the nineteenth century the next superpower—the unchallenged military power
United States of America—limbering up and then continuing its
at the moment, I think that
run through the late twentieth century. I would argue that in the
coming decades we are going to see the decline of the U.S. as its hegemonic economic and
the defining superpower. We already have evidence of that. cultural influence in the world
Although the U.S .enjoys unparalleled and unchallenged will continue to fall into
military power at the moment, I think that its hegemonic greater and greater decline
economic and cultural influence in the world will continue to in the decades ahead.
fall into greater and greater decline in the decades ahead.

Instead I think we will see the emergence of new powers. Two of the most obvious are China and
India. Those are powers that will, in fact, have global reach and influence, and are not going to play
by the old rules of the old game. The rules are going to be changing, and particularly the rules
China will be establishing. China is already ahead, almost invisibly, creating relationships
everywhere. China is emerging as a leader with tremendous political influence across Asia. It is
developing extraordinary links right across Latin America: trade linkages, cultural linkages,
political linkages, and alliances around scientific collaborations of a sort that, frankly, the U.S. no
longer enjoys with its southern neighbors. It is also making a very strong foray into being the

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partner of choice for Africa. China recently committed to train, at its own expense, another 10,000
Africans as technicians in Chinese solar power because it recognizes Africa as an enormous future
market and wants to have the relationships in place to exploit it.

And very importantly, along with Brazil and to a lesser extent India, China is trying to reset the
rules about intellectual property and proprietary technologies. We have spent some years trying to
translate the traditional notions of economics based on ownership, property rights, possession, and
transfer that were developed in the physical economy into the intangible world of ideas and
intellectual property. The emerging powers are not going to play that game. They are quite
explicitly making a decision not to go there. It’s all going to be about open source, open
methodologies, open databases. That’s the future of science and technology when China is setting
the rules.

I think Scotland has a place here potentially as a bridge: a country that understands well; a country
that, let’s face it, basically invented America; a country that has relationships looking East. I
believe Scotland has a very significant cultural competence that enables us to act as the bridge-
makers to a different world.

Now let’s move to the twentieth century. There were so many different things I could have drawn
on here for my five centuries of the future, but the one I have chosen is the “paradoxes of
prosperity.” I think there were three important paradoxes of prosperity that emerged in the
twentieth century. The first is that as we prosper we go through periods of increasing polarization
between the haves and the have-nots, the people doing well and the people not doing well.

The second paradox of prosperity is that as prosperity spreads globally it increases the readjustment
and restructuring process throughout regions, and the pain of that change is experienced unequally.
We experienced the unequal friction burns of change in Scotland in the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s when
Scotland was a victim of structural economic shifts.

The third paradox of prosperity and perhaps the most

The third paradox of
challenging one is the “man over nature” mindset that we’re
deployed for economic growth for the last 200 years. We are prosperity and perhaps the
damaging the environment. I think we are now living in a world most challenging one is the
and in an era in which climate change is real, starting to happen, “man over nature” mindset
and becoming an important piece of our global civic that we’re deployed for
consciousness. We are seeing the evidence. A lot of the change economic growth for the last
is manmade, and a lot of it is natural. Climate has always been
200 years
changing quite autonomously—the planet has a mind of its own.
As the saying goes, “nature bats last.”

I think we will have to figure ways to deal with these paradoxes of prosperity. Scotland again has
had real experience in dealing with issues of polarization and transitional change and the friction
burns that result. Scotland also has something to offer in terms of environmental consciousness. So
I think here again there is a contribution—a gift to the world—that Scotland could be making.

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Finally I come to the twenty-first century. We’re just at the beginning of that, but I will presume
to identify at least one of the issues that is going to define this century: dealing with the “downsides
of science.” What do I mean by that? Well, at one extreme we can see weapons of mass destruction
and nuclear proliferation. If we think nuclear is bad, wait until we get to the next level of
bioweaponry.

The problem, however, lies in the easy access to such technology. You can buy DNA testing kits in
the U.S. for $70. Biotechnology is democratizing in exactly the same way as computing technology
did over the last 30 years. As we get closer to the point where that enables many people to do really
bad things, we are going to have to figure out what to do with science when it endangers and
threatens all of us.

At one end of the spectrum we can see science deliberately designed to do bad things to people.
Perhaps the more challenging end of the spectrum is a science that has been devised to do good
things to people—human enhancement. I think the potential here is extraordinarily rich and
extraordinarily challenging. We are learning in the course of this century; in the next couple of
decades even, what it really means to be human.

I want to illustrate this with reference to DARPA—the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency. This is the high-technology, cutting-edge, science-and-technology-investment agency for
the U.S. military. It has made investments over many years that have allowed the U.S. to gain and
enjoy today’s extraordinary superiority in military power. Essentially it was DARPA, not Al Gore,
that invented the Internet. Microprocessors, lasers, multi-fibers—every major technology that has
created the interconnected world we live in today, DARPA had some early hand in designing,
developing, or supporting.
…there is an infinite and
About five or six years ago, DARPA’s concentration and reckless demand for things
focus started to extend beyond technology. All that previous
that will make us better. I
investment had been about creating tools to make soldiers
think we have enormous
more powerful. More recently the focus has shifted to
changing the soldiers themselves to make them more ethical issues to contend with
powerful—literally changing their metabolisms. They are in terms of where we put the
working on vaccines against pain. They are working on drugs limits on those kinds of
that allow soldiers to go for seven days without sleep and investments and those kinds
drugs that allow soldiers to go without food, living off their of bets.
own body fat. What we are seeing at DARPA is not an
incredibly futuristic attempt but a decade-long one to change what it is to be human. If we look at
what’s happening in the world of sports right now, or what happens when people grow elderly and
want to hang on to youth, we see there is an infinite and reckless demand for things that will make
us better. I think we have enormous ethical issues to contend with in terms of where we put the
limits on those kinds of investments and those kinds of bets.

In the twenty-first century, dealing with the dilemmas of science is going to be an important
question for the world generally. Here Scotland has some particular strengths. Scotland has a
tremendous education and science base. It is trusted and respected in the world. I’ve used my

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Scottish accent shamelessly in my career; it seems to add hugely to my credibility. I have no idea
why this should be, but we are trusted—and that’s a very important thing to hang on to. We have
our own quite distinctive legal system, our own jurisprudence. In the same way that the Hague
“owns” human justice for the world, I think that all of these attributes can come together to make
Edinburgh or Glasgow the place that accommodates the best thinking and the best civil global
dialogue about the new ethics of the new science, the constraints that we are willing to impose on
ourselves, and the risks we are willing or not willing to take.

So, for all of these reasons, I believe that there are some big issues now in play, some of them rich
with challenge, some of them ripe with opportunity. The world is truly in flux. We are at a hinge
moment in history. What happens in the next couple of decades will, I believe, probably define
what happens for the rest of this century and beyond. And I think Scotland has a real role to play
and a contribution to make.

I am reminded of the big thing I learned from GBN cofounder Napier Collyns, who is here today,
when I started looking at how to learn from and participate in networks. He observed, and I have
since learned over the years, that each participant in a network must not think “What can I get from
this?” but “What can I bring to this?” If everyone starts with this spirit of generosity, then everyone
benefits; the networks work and we all get the learning we are looking for. That works very well in
individual learning, and I believe it works at the regional and civic levels as well.

I do believe that the world is going to be a better place 50 years from now, and that will be because
we will learn the power of giving and the value of generosity. The question I’d suggest here in this
group, a question to hang on to in the back of your minds, is not just how can Scotland do well in
the world, but what is Scotland’s gift to the world in light of the issues we are contending with now
and in the decades to come?

Eamonn Kelly is the CEO and president of Global Business Network, and the former head of
strategy at Scottish enterprise, the pre-eminent economic development agency. He is co-
author of What’s Next: Exploring the New Terrain for Business, and author of a forthcoming
book, Powerful Times.

© 2005 Global Business Network and International Futures Forum

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