Truth that is in Uncertainty

In the animal world most living organisms are given their shape, support, and protection by a skeleton of some kind.  In the case of humans the skeleton is internal, but for most animals including insects it is an external skeleton - the carapace. 

The trouble with a carapace is that it does not stretch, and a growing animal must moult periodically, that is shed its old carapace and replace it with a larger new one.  During moulting the animal is extremely vulnerable to attack and to drying out, and a proportion die during the process. 

We can think of our global society as a living organism that is growing out of coalescing national societies.  Under the world order we are leaving behind most national societies had their own carapaces: frameworks of laws, institutions and value systems providing their citizens with a semblance of law and order.  In the emerging global world order these carapaces will no longer protect their citizens, not even as poorly as many of them have. 

The world is straining within its national carapaces and is starting to moult, but there is little evidence of a larger and effective replacement carapace.  Nation states are forming blocs and regional accords; there have been some feeble attempts at global cooperation in the face of pressing problems; and countless non government organisations and international pressure groups have formed seeking to address particular concerns.  In the meantime some of those who benefit from the international Wild West are despoiling and exploiting with impunity. 

While nation state and pressure group initiatives are necessary and should not be belittled, alone they have little chance of timely success.  The term `United Nations' is arguably a contradiction in terms.  Historically nation states have developed to protect their sovereignty at almost any cost.  To ask such inert institutions to take a global perspective is almost unnatural, and they will only do so when it is incontrovertibly in their own interests to do so, by which time it is often too little too late. 

Non government organisations and international pressure groups appear generally to have quite narrow agendas.  They pick off particular issues and concerns that may well be valid and worthwhile in their own right but that do not address global challenges holistically.  The solutions to particular problems together do not go anywhere near to forming a viable carapace for the global village. 

In a moulting arthropod the new larger carapace forms from beneath, from the bottom up rather than from the top down.  Perhaps we should not rely on our national institutions and sectional international organisations to construct a new carapace for us from the top down?  Perhaps we as global citizens should take the initiative and create one from the grassroots up, by-passing our increasingly irrelevant institutions altogether?  After all, they are part of the old regimes that `the Carapace' must complement, if not supplant.