By Dee Smith
If homo sapiens has been around for about 300,000 years, then we have lived all but 3 percent of that in circumstances almost entirely different from the present day. To put it another way: even with a generous allowance of 10,000 years or so for settled life in something like cities (which is what “civil”-ization means), for 97 percent of our existence we lived in very small groups and, except for wide-ranging nomads, with very little change over vast periods of time (centuries or even millennia). And even the nomads could usually count on migration routes leading them to familiar places, over and over again.
We are now thrust into a world where we are clustered into groups of a size unimaginable to our ancestors. They would seldom encounter anyone outside their little bands; now we all meet people every day whom we don’t know and who are different from us, and we need to co-exist with them. We are required to deal with levels of novelty, complexity and social regulation for which we are not adapted.
This goes a long way, I think, towards explaining what is happening politically and socially around the world today. Our lives are full of what scientists call “baseline resets” — we have to recalibrate our understandings and expectations over and over. We hardly become accustomed to a certain configuration of things, and then it changes. And it changes yet again. Some people embrace this. The “move fast and break things” entrepreneurs claim to do so. For most of us, however, it is highly disorienting, uncomfortable and emotionally distressing.
If we could just go back to the way things were! Vast numbers of people, of all socio-economic groups, pine for a world in their past — often a world that never existed in the way that they believe it did.
In the US, for example, so-called “liberals” — Democrats and their ilk — bemoan the loss of a US-led Liberal International Order, a rules-based international system that many analysts believe never actually existed in the way that it is remembered. This brand of nostalgics sees the post-WWII era, and particularly the “long decade” between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the 9/11 attacks, as a golden age of international cooperation, when in fact it was a short period of unipolar U.S. dominance following the collapse of the Soviet Union, a period in which there was a great deal of conflict. Of course, it seems like a golden age to those who found themselves briefly its masters! But they fear an approaching age when the “progressive” system and message no longer resonate or hold, and overt authoritarians, operating from positions that they abhor and see as threatening, are ascendant.
On the other side, in the US, many Republicans and members of right-wing movements harken back to a lost age of white social dominance. To some extent, this did exist, but it was not the halcyon period they that think they remember. Firstly, most of them were not actually alive at the time. It was a period filled with hatred and civil violence. Furthermore, the definition of who and what is “white” has never been clear. For example, Italians in the US were not, and then they were. Some Hispanics would be considered, or consider themselves, white; others would not. Besides, return to a lost white world is no longer even a possibility. The US has become “minority-majority.” White nostalgics fear an age when what are remembered as traditional white values, if not white people, become sidelined.
Similarly, the term “conservative” has been warped beyond recognition. What is it, exactly, that conservatives wish to conserve? The fact that “move fast and break things” tech leaders call themselves conservative and support conservative politicians is an oxymoron in the most literal sense.
The situation is similar in many other places around the world, whether the past is Soviet Russia, Maoist China, or various strongman dictatorships or ephemeral democratic Camelots. For much of the last couple of centuries, the Enlightenment doctrine of progress imagined the golden era in the future. As human life seemed to improve (or was said to be improving) through new systems of governance and technology, life would generally become better and better. We have now reverted to what has been the norm for most of our history, an assumption that golden ages lay in a mythic past.
The political and social status quo is increasingly seen as having failed to deliver. Life is not better than it was—and it is not getting better—for most people. They do not believe that the lives of their children will be better than their own. In fact, they increasingly just “don’t believe” in the current system, wherever they live and whatever the system is. When I presented the television series A World on the Brink in 2017, I found that there was one phrase with which everyone agreed, regardless of where they lived: “what we have is not working.” That was already 7 years ago! Since then, the needs and concerns of most peoples have really not been addressed.
The bottom line is this: conditions have changed radically; whatever happens next, they are going to change even more. The answers are unlikely to be found in any of the dominant political systems of the past few centuries. We need to think again and we need to think quickly. We need to come up with new approaches that are relevant and adaptive to the very different age we are living in and the even more different ages that are emerging. I say “approaches” because need to give up on universalism — there can be no universal system that will fit the bill, or so it seems. There may well be, and will probably be, many different and divergent systems in different places and for different people.
But they won’t be like it is now, or like it was. And that is hard.