In the year of my birth, Harry Truman was president of the forty-eight United States; George VI was King of Great Britain and had just ceased to be emperor of India; and Joseph Stalin was the dictator of something called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Airliners were driven by piston engines and could not cross the Atlantic without refueling in Newfoundland; and computers were the size of a large room and ran on vacuum tubes. A transatlantic telephone call was booked in advance and cost a good day's wage for a three-minute call; and if you produced a document (by pecking it out on a typewriter), you could only have a copy if you had placed a sheet of carbon paper under the original. The first commercial photocopy machine was to be sold that year. A secret U.S. government project was figuring out how a satellite might be launched into space to take photographs of the earth; and two scientists named Watson and Crick were figuring out that a molecule called deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA, for short) might contain the "genes" that Mendel had predicted. 

As a young boy in the 1950s, I consumed enormous amounts of low-grade science fiction, mostly in comic-book form. These presented an intriguing, if not necessarily convincing vision of a twenty-first century that seemed unimaginably distant, in which we would have flying cars, cities of soaring towers connected by aerial ramps, routine flights to colonies on other planets, atomic robots cleaning our houses, and gigantic computers the size of skyscrapers capable of conversing in natural language. As I grew older, I gradually became aware of not how rapidly things were progressing, but rather how slowly. The launch of Sputnik held the promise that space would soon be available as an arena for human activity. By the time of the moon landings, it became clear that space travel as actually practiced was extremely costly and was only being addressed by ponderous governmental bureaucracies. A life spent in the space program would not be spent jaunting to other planets, but mostly sitting at grey metal desks in government buildings creating endless viewgraph presentations about programs that would mostly be canceled before they ever cut metal. 

Internal combustion engines were replaced first with turboprops and then with jet aircraft. The first supersonic airliners never developed beyond the handful of Concordes kept aloft as political symbols, limited by high costs, sonic booms, and environmental concerns. Nuclear power became a political disaster rather than a source of cheap, unlimited power. Far from becoming the Radiant Cities of the future, cities seemed to be turning into urban wastelands prowled by bands of thugs. Mad Max seemed to be replacing George Jetson as the citizen of the future. 

Today, at the start of the twenty-first century, it is clear that some of the promises of the future will never be kept, while other things not readily imagined in the first half of the twentieth have already come to be. The Information Revolution has gone from a miracle to a cliché without really being understood by a fraction of the people who toss around the term with familiarity. It was touted as an economic miracle by people who could not tell a good venture from a bad one, and is now being dismissed, equally ignorantly, by people (often the same ones) who cannot tell a bad venture from good.

THREE QUESTIONS ABOUT THE FUTURE: ANSWERS FROM THE PAST

In the course of writing this book, three questions came to me. The first was: "Will the revolutions of the Singularity* mean the end of the nation-state and (as many prophesy) the advent of the borderless world?" As we will see, the answer that gradually emerged was that we would indeed have a borderless economy, but not a borderless world. The concept of the nation-state as an economic state is indeed at an end, but the civic state, based not on the illusion of economic sovereignty but on the realities of commonalties in language, culture, and shared narratives, would emerge as the basic organizing form of the new era.

The second question was, "Where will these changes first arise?" They will arise first in the United States (where indeed these changes are substantially advanced) and almost simultaneously in the rest of the English-speaking, Common Law-based nations of the world -- the Anglosphere. Shortly thereafter they will spread through the rest of the developed world, more or less in the order of the strength of their civil societies. Thus, Scandinavia very quickly, some of the Latin and Mediterranean countries, less quickly.

The third question was, "Why has the Anglosphere been the leader of the scientific-technical revolution uninterruptedly from the start, and how deep-seated are the characteristics which have enabled this leadership?" The answer to the first part of the question is complex, and I will discuss it at greater length later in this book, but it can be summarized by saying, "The Anglosphere developed a strong civil society early, and it grew least hindered here while its counterparts elsewhere (seemingly equally promising) were smothered or destroyed."

The answer to the second part is more intriguing. Chasing the answer to this question became a detective story in history, trying to determine the departure point at which English-speaking society became substantially distinct in this fashion from its Continental neighbors. It took me further and further back, through the Industrial Revolution, back to the American Declaration of Independence, back to England's Revolution of 1688, then to the English Civil War -- and beyond. Every time I thought I had found the departure point, I found evidence that significant changes existed even further back in time. Magna Carta played a part, but Magna Carta came about because English society had already acquired a broad class of surprisingly literate, surprisingly individualistic, surprisingly outspoken civic participants -- hardly the passive, oppressed peasants depicted in bad historical novels and movies. They were aware of the concept that they had rights under law and were accustomed to acting together to defend those rights.

This led me to reexamine what has been called, broadly, "Whig history" -- a school, now discredited in academia, which interpreted the history of England as an inevitable process or progression of society to greater freedom. Although one could readily demonstrate that the element of inevitability was indeed more in the mind of the historian than inherent in history, the Whig narrative was what we might call emergently true; that is, even when its specific points are obviously wrong, the overall picture it presents still discloses useful patterns in history.

There is an element of cultural evolution visible in the history of the Anglosphere, of a variation of social forms combined with selection of those forms most compatible with the self-organization of society into increasingly complex patterns. These organized themselves using larger and larger amounts of energy, tying together larger and larger areas of the globe. Whig history, in order to be useful today, must be shorn of its assumptions of inevitability; corrected for its blind spots in ignoring or misunderstanding Ireland, and other anomalies; and must be based on a more sophisticated understanding of cultural evolution. Given these updates, however, an understanding along the broad outlines of Whig history -- call it Whig History Version 2.0, if you will -- emerges as a useful way of looking at the history of strong civil society, and of the Anglosphere in particular.

These patterns become clearer once certain veils, which have served to obscure, have been parted by time and growing understanding. The veil of Marxism, which unsuccessfully tried to fit all phenomena into a Procrustean bed of materialist determinism, labor theory of value, and Hegelian mysticism, has largely fallen by the wayside. The declinist theories of Spengler and his various acolytes have largely been disproven by events and by more sophisticated analysis. Such theories saw our civilization as subject to a set of patterns of rise and fall which may have been valid for preindustrial civilizations dependent on slave labor, but have never been demonstrated to have validity for industrial or postindustrial cultures. Rome may have been dependent on the surplus wheat produced by Egyptian peasants, but Industrial England and America fed themselves by free labor. If slavery was the principal critical factor in financing the Industrial Revolution, then Portugal and Spain, the great slave masters of the Atlantic world, should have industrialized first, and America and Britain should have grown poorer after abolition, rather than immeasurably richer.

Imperialism theory, the bastard offspring of Marx and Spengler via Lenin and Stalin, has similarly fallen to superior historical analysis. It is sometimes difficult to recall that Marx predicted that the industrial working classes of the West would grow progressively poorer through the end of the nineteenth century, rather than, as was the fact, much more prosperous. Imperialism theory was an attempt to extend the lifetime of Marxist prophecy by introducing ever-more-complex cycles and epicycles. But in the end it proved no more useful than its parent. Finally, the narrow nationalist narratives of America and Britain alike, as well as the recent narratives of other Commonwealth nations, which have served to distort the proper perception of the Anglosphere as a distinct civilization, are beginning to fall away as well. The return of a renewed Whig history in a new form is relevant to a more sophisticated understanding of the issues of the Singularity Revolutions.

This new Whig history should not shy away from a clear-eyed discussion of slavery, colonialism, or internal oppression of minorities. However, it should place them in a realistic historical context. The Anglosphere is not remarkable for having traded in or kept slaves, but it is remarkable for having given birth to the philosophy of abolition, and the practical movement which eventually accomplished it. The Anglosphere is not unique in having maintained exploitative land practices in Ireland and elsewhere, long after their abolition in England, which maintenance (while not ignoring other things) was certainly the leading contender for the root cause of the Irish famine. English-speaking society is unique in having moved beyond feudalism in its core lands so early in history, transitioning from a society with an illiterate peasantry to one based on a free and essentially independent, literate, rights-protecting yeomanry long before the Industrial Revolution.

It may even be possible to have a realistic examination of the history of the British Empire, neither the celebration of it common in the Victorian era nor the demonizations of it which have dominated historiography for the past half-century. (The recent work of David Cannadine and Niall Ferguson may be considered a start in this direction.) Indeed, the later episodes of British colonial practice have interesting similarities to the "humanitarian interventions" of recent times, in that a similar mixture of genuine humanitarian sentiment, media sensationalism, raison d'etat, and short-term interest has driven the dispatch of British gunboats then and American helicopter gunships now to distant corners of the world. In fact, British colonialism may be preferable to United Nations humanitarian intervention, in that, once the Union flag was run up and a governor installed, Britain acquired some accountability for the results of its actions before its citizens' eyes, while responsibility in the case of recent humanitarian interventions has typically been somewhere between diffuse and nonexistent.

Similarly, much criticism of British colonial practice was formulated on the idea that Britain was exploiting surplus value from native populations for its own benefit, and that once independence was established, the colonies would be richer and freer, and Britain poorer and more insignificant. Orwell loved to predict that Britain minus India would have to subsist on "herring and potatoes," yet a stroll around London today suggests that the diet has evolved more toward sushi and Chardonnay. In fact Britain has become much richer since it shed its colonies, and its former colonies have had a mixed experience. A few, such as Singapore, have in fact become richer while many (particularly in Africa) have become poorer and more despotic. We called the Amritsar events of 1919 a massacre, and rightly so, but today many Third World police forces would just call it a good day's work.

I suspect an independent and objective analysis would show that relatively few colonial schemes were profitable to the British state and people, when all net costs were counted. Some were highly profitable to individual persons and companies, and it might be possible to see much colonialism as an elaborate cross-subsidy scheme by which British taxpayers were subsidizing British colonial profiteers, with the actual colonized populations randomly benefiting or suffering. Certainly much of the geopolitical thinking that motivated later British imperialism was illusionary. There was no point in formally colonizing land to control overseas mineral resources, when (for example) it was naval supremacy which determined whether the minerals of Africa would be available to Britain or Germany in World War I, not the formalized control of the land upon which the minerals were found.

In fact, the Achilles' heel of the Second British Empire may have been its self-identity as empire. The British administrators of the late nineteenth century were lulled by classical educations into revering the Roman Empire, and seduced by the antiquity and persistence of the Chinese and other non-European empires. In constructing the Indian Empire in particular, they did not stop to ask whether a preindustrial model of administration (and one which rested on a profoundly nondemocratic mentality) should serve as the template for even a part of an Industrial Era polity. If they can be faulted, it must be for an insufficient confidence in the Indians as pupils (and thus, in themselves as teachers) in constructing a modern industrial society. Every aspect of the Indian Empire, its tax policy, its Civil Service based on the Chinese model, its willingness to retain existing preindustrial Indian political models (benign in intent, but already betraying a growing self-doubt over their own social achievements), demonstrated either an expectation that India would never become modern, or a demonstration that the British had lost the appreciation of the causes of their own success.

These issues are not idle intellectual curiosity, but are key in understanding the roots of the Anglosphere as the cradle of the scientific-technological revolution, and in attempting to construct the institutions to deal with the next phase of that revolution. For example, it is inevitable that some will brand Anglospherism as an attempt to reconstruct the British Empire. This is precisely the reverse of reality: it is rather the Second British Empire which can now be seen as an early and overly backward-looking attempt to create an international polity connecting the English-speaking world. The very name empire discloses its weakness in looking to past imperial models, a weakness which had much to do with its demise. As Indian author Nirad Chadhauri pointed out, the final logic of empire required that either the Indian remained subjugated to the English, no matter how well-assimilated he became, or that ultimately the center of gravity of the empire would shift to India. Anglospherists are constructing neither an empire nor a state, but rather what I discuss in this book under the name of a network commonwealth. In such a commonwealth, should the Indians choose to engage it, it may well be that Bangalore becomes a major center of the Anglosphere in thirty or fifty years' time. Anglospherists do not fear this, knowing that just as London is still great today because it shares an Anglosphere with New York and Los Angeles, it and the American metropolises will be great tomorrow partly because they might share it with Bangalore.

The Anglosphere Challenge is more than a bit Janus-like, looking simultaneously ahead to the challenges of the Singularity and the culmination of the Scientific-Technological Revolution, and backward into the foundation of the Anglosphere in the mists of time. It is certain that technologically oriented readers may question the relevance of the history, and historically oriented readers may be puzzled at the introduction of radical speculation about the shape of the near future. Yet if there is a particular value to this book, it is precisely in its attempt to look backward and forward with equal interest. Technologists' speculations about the future often incorporate assumptions about the history of technology and society which are simplistic, ill-informed, and quite often unexamined altogether. Many still contain assumptions of an ability to rationally plan and program human events far in excess of any demonstrated capability to that effect, and now in the face of numerous disastrous attempts in that direction. At the same time, historians who venture into speculation about the future are often hampered by equally uninformed assumptions about technological change, its pace, and its ability to bound the limits of human action.

The viewpoint underlying this work rejects determinism of all varieties, whether the economic determinism of Marx, the geographic determinism of Haushofer, the genetic determinism of the more extreme sociobiologists, or the technological determinism of numerous utopians. Yet it acknowledges that each of these factors form certain circumscriptions within which human efforts must play their parts. Understanding these bounds is critical to understanding the menu of options from which we as moral individuals must choose.

This work is furthermore distinct in not presenting itself as a work of detailed research, nor a blueprint for future action. It is rather a series of linked essays on the nature of the scientific-technological revolution, its relationship to the emergence of constitutional freedom, and its common roots in the emergence of a strong civil society. These interests lead to an examination of the Anglosphere as the cradle of all three phenomena in the modern world, the arena in which their precursor institutions survived challenges which defeated their analogues elsewhere. It goes on to discuss the rise of the network commonwealth as the emergent political form in the coming era, and the particular prospects for the emergence of the first network commonwealth in the Anglosphere.

I have striven to refrain from specific blueprints or deterministic predictions. These chapters are intended to be suggestions for a framework for new research, not the results of that research. Similarly, I have tried to give enough examples of what network commonwealths might be, and how they might arise, to serve as starting points for discussions about whether and how to pursue such opportunities. It is clear that I write as an advocate of an Anglosphere Network Commonwealth, and that I feel that the creation of such is the best course for all in the Anglosphere. It is also the best course for the well-being of the world, for I believe that any possible solutions to the challenges of the Singularity must come from the toolkit of strong civil society. The Anglosphere Challenge is a challenge to the Anglosphere, to learn from its successes and failures in order to deal with the coming issues of the future.

At the same time, the book is intended as a challenge to those outside the Anglosphere. Certainly some will call it a work of English-speaking triumphalism, or a call for the universalization of English-speaking culture. That would be a misunderstanding. In fact, the more the roots of the Anglosphere's successes are understood, the more it must be realized that Anglosphere institutions cannot be copied blindly in cultures with far different histories and circumstances. What is universal is the need for strong civil society. Each culture must learn for itself how to achieve these characteristics, and how to evolve its own institutions to such ends.

Any book containing new ideas or new outlooks is by necessity a letter in a bottle, tossed into the ocean of future possibilities. It is my hope that it will be found and read by those who will find it a stimulus to thought, a rule of thumb for judging options, and an outline of future courses of action. The Anglosphere debate has already begun. I offer this as my contribution.

* The Singularity is a term, taken from mathematical science, which refers to a dramatic statistical discontinuity. Writer Vernor Vinge (who defined it as "the point where a rising trend line on a graph turns completely vertical") used the term to describe the effect of a number of scientific, technological, and social revolutions coming together at the same time and as a result of their mutual interaction. Observers see the Singularity unfolding as numerous parallel events driven by rapid progress in various fields begin interacting and supporting each other at a rate previously never experienced.