Welcome and Introduction

Well, thank you very much, distinguished moderator. I appreciate that, and of course I do agree that Texas has all the distinctive qualities that many individual countries have but has elected to be part of and to lead this great country. And I also take it as a mark of immense compliment to this great state that you have here a galaxy of its most distinguished leadership.

When the rest of the country and much of the rest of the world is focused on television for court proceedings and the recounts or hoped-for recounts that are going to determine the leadership of this nation, I congratulate Texans for assembling in the name of philosophy when these great events are unfolding.

I regard it as a very special compliment that you have invited me to participate in this distinguished forum and am particularly pleased and encouraged that you are focusing your attention on issues that I believe will largely shape the future of the human community in this new millennium. I really enjoyed and appreciated this morning’s proceedings.

I will not add very much new information; indeed, I will leave out some of the information I might have otherwise included because it has been so ably presented this morning, but I will try to build on and complement the very, very impressive messages coming out of this morning’s session.

These issues have been at the core of my own life interest and work, but the views and perspectives I will share with you today are those of a practitioner, not of an expert. The more experience I have in addressing these issues, the less expertise I would claim.

Surely the events of the past decade have made abundantly clear the hazards of prediction that were referred to this morning and the dangers and the costs of relying on the prognostications of experts, especially when they become conventional wisdom. That is not to say that we must be resigned to being carried along by the cross-currents of history as it unfolds, accepting that there is little we can do to influence the direction in which they are carrying us.

Recognizing that the pathway to the future will indeed be turbulent, complex, and fraught with uncertainty, there is much we can do, indeed must do, I would contend, to prepare for a future that we cannot reliably predict.

But paradoxically, the human future is in our hands and I contend will be largely determined by what we do or fail to do in the first two or three decades of this new millennium. That doesn’t mean it will all come to an end suddenly, but the direction we take and where that’s going to take us I believe will be largely determined in this next two to three decades.

For as we enter the beginning of the twenty-first century and the new millennium, the unprecedented increases in the human population and in the scale and intensity of human activities have reached a level at which we have now become the principal architects of our own future. The system of cause and effect through which human policies and activities have their impacts on the processes by which we are shaping that future is global in scale and complex in nature.

And as cause and effect are often separated by dimensions of space and time, their real consequences are not always readily discernible. We must learn to understand the system of cause and effect and how our interventions in it can make the differences we want to make.

The overall magnitude of human activities that have an impact on the natural ecological and life support systems of the earth is often relatively small in relation to natural forces, as for example in the case of the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. But they can nevertheless have a profound and perhaps decisive impact on the complex set of natural balances on which human life and well-being depend, which could move us beyond the margins of safety and sustainability.

We often think that life has gone on forever in our terms and that it’s bound to go on. We must remind ourselves that the conditions that support life on earth have existed on this planet for only a very minute portion of our geological history. They rest on a set of balances that was achieved over many millennia of geological adaptation, and we cannot take their continuation for granted when we are now affecting the very margins that make the life as we know it sustainable on the planet.

In my view, management of our impacts on this system is the principal challenge we face, and it is in that sense that I address the remainder of my remarks.

I am concerned with the numbers of the Earth’s growing population, the increase in numbers we heard about this morning. But I am also impressed by the fact that highly dense societies can maintain high levels of life—dependent, yes, on external resources environment. But the issue really is how to manage them, how to manage the trade-offs between population growth in countries that have limited resources and capacities to service their people and that must decide how to balance the levels of their population against the standards and quality of life to which they aspire.

These are not global decisions. They are influenced by global considerations, but they are basically national decisions, and to help people make those decisions by understanding the options and the consequences of what they decide is one of the areas where we can support them most, not just exhorting them to reduce their population, as the presumption behind that is that it will enable us to continue to enjoy the way of life that we prefer.

Now, to do this effectively cannot simply be a matter of placing our bets on the prediction of experts, as I’ve said, however plausible they may be. Rather it involves understanding the processes through which human activities interact with each other and with natural phenomena to produce their ultimate consequences, and at what points and in what ways our interventions in the system can have the effects we desire.

Of course, this also means we must know what we desire, what risks we want to avoid, what opportunities we want to expand, and what limits or boundary conditions we must accept to ensure a secure and sustainable future.

This does not require homogeneity in our lifestyles or in our aspirations. But it does require at the global level that we agree on those certain measures that are essential to all of us to enable us to avoid major risks to the survival and well-being of the entire human community and to ensure the broadest range of opportunities for individual self expression and fulfillment.

It is instructive to remind ourselves that the most healthy and sustainable natural ecological systems are those that maintain the highest degree of diversity and variety. Monocultures are vulnerable cultures. But to ensure their sustainability requires that they remain within certain basic boundary conditions on which the healthy and effective functioning of the system depends.

The same, I would contend, is true of human systems. The essence of human freedom surely lies in the extent to which individuals have the largest range of choices as to how they want to live their lives. They do not have to make homogenous choices, but they do need to agree on the basic framework in which those choices can be made.

The processes through which human activities produce their ultimate consequences transcend the traditional boundaries of nations, of sectors, and of disciplines. Emissions of greenhouse gases, whatever their source, contribute to changes in climate that affect everyone, and decisions made to deal with economic and financial issues are the principal determinants of environmental and social conditions as well as ones that affect peace and security.

Recent experience, now partly transcended, in which the collapse of some of the most dynamic economies of Asia rapidly developed into an emerging global crisis threatening the entire global economy, dramatically brought home that the benefits of globalization are accompanied by a new generation of risks. It made clear that no individual nation, however powerful, can insulate its people against these perils or manage them alone.

Neither can any of the main issues that affect the quality of life and sustainability of the human community: access to food and water, managing the pressures for migration, protecting the environment, meeting social needs, ensuring employment and livelihoods, and of course maintaining peace and security cannot be managed in isolation, even by the most powerful nation on earth.

To ensure a sustainable future for humankind will require a degree of cooperative management beyond anything we have yet experienced or are now prepared for. Let me make it clear it does not require world government. That’s the last thing we need. But a world system through which these issues that no country or no sector of society can manage alone is absolutely indispensable if we are going to manage our way sustainably and peacefully into the future.

I am a great believer in the principle of subsidiarity in which every issue should be managed at the level closest to the people concerned at which it can be managed effectively. But even by that standard, more and more issues have to be managed in a global context—not necessarily managed globally but managed within a global context of cooperation and framework of internationally agreed measures.

Now, I won’t comment to any great extent on the institutions that do this, but it is a great paradox that while the world needs an institutional framework for dealing with issues that the United Nations was designed to produce when it emerged from World War II. It is ironic that we need that system more today than we did then, and yet support for it and understanding of its imperative mission for all of us is at a lower ebb than ever.

And I have to say as—I am a Canadian, I regard myself as a North American, one who loves this country. I spend more of my life in this country I think than I do at home. Nevertheless, I don’t vote though I do feel that I pay enough taxes here to have a voice. It’s a friendly voice, but it’s a voice that says that when this great nation applies the rule of law selectively, honors its treaty obligations only selectively, this is not the kind of leadership that is credible for the world’s greatest power. We need the consistent moral as well as political and military leadership of the United States.

We all lose when that leadership lapses from the highest values and traditions that all of us have come to expect of the United States. The United States is always at its best when it lives up to the best of its own traditions and its own constitution.

So all I say is that the United States that leads this world system needs in doing so to apply the best of its own values and traditions. We all want you to do that. You do it more often than you don’t do it, but it is a message that I hope that groups like this, which have such influence in your country, will champion.

Now, the UN needs reforming. I was given the privilege by Kofi Annan, the Secretary General, to help lead the reform process, but there’s a limit. He’s the chief executive; he’s not the shareholder. It is interesting that all the reforms that were under his control he has done. Not perfectly, but they’re all done. Not a single one of the fundamental changes he recommended to governments has in fact been carried out, even by the governments that are always asking for reform. That reform is overdue, it’s necessary, but it can be done only by governments and only by governments who have behind them a body of public opinion that understands the importance of and the need for it.

An indispensable prerequisite to a secure and sustainable future is of course the maintenance of peace in the world. With the demise of the Cold War and the emergence of the United States as the only world superpower, the risks of global war have receded. But despite some progress toward nuclear disarmament and even cooperation amongst the main nuclear powers, they continue to maintain and deploy weapons sufficient to destroy life as we know it many times over.

Now other nations, most recently India and Pakistan, have developed nuclear weapons, and others, including terrorist groups, have or will soon have access to them. As long as nuclear weapons exist and particularly as they proliferate, we must live with and learn to deal with the prospect that they may be used.

Eventually threatening and in other ways more difficult to contain are the risks of biological warfare or terrorism. We’re talking about the things that can constrain population growth. Of course, warfare has always done that, and risks of war today have receded but they have not disappeared.

But while these weapons of mass destruction continue to threaten that global peace and security, millions of people, particularly in the developing world, are suffering from and dying from local and regional conflicts driven by ethnic, religious, ideological, and economic differences, and conflicts over land and resources. The potential for more such conflicts is escalating as the conditions that produce them continue to deteriorate.

In these conflicts, which mainly take place within nations and often spill over into neighboring countries, civilians are the main victims, and in some cases they are also participants as members of guerrilla forces or militia. In many cases the safest place for a person to be in such a conflict is in the conventional military. It is the civilian populations, especially women, children, the elderly, the young, and the infirm, that are most at risk and experience the greatest losses of life and suffering.

The conditions that give rise to such conflicts are usually deeply embedded in the history structure, the culture, and the prejudices of these societies and cannot be resolved quickly or easily. We need to develop the skills and the attitudes that permit us to do this. Growing population and economic pressures can only increase these vulnerabilities while at the same time constraining the capacities of developing countries to deal with them.

There is now evidence that, as we’ve heard this morning, population growth in many developing countries is beginning to decline, but this is very uneven and it is not likely that the world’s population will stabilize much more before the midpoint of the twenty-first century at a level which—well, guess as you may, but will likely be at least significantly greater than current levels of population.

Today the borders of the world are closing, and new barriers are being erected to the movement of people, particularly the poor and the dispossessed, while the same countries—and here I commend the United States for its continued openness—that deny people the right to immigrate actually try to attract the rich and the privileged and the skilled while keeping the poor and those without skills out.

The more mature industrialized countries are facing the prospect of aging and declining populations; thus a demographic dilemma of monumental proportions is in the making.

Now, it is paradoxical that the same forces that are driving the need for more cooperation between industrialized and developing countries also contain the seeds of deepening conflict and division that could threaten the prospects for cooperative governance.

A countryman of mine, Professor Thomas Homer Dixon, has cited the growing potential for eco-conflicts as a result of competition for land and other resources. At the University for Peace, which I have the honor now to head, we’ve developed an Ombudsman Center to help anticipate, mitigate, and resolve resource-related conflicts.

The explosion of urban growth in developing countries is giving rise to more and more environmental degradation, and the former antipathy of developing countries toward environmental issues has given way to mounting public awareness and political attention. This isn’t because they’ve been listening to the rhetoric of the north; it’s because they are now experiencing these problems themselves and realizing more and more how vitally important they are to their own interests and their own development.

As their development accelerates, developing countries are contributing more and more to the larger global risks such as those of climate change, ozone depletion, degradation of biological resources, and loss or deterioration of arable lands. China—although China has done a better job, despite its economic growth, of reducing its emissions than has the United States or Canada—is nevertheless still likely to precede the United States to the dubious honor of becoming number one in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.

But developing countries cannot be denied the right to grow. Neither can they be expected to respond to exhortations to reduce their population growth or adopt stringent environmental controls from those whose patterns of production and consumption have largely given rise to such global risks. Our exhortations do not mean much. In fact, they can often be counterproductive.

Our example is what they follow. They look at what we do today far more than what we say to them.

Indeed—I see my time running out here—I will make one major point that arises from my own experience. Stockholm in 1972, at the world’s first global environmental conference, we lost our innocence, in the sense that we finally recognized that some of the same processes of economic growth and urban development that had produced such unprecedented levels of wealth for industrialized societies had also produced inadvertently some negative by-products that threatened everyone.

We, in the years since then, have learned a lot about how to deal with these products. We of course need to know more. We’ve developed technologies that help us to do it. So we’ve lost our innocence. We can no longer pretend that we don’t really know what we’re doing or how to fix it. We largely do.

We also know that solutions work. Solutions have worked in many places. Why is it then that overall, despite progress, the environmental condition of this planet continues to deteriorate? Doing a total balance sheet on Earth, Incorporated, we see that much of what we call growth today is really liquidation of our natural assets, depletion of our natural capital.

Why is it? It’s no longer a problem of implementation; it’s a problem of motivation. What are our motivations? They are economic, of course. Yet a study that the Earth Council recently did made it very clear that governments both north and south today in just four sectors alone—water, energy, transport, and agriculture—are spending over $700 billion subsidizing activities that are wasteful economically and at the same time provide disincentives to environmental and socially responsible behavior.

They weren’t intended that way. This is the unintended consequence. But it’s happening, and just examining that system, revealing how we are wasting our resources and how that waste is also contributing to undermining our future is one of the best things that we can throw some light on, because if we focus light on things, the chances are that people will do something about them. And I hope that will happen.

Finally, I think ultimately the fate of civilization as we know it will be determined by what happens in the developing world, and this in turn will depend very much on the example we set and the cooperation we extend to it. We in the privileged industrial world must get used to the fact that we are a minority, a powerful and privileged minority to be sure, but one in which the processes of globalization inextricably link us to the interests and to the fate of the majority in the developing world.

Going it alone is simply not an option. We all know historically that minorities do not maintain their privileged positions and power forever, and particularly in a world in which everybody is involved in the same framework of processes that we call globalization.

Here, the U.S. role is absolutely central. Your footprint, your contribution to the good things of the world has not been exceeded by any country. Your contribution today to the risks that I’m talking about is also as you well know the greatest, including that of CO2 emissions. I say that in Texas, an oil-producing state. I come out of the energy industry myself, including a history in the oil and gas business. So I share that with you.

Finally, I am persuaded that the twenty-first century will be decisive for the human species. For all the evidences of environmental degradation, social tension, and intercommunal conflict have occurred at levels of population and human activity that are a great deal less than they will be in the period ahead. The risks we face in common from mounting dangers to the environment, the resource base, and life support systems on which all life on Earth depends are far greater today as we move into the twenty-first century than the risks we face or have ever faced in our conflicts with each other.

A new paradigm of cooperative global governance is the only feasible basis on which we can manage these risks and realize the immense potential for progress and fulfillment for the entire human family that is within our reach. I am an optimist in the sense that I believe a golden era is within our reach. I’m a pessimist in the sense that I still don’t see the signs that we understand what we must do to achieve it.

All people and nations have in the past been willing to accord highest priority to the measures required for their own security. We must now give the same kind of priority to civilizational security. This will take a major shift in the current political mindset. Necessity will compel such a shift eventually. The question is, Can we really afford the costs and risks of waiting?

And I commend to you all the Earth Charter initiative that started in Rio but didn’t get completed there but to which millions of people are now looking at for the fundamental ethical and moral basis, our common motivation to provide some guidelines for the future, through the Earth Charter—in Anglo-Saxon terms, a Magna Carta for the Earth.

Thank you for the opportunity of joining you. I’m looking forward now to hearing from my distinguished colleagues and do hope there will be some time also to dialogue with you.

Thanks, Dudley. My charge today is to talk about the effects of population growth on communications. That’s rather easy to do.

People want to stay connected, and population growth has driven the demand for more advanced and effective ways to do that. Without better communications, individuals would be lost like ants. So, that’s the effect of population growth on communications, and I see I’ve got about 20 minutes left!

What I’d like to do, then, is flip the topic now and talk about the effect of communications on our growing population. I fear that my task is akin to people in the late 1800s who tried to predict the impact of telephones in the twentieth century.

As was reported in the Wall Street Journal, some people back then believed the telephone would, and I quote, "Bring peace on earth … eliminate Southern accents … stamp out ‘heathenism’ abroad … and save the farm by making farmers less lonely." While telephones had a huge and positive impact on people in the last century, we didn’t achieve world peace.

And a short discussion with any good Texas philosopher, for example our own Baker Duncan, will quickly prove that the Southern accent has survived intact! We did, however, achieve some remarkable advancements in technology, particularly the development of digital electronics.

Let me provide some brief technical background before we move on to the impact of all this. Digital simply means the use of binary code—those strings of ones and zeroes—to represent information. In digital communications, analog signals—such as the sound waves of your voice—are transformed into digital code at one end and decoded back into analog signals at the receiving end. This yields two major benefits.

First, digital signals can be reproduced with great accuracy. As analog signals travel, they progressively lose strength and pick up distortions, much as a radio station fades out into static as you drive away from the radio tower. But in digital transmissions, the network periodically reads all the ones and zeros and precisely duplicates the original signal. That’s why digital communications are so much "cleaner" than analog.
The second major benefit is that digital electronic circuitry is getting cheaper and more powerful all the time. A given digital electronic circuit will decrease in cost 25 to 30 percent each year. So, digital means higher-quality communications that are more powerful, yet cheaper.

Digital technology also allows ubiquitous networking. Whereas we all grew up with separate networks for separate mediums—voice networks, data networks, and broadcast networks—digital technology allows any type of signal to travel on any type of network to anybody or virtually anything, to anywhere.

There are three simple truths that illustrate how this is playing out in the world around us.

First, bandwidth—or a network’s capacity to transmit simultaneous voice, video, and data—is exploding.

Truth number two: Broadband subscribers—people who can access high-speed, high-capacity bandwidth—are using this bandwidth in increasingly personal ways.

And truth number three: The Internet is changing everything. And yet, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Let’s look at these truths a little more closely.

Number one: There’s a boom in bandwidth at all levels—internationally, nationally and locally. On a global basis, at least 52 major undersea communications cables are in operation or under construction. That’s in addition to an expanding global network of satellite communications. Between 1999 and 2001, transoceanic network capacity will increase more than 500 percent.

At the national level, companies in many countries are building nationwide fiber-optic networks with tremendous capacity. For example, at the end of 1996, the total bandwidth of all wireline networks in the United States was 1 trillion bits per second—or one terabit. By 2003, that is expected to rise to 100 terabits.

Considering that the entire Library of Congress contains an estimated 10 terabits of information, within two years our national networks could transmit the entire Library of Congress 10 times every second. Locally, phone and cable companies are extending broadband directly to our homes and offices.

One of my former employers, SBC, is investing roughly $6 billion to make broadband DSL—or Digital Subscriber Line—available to the vast majority of its customers. DSL takes the existing telephone wiring and turns it into high-speed multimedia pipelines. In similar fashion, cable TV companies are upgrading their networks to handle high-speed data. The huge increase in network capacity is driven by customer demand. In the U.S., 70 percent of all adults now use a computer, and 80 percent of those people go on-line. Worldwide, an estimated 375 million people have Internet access today, growing to 500 million over the next two years. Most of these people still use low-speed dial-up connections, but as broadband becomes available, people are signing up. Broadband subscribers [cable and DSL] in the U.S. will jump from around one million at the end of 1999 to 20 million or more by 2004.

Truth number two is that people are personalizing their use of all this bandwidth. A primary reason people go on-line is to communicate with friends, family, and business associates. A recent study showed that the number of e-mail boxes worldwide increased 80 percent last year, to nearly 570 million. For years, my wife resisted getting a PC. But she recently made me buy her one so she could do e-mail. Turns out, our kids were talking with me by e-mail more than their mom. She had to get a PC at the kitchen desk just to stay in the loop!

Beyond e-mail, people also want to connect to information. The fastest-growing segments of on-line users are baby boomers and senior citizens who are drawn by Web sites about health, lifestyle, and business.

Truth number three is that the Internet is changing everything. Yet, as the old saying goes, the more things change, the more they stay the same. People are using the Internet to do things differently, but our basic desires as human beings are the same as they’ve always been. By and large, people want health, wealth, and happiness. I think internetworking is a lasting phenomenon because it helps with these fundamental desires.

On the health horizon, we’ll see widespread use of smart medical devices, such as insulin pumps and pacemakers that are remotely monitored and activated by medical offices. We’ll also see things such as vehicles that automatically call an ambulance when an airbag is deployed.

Aside from obvious lifestyle benefits, health applications also mean more people will be able to work, thus adding to economic productivity. Which leads us to the topic of wealth. The world economy already has reaped tremendous benefits from information technology. The efficiencies of e-commerce are changing the economy’s cost structure by expanding customer bases and by driving down the cost of delivering goods and services.

Just three years ago, there were serious questions about whether people would do business on the Internet, mostly because of concerns about the security of financial information. But last week—on the day after Thanksgiving—1.3 million people used the Internet to shop at Amazon.com alone.

PriceWaterhouse estimates that in total, fourth quarter e-commerce sales will exceed $10 billion this year, up almost 100 percent from 1999. Of course, business alone does not lead to happiness—basic desire number three.

These are hectic times. In response, people are using the Internet to stay in touch with loved ones. And they’re beginning to use the Internet as a prime source for entertainment. This will increase as new generations of Internet appliances come to market. These new devices will include game consoles, Internet music players, smart wireless phones, and portable Internet gadgets in all shapes and varieties. These new devices will build upon the success that cellular phones achieved in the last decade. This year alone, the world will add 200 million new wireless phone subscribers.

It’s widely predicted that we’ll see more than 1 billion wireless subscribers by 2003—an incremental gain of roughly 600 million subscribers in just two years. As wireless penetrates worldwide, the coming new generations of services will offer global roaming, lower total costs, higher voice quality, multimedia, high-speed Internet access and longer battery life. If you think about it, wireless service already has come a long way.

The first cellular handsets were very expensive. They weighed as much as a brick and were as big as a cinder block when you added the batteries. Today, you get more functionality, better sound quality, and a quantum increase in talk time. And, it can fit in your pocket.

It’s amazing what this allows. Two years ago, I was standing on top of the Great Wall of China, and I direct-dialed my cell phone to speak with my wife in the United States. In the near future, the wireless handsets of the year 2000 will appear as antiquated as those clumsy early cell phones appear to us today. Using one of these new generations of phones, I could have seen my wife and showed her the Great Wall using video transmission.

A basic consequence of all of these truths is that power in our world is shifting. In business, consumers are establishing direct connections to content providers and manufacturers, threatening the middlemen as a result. As we speak, the music industry is wrestling with the Internet because it lets artists distribute their own music and lets consumers compile their own music catalogs.

In another example, Stephen King released a short story over the Internet last March. Consumers downloaded 500,000 copies within the first few hours. Time magazine said King typically would have earned $10,000 from a magazine. By releasing the story over the Internet, King estimated he’d make $450,000.

In the bigger picture for business, the Internet is changing some time-honored principles of the Industrial Age. Customization is replacing standardization, flat organizational charts are replacing hierarchy, and decentralization is replacing centralization. Businesses who ignore this do so at their own peril. Just as Western Union fell into decline after it dismissed telephone technology, today’s businesses must adapt to the new reality of the Internet.

Many major corporations have embraced the Internet to facilitate their multinational operations. At the same time, many small businesses and individual sellers are using the Internet to operate multinationally.

One of my hobbies is collecting antique pocket watches. This year, I’ve used the Internet to buy watches from Bulgaria, Australia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Alaska, and the continental U.S. For me and the sellers, this kind of multinational interaction would have been impossible just a few years ago. The implications for politicians are perhaps even more dramatic.

The global nature of the Internet frees constituents from the bonds of geography by opening up channels of information that previously were not available to the masses. In the Information Age, governments can no longer control information. The embattled Philippines’ president Joseph Estrada has learned this fact, much to his chagrin. An estimated three million Filipinos use their cell phones to send 30 million text messages every day, and it’s expanding daily.

This phenomenon has greatly reduced the president’s power to influence public opinion as people share their thoughts and feelings with one another on a massive scale. But there is a downside, as well. A recent Filipino bank run was induced by false rumors spread through text messaging.

Even as the Internet expands communications within classrooms and national borders, it also has exploded these boundaries themselves. The Internet is, in fact, creating new international communities of interest.

I believe that people will still maintain their national loyalties, but many futurists predict that people will steadily expand their horizons to become global "netizens." A netizen is someone who grew up—or has grown into—using computers and networks as their principal means of exchanging information and communicating with people. Netizens are actively connected, and 92 percent of adults who use Web browsers are registered to vote. American Demographics reports that netizens tend to be deeply dissatisfied with their political choices, yet are optimistic about the future. Netizens are attached to ideas rather than political parties, and they are deeply committed to free speech.

As a result, politicians are under more pressure from more places than ever before. Whereas the Internet removes physical barriers, our political and legal systems are based on such boundaries. Governments now must resolve differences on a broad range of international issues, ranging from copyrights to privacy.

Taxation is just one area that shows how vexing the Internet will be for governments. Today, governments levy sales taxes based on location. In the U.S. alone, there are more than 30,000 separate taxing jurisdictions—all defined by geography. Almost all are ignored by most Internet commerce.

As you can see, there are problems that government and business must address. And there are fantastic possibilities for the people. But in the midst of this change and euphoria, let’s take a reality check. Even if we reach 500 million Internet users worldwide in the next two years as predicted, that’s still less than 10 percent of the world’s population. To fully capture the promise of the Internet and broadly extend the benefits of the Information Age, we need to extend advanced and more affordable communications to as many people as possible.

The challenge for governments is to balance societal goals and serve the public, while at the same time protecting commerce, free speech, and values. If governments can succeed at that challenging task, communications technology in the future might indeed help lead to unmatched peace and prosperity for the world’s growing population.

I do hope the Southern accent survives (!), but in the end, communications is simply a tool. What humanity does with this powerful tool is up to humans.

James Henry Breasted wrote, in his unforgettable book The Dawn of Conscience, "The course of sound progress is a wisely balanced mean between the lessons of experience and new vision."

The supreme questions: Where do we find the lessons of our common human experience? The velocity of change is so fast—what are the realities that do not change in this world of constant change? If there are universal principles that hold true through time, how do we apprehend them? How do we go about transmitting them?

These questions are timeless and relevant now because the answers to these questions are relevant to the fashioning of a humane Global Curriculum that will nurture our growth into a unified diversity.

My path as an educator has been paved with these timeless questions. My pursuit of answers began through the door of etymology, the study of the full and original meaning of words, in five ancient languages: ancient Chinese, Egyptian, Sanskrit, Homeric Greek, and Biblical Hebrew. This fascinating study uncovers the world of common human experience and the wisdom gleaned from it, in words. Moreover, it reveals that these ancient languages were founded on a simplicity so basic that it consists of only one concept: the philosophy of Oneness, animated by the value of love and the value of family.

The result of this continuing study is the creation, development, and implementation of an interdisciplinary, intercultural, interlingual Curriculum rooted in the classical cultural traditions and standards of thought. The goal of this approach is to develop global, Renaissance human beings who are awake to our common world.

The Wilhelm Curriculum is humankind studied as a whole. The program demonstrates the universality of fundamental ideas. To illustrate impartially the mental, technical, and aesthetic achievements of the past and the present, each discipline is studied across the board, with the concept words—that is, the principal ideas—given in several languages. Each culture, in its own inimitable way, defines these terms differently yet never contradicts one another in principle. This confirms the fact that the human mind and spirit are the same at all times and in all places; it forms the basis of all translations, from ancient hieroglyphs to modern-day languages.

Further, fundamental principles of all the disciplines are explained, clarified, and emphasized by a correlation of parallel texts of other cultures. In this manner ideas are stretched, expanded, and appreciated until the pupils have a bone-deep understanding of what these principles are. In the process they firmly grasp the fundamental concepts that are indispensable to higher learning. As they learn to see the world th7rough language, they not only gain a keen awareness that we speak a common vocabulary, but they absorb with understanding the illuminating remark by Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, the great Orientalist and transmitter of traditional thought, "There is no private property in ideas." In this manner the pupils become united with the world, begin to receive and appreciate the rich inheritance bequeathed to them by their ancestors, the family of humankind.

Studies begin in Africa and Asia, our oldest cultures, move on to the Greek and Roman eras, and then move to the Arabic period, which made way for the opening of the New World and to the many cultures of great antiquity of the Americas setting the stage for the modern era.

In the process of finding one’s roots, finding one’s family in a universal sense, pupils grasp the fact that our ancestors include all those who have gone before, and that we ourselves are in the process of becoming ancestors to all those who are to come. As they learn to think of the various cultures as different branches of one tree, a sense of respect for all the members of the family emerges. Best of all they perceive that we owe grateful homage to all those who have contributed to our common heritage.

The Wilhelm interdisciplinary, intercultural, interlingual approach weaves the arts, the sciences, and the humanities together and relates them to traditional values. Thus, art is science and science is art and both are philosophy.

We enter into the soul of a culture through language because the values of a culture are transmitted through language. Language embodies perspective, that is, a theory or philosophic way of living and perceiving. Einstein’s stimulating remark reminds us, "It is the theory that determines what will be observed." Or, as the American linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf would say, "Language determines our logic and vision of reality."

Basically, language embodies only two philosophies: one sees unity in diversity, and the other is a vision divorced from the concept of unity. It must be remembered that all traditional values—that is, the invariants of civilized life—hinge on the ability to see unity in diversity, the integrity of things. Etymology stands as witness to this perspective, for all words originally had an implicit or explicit reference to unity.

Integrity was the "masterpiece standard" for all traditional cultures. For all of our ancestors, integrity was essential to any form of creation, from business agreements, to art, architecture, music, politics, science—in short, to every aspect of life, because integrity has to do with conscience, with unifying the parts into a grand wholeness where every part supports and sustains every other part and the small is equally significant as the great. Einstein articulated the traditional, indivisible view of science, ethics, and aesthetics when he said, "The first test is beauty," meaning integrity. Because science, ethics, and aesthetics are in principle the same, science affirms our spiritual heritage, giving our pupils roots and purpose.

Language with a reference to unity activates the imagination, breeds conceptual and rational thinking, for it guides one to see relations between things and nurtures our ability to see "the big picture." Oneness becomes Truth no one can ignore because language will not permit it.

Brain research and etymology are allies in confirming the fact that we are programmed to seek unity because the brain is innately programmed to hold opposites in equilibrium, to simultaneously keep a vision of the whole in mind while analyzing the parts.

Therefore, the constant reference to unity in traditional languages in no way lessens the ability to analyze the parts; it simply increases the ability to see relations, to make connections, to see the interdependence of the parts and the completeness and integrity of the whole.

For example: Geology. Current dictionaries define geology as "study of the earth." This definition is misleading because it is a half-truth. Geo means "earth"; logy is from logos, meaning "unity." Thus the full meaning of the word geology is "the study of the unity of the earth," which returns the significance and beauty to the word’s original implicit meaning.

"Cracking the code" of language leads to the discovery that all concept words embody love or non-love, that the conception of a single living principle is embodied in all words and in all languages, and in itself corresponds to all choices of right and wrong in their invariant state.

This establishes a universal moral reference point, a supreme standard that is binding on all alike because it expresses the unalterable character of integrity. Sincerity, compassion, gratitude, cooperation, courtesy, responsibility are all forms of selfless love. Irresponsibility, ingratitude, insincerity, lack of compassion, discourtesy, are all forms of selfishness or non-love. In the process of learning to think and to speak the language of integrity, the pupil grasps with full comprehension Ashley Montague’s profound remark: "The meaning of a word is the action it produces."

Further, "cracking the code" of language leads to the discovery that "Human culture is a unified whole," as the German historian Alfred Jeremias tells us, "and in the various cultures one finds the dialects of one spiritual language."

The great fourteenth-century statesman, jurist, historian, and scholar Ibn Khaldun, in his masterpiece The Maqaddimah, gave the definitive explanation of logic when he wrote, "Logic concerns the norms enabling a person to distinguish between right and wrong, both in definitions that give information about the essence of things and in arguments that assure apperception."

Once the pupil has learned to read, to see "in depth" the essence of all events, actions, images, and concepts, words pass on what they possess—the life-sustaining values of civilization. For the pupil sees that it follows that anything done out of context is without love, is unhealthful both for the individual and society.

These health-enhancing ideas are further confirmed for the pupils by brain research and medicine. Medicine tells us that health means not only the absence of pain and disease but also a sense of well-being and the ability to give and to receive love.

This unalterable law was understood by our ancestors, for they defined abnormal, paranoein, as apart from the mind of Reason, unable to perceive the unity; normal, metanoein, as with the mind of Reason, able to perceive the unity.

Brain research and medicine verify that language, moral imagination, and health are inextricably one, for brain research tells us that every thought is a biological change affecting us from the tops of our heads to the bottoms of our toes. Thoughts are clothed in words.

With the remaining time allotted to me I would like to share in summary fashion how these principles were substantiated by being put into practice in public and religious inner-city schools in San Antonio when I was called in to help assuage gang wars. I presented our Curriculum and approach as a cost effective health program. The following is the story of one approach and one model. It is no brief of the only way to work, it is simply one way that does work.

Now come with me into some of the classes and see how students begin to make human connections, recognize their oneness with those who are seemingly other than themselves in their beliefs, their ethnicity, their gender, their age. See how they learn to discern without separating and begin to move from me to we, begin to recognize and acknowledge that we are, All Under Heaven One Family.

After we have been introduced to the class and each individual student has been introduced, I explain that we will be in engaged in the classic traditional approach to education which begins with the premise that life has a purpose, that each one of us is significant, and that each one of us has a Destiny to fulfill. Our Destiny is tied to our gifts, and we are all born gifted.

The pupils learn that, from the traditional point of view, our gifts, our innate abilities, are our vocation, our calling, and that to be gifted is to be in the presence of something given. "Work," wrote Khalil Gibran, "is love made visible." Our gifts are that form of love which we have been chosen to give to the world.

Thus the primary reason for going to school is to find one’s gifts, to develop them to the fullest so that one has something to give to the world. Peter F. Drucker, acclaimed economist and management philosopher, sums it up with this advice: "Forget about career planning. Find something you are good at and try to make a contribution."

Next the pupils learn that the Curriculum will be the story of civilization. Our starting point will be the history of words because words embody "the high story," the common life experience and accumulated wisdom of the family of humankind.

The pupils learn that language is the life-blood of a culture because the values of culture are transmitted through language. They learn that the inner origin of language is deep. The roots were formulated in times when the universe was conceived as Pure Being, Pure Unity, outside of which nothing exists. They learn that words were an expression of our ancestors’ profound sense of kinship with their fellow beings and the world. Oneness, the value system at the core of all traditional languages, expressed a philosophy of family and the indivisible unity of humankind and nature. Thus the integrity of language was held together by a common principle, what the Chinese call tao, Egyptians: atum, Indians: brahman, Hebrews: elohim, and the Greeks: logos—the principle of harmony between opposites, the highest form of Unity, the First Principle of the Universe.

In the beginning words had real meaning because words were whole entities, spiritual and physical not being separate but simply different aspects of a single meaning. Through language one was guided to distinguish without separating and to live one’s life in context, that is, to never lose sight of one’s individuality or the individuality of others, while at the same time never losing the vision that we are all one family, all parts of the whole.

The pupils learn that in the beginning words were created through direct experience. Realization, the sudden moment of seeing the real, was an emotional experience followed by a struggle to clothe what had been seen and felt in words. They learn that all traditional cultures believed that the meaning of a word is in the sound; when the sound changes, so does the meaning. Further, if two words are spelled the same, sound the same, but have different definitions, they come from the same philosophic center. Or, if two words are spelled differently but sound the same, yet have different definitions, they too come from the same philosophic center because originally language had to do with making sounds come together meaningfully.

Our first example is pupil. The word pupil refers to the pupil of the eye, and pupil also means "student." The pupils will later learn that the ancients called students pupils for a good reason; for the truly educated human being, a sage, was called a Seer. After the definitions have been recorded in their vocabulary notebooks, the pupils are invited to turn to the person sitting next to them and look them in the eye.

Ahhhs, mingled with laughter, are heard all around the classroom as the vision of the eye and a tiny image of oneself are reflected in the pupil of the eye. This lucid and powerful vision of Oneness has a profound psychological impact because the tiny image reflected in the pupil of the eye is authentic, it is real—it is not digitally or otherwise technologically produced. "One is peering into the face of Truth," as Quincy Jones would say.

Another "ahhh experience" follows as this visual logic is clothed in two words conveyed by one sound: eye and I. Octavio Paz would say the pupils are discovering something we have forgotten, "the correspondence between what words say, what eyes see."

In the process words become sound-images; sound-images that support intuition and sustain memory because word and meaning, sound and image, are mutually interlocked. Oneness has become an idea one sees, hears, and feels.

These experiences crystallize The Golden Rule, the essence of wisdom of every age and every culture, the standard of conduct unanimously agreed upon by every branch of the family of humankind. In this manner, language lifts the pupils up ethically for, by the help of the Mirror in the Eye, they have the power of seeing and knowing who they are and how they are to live in an almost miraculous way.

The following poem, written by two of the pupils, records those moments of spiritual transformation when the familiar became illumination.

The Pupil of the Eye

The eye is like a mirror

My neighbor is myself

Samuel Oren-Palmer 7 yrs.; Aaron Barr 6 yrs.

This poem was committed to memory in several languages. Homework includes sharing their new knowledge with their parents and a research project: look your pet in the eye (if you don’t have a pet, borrow a friend’s pet) and share what you see with your classmates and teacher in the morning. More "ahhh experiences" in the making!

The adventure comes full round with the words think, perceive, reason, Seer. Think means "to reflect; to conceive." Reason means "to test by reflection and deliberation." Perceive means "to apprehend with the mind of Reason," the faculty that thinks but does not also will. As St. Thomas Aquinas said, "The will is free insofar as it obeys reason." A Seer, a wise person, is one who perceives the paradox: I am myself and my neighbor—All is One and One is All. Or, as the Chinese would say, "Everyone is Chinese whether they know it or not."

Moral judgment grows ever stronger as the pupil comprehends that to think correctly means to see oneself in others, to remember we are each other, and that think also means "to marry facts and feelings and give birth to conscience." As Aldous Huxley brilliantly pointed out, "To think correctly is, in itself, a moral act."

As the pupils come to the realization that every word, even seemingly trivial words, have profound philosophical, mystical, and social connotations, they are given the definitions of these words in several languages. These geographical variations of the same concept expand and enrich the single definition and strengthen their sense of common understanding. Moreover, the pupils see that language reveals the origins of our inherited ideals.

For example: think in Egyptian means "to see with the eye of the heart"; in Chinese, "to examine with the heart"; in Sanskrit, "to conceive; to perceive with discernment and feeling"; in Hebrew, "to perceive the importance of Oneness"; in Greek, "to conceive; to intuit the unity." Intuition means "to see, to guard, to protect with the eye of the heart." Now the pupils have a multiplicity of trusted sources—separate cultures but closely united objectives—verified by thousands of years of human experience.

It is a widely unappreciated fact that during the Alexandrian period Western vocabulary became stripped of its spiritual base, its reference to unity. In the process, words were restricted to their surface value with no clue to their significance. Disconnected from feeling and emotion, words became destitute of spiritual essence, that is, devoid of the concept of Oneness. What remains is a bankrupt vocabulary dispossessing us of our traditional inheritance.

When language regains its spiritual strength, it nurtures the best in all of the pupils by reorienting them to the Principle of Oneness. Moreover, Balanced Thinking and The Golden Rule, two aspects of the same thing, are an integral part of common courtesy. Courtesy is the tradition that prevents violence. Thus the tradition of Reasonableness and The Golden Rule is transformed into the pattern of health and harmony.

Each day the pupils are centered and the tone of the day is set by beginning the day with the following credo—an unambiguous step-by-step way of becoming a cultured human being. The Credo is committed to memory in many languages.

Where There Is Concern

Where There Is Kindness

Where There Is Harmony

There Is Helpfulness

Where There Is Helpfulness

There Is Cooperation

Where There Is Cooperation

There Is Civilization

The Wilhelm Credo could be described as an ecumenical prayer because all religions converge at a common point: God is Love. E agape inne Theos. Selfless Love is God.

What we have here is old wine in new bottles. The shape of the bottles are different for the public schools and the religious schools, but the wine is the same for both.

The public schools’ "unity consciousness" is referred to as moral consciousness in the religious schools. In the public schools, the students are learning the pattern and process of reason, balanced thinking; in the religious schools this is called the pattern and process of virtue —for there is no virtue without reasonableness. In the public schools, the Curriculum strengthens the student’s concept of health and rationality. In the religious schools the Curriculum strengthens the pupil’s identity with God, for God is Love. Whether one calls the result health or holiness does not matter—the pattern and process are exactly the same.

Love, Reasonableness, and The Golden Rule—these are the seeds planted by all cultures and all religions. These are the familiar sounds the pupils long to hear again and again. These are the familiar sounds that nurture the seeds into flowering. In this manner education unifies the diversity of cultures, unifies the diversity of religions. By so doing, education transmits the precious legacy that is our common moral and ethical inheritance and our only protection against a relapse into barbarism.

Jacques Barzun, in his illuminating book From Dawn to Decadence, defines decadence as "a technical description of historical cycles when a culture forgets the original meaning of its motivating ideas." In my opinion, this crisis in meaning has its roots in language because we think in language.

Language controls perspective, controls the way we see, think, feel, and respond. Words without a reference to unity are out of context, are abstractions, are words devoid of meaning.

What I am suggesting is the revitalization of language that will reverse the Tower of Babel and provide the change of consciousness demanded by our global civilization and the new millennium. For the journey into the new millennium consists "not in seeing new lands, but in seeing with new eyes," as Marcel Proust would say. It is time to outgrow self-centeredness and awaken to the fact that one is infinitely more than oneself.

It is a historical fact that the attainment and maintenance of civilization and culture have been achieved only through education. Now marks the critical time, the historical moments when we are shaping the civilization form of our universal civilization. "Here is a challenge which we cannot evade," as Arnold Toynbee would say, "and our Destiny depends on our response."

By taking the prudent and daring step of returning the principle of integrity to words, the civilizing, unifying power of language is restored. Language once again becomes family-oriented, engenders a sense of belonging and well-being by guiding one to discern without separating. By returning words to their original meaning, one is reminded of the problem-solving principle, love, embodied in words and in all of its manifestations. Thus, one is intellectually prepared to make choices of integrity.

Idealism makes a great people and a great culture. The integrity of our universal civilization requires that people everywhere have a good understanding of these universal values that transcend change.

When words are once again rooted in the reality of Oneness, things will once again be seen in context, facts will no longer be "value-free" and without significance but will be reference points to the "big picture," where everything matters because everyone and everything are interrelated, interdependent, and indivisibly one. Language will no longer be an obstacle but a vehicle whereby we, in the twenty-first century, will have the opportunity to return to Paradise, "the Land of No-Forgetting," where everyone remembers we are each other.