by Dee Smith
We have quite recently left a period of history that was anomalous in several important ways. To understand what is happening now, it is essential to be aware of this and to understand how it is changing.
For the past 25 years, we have been moving from a period of relative quiescence into a period with very different characteristics. In some ways, this represents a return to unhappy norms of human history. In other ways, it represents a radical departure. But in all ways, it is leading to a very different world: one that is becoming less and less familiar, more and more quickly.
Unfortunately, many of the changes underway have produced or could produce very unpleasant and threatening outcomes. The series has looked at a few of these trends, but many cannot be included for obvious reasons of space. I have given short shrift to genetic engineering and its twin children, bio-error and bio-terror. And to AI, to resource depletion, to population and demographic changes. And to trans-national crime, the rise of authoritarianism and nationalism. And perhaps the most significant omissions: the twin potentially existential threats of climate change and environmental degradation.
Especially when considered in combination, these departures from perceived norms of the last half of the 20th century also represent a major, mass psychological problem. First, we are attuned, by both biological and cultural evolution, to expect that the near future will be like the recent past. Change was very slow through much of human pre-history. This expectation of continuity is now called recency bias and is closely related to the problem of induction in philosophy. Because we expect things essentially to remain the same, we are very alarmed when they change abruptly. But many major changes are often very abrupt. What this means is that we are unprepared to envision and come to terms with, let alone navigate, what is hurtling toward us with accelerating velocity — in fact, what is already happening. Our ability to grasp where change is leading, even change we see widespread evidence of, is woefully inadequate.
Second, the post-WWII period is commonly remembered now as a golden era that has since been lost. We want to think that the past was better and can be regained. The reason this is a mass problem is that in fact, for those of us who lived through it, the postwar period was enormously stressful. The US and the Soviet Union had arsenals trained on each other that could destroy human civilization several times over (and there were several close calls). There was also a stream of smaller conflicts and crises, often proxy wars engaged in by the two superpowers. This was not a short list. Ranging from Somalia to the Congo, from the Balkans to Iran, and from Peru to, of course, Iraq, many also featured repeating cycles of violence and conflict.
When the Cold War finally ended, social expectations were shaped by the “long decade” between the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the World Trade Center attacks in 2001, a period during which almost everyone, in the West at least, fooled themselves into believing that we had entered a new, optimistic, and peaceful era — Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history”.
The post-war half-century was indeed one of positive social and economic change in which millions of lives were improved markedly. People in many (but certainly not all) parts of the world today live with advantages — luxuries, even — unimaginable even to royalty 500 years ago. To give just a few examples: we mostly do not suffer from unremitting pain, as people once did from something as simple as an infected tooth. Many today have clean drinking water most of the time. We have such a high-calorie diet that obesity has become a huge problem, one that — again through more technology — is beginning to be addressed by pharmaceuticals.
The relative political and economic stability of the post-war period enabled these trends to advance dramatically. Eventually, despite all the conflicts and problems, more than a billion people were pulled out of extreme poverty. And the relative social quiescence extended to many aspects of life in general. Murder, for example, was very frequent globally 100 years ago; now it is much less so in most societies.
Strangely, the relative quiescence of this period included the climate as well. Most of the 20th century was fairly stable and predictable from a climate standpoint. This stability, combined with the technologies of the green revolution, allowed modern society to feed many more people that anyone had ever imagined. Although the increased human production of greenhouse gases (GHG) began to escalate in the 19th century, the concentrations were too low to have noticeable climate effects. And even as the levels increased in the 20th century, the parallel escalating injection of aerosol pollutants into the atmosphere from industrial civilization, which reflect sunlight, more or less balanced out the effects of increasing carbon and other GHGs. Global temperatures not only did not rise, in some decades they fell. But that ended around 1980, and a key cause was the global — and successful — effort to dramatically reduce air pollution. There was a kind of Faustian bargain to this: reducing industrial aerosol pollution (which was sickening and killing people) removed the “cap” it had placed on warming from GHGs.
And that is a prime example of unintended consequences, a concept key to understanding what is happening today.