CUSP

The future of human development

Cusp:

Human Development in the Global Era

Preface: This is the first essay in a series focused on the past, present, and, especially, the future of the human story. From a modest and frankly precarious beginning, humans now dominate the planet, altering its very essence. But the future of human development is far from assured. The technological drive that enabled that domination now threatens us, from nuclear annihilation to climate collapse to a regime driven by artificial intelligence in the service of those with rapidly centralizing wealth and power.

This is modernity’s paradox. We have the practical tools and abundant material resources to enable a dignified life for all, but we don’t have the social and cultural wherewithal to enact it. We stand balanced at a cusp between progress toward that widely desired goal, versus the centralization of control by a small cadre with totally consolidated wealth and power.

The immediate crisis is that democratic governance to enable collective decision-making advancing the goal of population health and well-being is experiencing existential threats from increasingly authoritarian rule around the globe. This is perhaps starkest in the U.S., once an aspirational leader for democratic expansion – although far less often in practice – but is now moving rapidly in the wrong direction, undermining collective governance.

One missing piece in our cultural toolkit is a narrative that explains and promotes equitable deployment of our vast resources on a global scale. The premise of this series is that the science of human development – from the biological to the psychological to the societal – can help to diagnose, predict, and offer realistic pathways to solve our global predicament. Our collective imaginary has the capability to create the new narrative to guide that path.

Humans are social animals. We can’t develop or survive in isolation, but we often struggle with how to get along with others, from interpersonal conflicts to World Wars. We share with our primate cousins this essential tension between group cooperation and individual competition for resources, status, and control.

Our competitive advantage as humans has been to find ways to cooperate on ever larger scales. Although non-human primates, especially chimpanzees and bonobos, show important elements of cooperation in acquiring resources, only humans appear to (occasionally) distribute the benefits of cooperative acquisition. A Language Revolution afforded joint planning and solidarity within larger troops, about 200,000 years ago. Prehistoric tribal links emerged among troops, enabling wide and rapid exchange of resources and transmission of tools, skills and cultural toolkits in the Human Revolution, culminating about 50,000 years ago. The expansive population growth sparked by the Agricultural Revolution, about 10,000 years ago, led to ever larger settlements from towns to territories to empires. The technology explosion of the Industrial Revolutions, about 250 years ago, generated unprecedented productivity and wealth, leading to dramatic increases in human longevity.

Each shift led to new social arrangements that in turn shaped how we think, feel, and act – and even our biology. This process of human evolution – integrating the biological and the cultural – takes place across many generations. Over time, human social arrangements come to seem like a nearly immutable second nature, entrenched in a system of institutions, cultural practices, and the stories that give them meaning.

The Stress Pandemic

Alarming signs show that our legacy social arrangements are not up to the task of promoting healthy human development in the emerging global society. Five existential crises highlight these legacy failures, although this is not an exhaustive list:

1. Global warming threatens humanity’s viability on our only planetary home.

2. The vast expansion of sophisticated lethal weaponry threatens social stability and survival, from individual firearms that deliver random death to nuclear stockpiles capable of a global holocaust.

3. An increasing concentration of global wealth and power in ever fewer hands – and the accelerating social and economic inequalities that result – threatens the health and well-being of more and more sectors of society, from the poor, to the working class, to the middle class, and beyond.

4. The wealthy and powerful work hard to stymie viable and popular pathways to address these existential crises by controlling the system from which they benefit. Shifting public attention by stirring up malicious “othering” through racism, patriarchy, homophobia, and other dehumanizing is a key strategy.

5. A palpable sense of high anxiety, toxic stress, helplessness, depression and loss in the face of these mounting crises grows in the population who suffer the harm. At the same time, the mechanisms for hearing diverse voices and making collective choices – the essence of self-governance – are undermined by global movements toward “strongman” autocracies and by deliberate efforts to foster chaos and disinformation, making society seem ungovernable. The progressive ideal of collective self-governance is rapidly receding.

It’s hardly surprising, then, that the combined impact of these “Big Five” threats is stoking a global stress pandemic. In the U.S., survey after survey show that people report they are feeling more stressed than ever. The rise of stress-related diseases and disorders in physical and mental health backs up those perceptions, as do biological measures of stress reactivity across the population.

The current political maelstrom in the United States is exacerbating all of these crises. All of these disruptions were planned for quite some time, to benefit the most powerful, and the Project 2025 playbook makes many of them explicit. The promotion of fossil fuels over sustainable energy curtails progress toward salvaging a livable climate. Gun control policies are aimed at fewer regulations, and rescinding the few that have survived. Budget proposals to dramatically lower taxes on the rich and to take away health and income supports for the poor and working class are key policy goals. The demonization of immigrants and the cruel manner of deportations, along with the rise of a “manosphere” aimed at controlling women and sexual minorities, together with relentless attacks on equity and inclusion, are central features of the longstanding strategy to divide and conquer. Last and worst, the clear and imminent plans to eliminate democracy – the voice of the people – in favor of centralized power in a very small group are well underway.

The first goal must be to find ways to revive and reform collective governance and the rule of law. Without that, none of these existential crises can be dealt with, and the massive stressors we now experience will grow worse, probably at an exponential rate, along with their predictable consequences for population developmental health. The attacks on the courts, on civil government, on the press, on science, on universities, and on law firms are clearly aimed at undermining or eliminating all alternate sources of power, influence, and knowledge. What makes these attacks easier is that all of these institutions have long been in desperate need of major reform, so arguing for a return to the recent past – the status quo ante – will not get us where we need to go.

We need a new narrative and new remedies for society.

The evidence by now is quite clear that toxic stress from increasing threats and stressors profoundly impacts the health, development, and well-being of the population. People vary in how well they cope, and we are learning how to more effectively promote individual resilience in the face of toxic stress. But on its own, individual coping is not enough. As extreme stressors pile up, even individuals with only a few minor vulnerabilities become susceptible to serious mental and physical health consequences. Among those consequences is an increase in stress vulnerability throughout the population, as it is passed on to the next generation both biologically and socially. This feedback loop then accelerates the stress pandemic: more widespread vulnerability combined with more extreme stressors.

What in the world is going on? How did we get here? What if anything can we do about it? Policy analyses and political pressure to address specific crises, like global warming, are crucial steps toward making better choices. But like individual coping, crisis management alone will not be enough. The simultaneous emergence of so many existential crises is highly unlikely to arise from mere coincidence. If these crises all stem from underlying and unaddressed systemic, structural flaws in our current social arrangements, new crises are bound to emerge and existing crises will emerge anew in different clothing. So, we need to unpack how our prevailing system operates, in order to understand and address its underlying dynamics.

To do this, we need to undertake the challenging task of diagnosing society – the topic of the following essay.