An update from Macquarie University historian Professor David Christian on his visit to the World Economic Forum in Davos to talk about Big History. David writes:

As my plane was taking off from Dubai, heading for Zurich, I saw over to the left the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world. It’s 820 meters high and if you want a symbol of human chutzpa, that’s surely it. From my plane it looked like a dagger pointed at the heavens. The Burj Khalifa is a powerful symbol of our astonishing technological creativity as a species and of the remarkable fact that now, for better or worse, we have become the first single species in four billion years capable of transforming the entire biosphere. After all, today, we are living in what the Nobel-prize winning climatologist Paul Crutzen calls the “Anthropocene” era – the era of humans.

I took the shuttle bus along 25 minutes of very snowy roads (the natives say there’s not been such snow since the 1960s) through a string of small ski towns, into Davos, passed through security, got my name tag (I can hold it up to any computer in the conference building to get information on panels and sessions at which I’m enrolled), and began to explore the conference building. Lots of delegates and conference organizers and food providers and technological support teams and powerful looking people with their PAs wandering around looking very purposeful.  And I began to wonder how much of this was pure theatre.

Klaus Schwab, Professor of Business Policy at Geneva University and the founder of the World Economic Forum, gave an introductory talk mainly for first timers like myself. I entered the room feeling both jet-lagged and a bit cynical, primed perhaps by years of scepticism about Davos. Does the corporate/political world perhaps need the annual theatre of WEF to display its good will, perhaps even with genuine sincerity, before getting back to the real task of making profits and creating the environments in which profits can be made?  I was very much aware of the small number of Occupy protesters down the road in their igloos.

Let me confess I thought Schwab was marvellous. He founded the Forum in 1971 as a not-for-profit foundation. He was very articulate, very precise: Here’s my précis of what he said.

He began by saying that if you were a newcomer you were surely overwhelmed by the scale of the organization and the sheer number of panels and glitter of many of the speakers, with 40 heads of governments and states, 19 CEOs of the world’s 20 most influential bank and all the leaders of the top 10 or so universities. I was overwhelmed; he was right. He then said it might help if he explained the background to the WEF. He was right about that too.

In 1971, he wrote a book on management in which, for the first time, he talked about the importance of companies focusing not just on their profits and their shareholders, but also on their “stakeholders”, those affected by their activities: governments, consumers, NGOs, environmentalists, and, ultimately, the world as a whole. He founded the WEF with the idea of creating a regular meeting between businesses and their stakeholders, so the forums (“fora” – well I did Latin at school) were designed to bring together two distinct communities: entrepreneurs and businesses on the one hand, and those affected by their activities on the other hand.

This idea committed him from the start to a very particular view of capitalism, a view some might find naïve, but one he has propagated with great energy and great success. It is the idea that businesses are not just profit-making machines; but they have a social role and a social duty as well. The WEF’s motto is “entrepreneurship in the global public interest”. Companies and businesses can make a difference, and in fact they can help build a better world.  I think that means he is committed to the idea that capitalism is far from perfect, that it has many blind spots, and that it needs guidance. He sees the forum as the place where conversations can be held about how to implement that vision.

Schwab was persuasive, precise, and passionate about the need for activists of many different kinds to inform the work of corporations and governments. And in his way, he is a severe critic of “actually existing capitalism”. I have to confess to finding this a very attractive vision. I’m a historian of Russia, and the collapse of the Soviet Union was surely a powerful negative demonstration of the astonishing technological dynamism of capitalism. And that dynamism has created the wealth of today’s vast global middle class, a class of people that, by many criteria – wealth, health, longevity, freedom from violence – live better lives than any earlier cohort in human history.

But of course our powers are potentially destructive.  (I still remember being a school boy living through the Cuban missile crisis; as we left for home one day a friend shook my hand and when I asked why he said: “I’m not sure we’ll see each other tomorrow.”)  The issue of sustainability is very much present here.  So, despite Schwab’s very impressive introductory talk, I’ll still be asking myself: how much of this is theatre?  Can there be serious discussion of the ultimate incompatibility between the drive for growth and the drive for sustainability?  Can capitalist societies really build sustainable societies?  Should we be questioning growth itself, at least growth in consumption of energy and resources, as our long-term goal?  Hmmm.

Steven Schwartz writes: there’ll be more from David and other Macquarie academics in later guest posts