Date: 2024-10-19 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00020945
Systemic Dysfunction
Decline of the West
Umair Haque ... The Decline of the West and the New Dark Age ... Our Civilization Needs to Take the Next Step — But a Paralysed, Embittered West Won’t Take It
Image Credit: Josh Edelson
Original article: https://eand.co/the-decline-of-the-west-and-the-new-dark-age-4a5d162443b4
Burgess COMMENTARY
Bridge to the future ... a world on fire! There is all sorts of evidence that the world is in trouble with more than enough pessimism about the idea that a better world is possible. I argue that doing more of what we have done in the past is not going to get improvement but rather a more rapid demise of what is already something of a mess. But, articulating a coherent action plan to do what needs to be done is difficult ... and making it happen even more so. The book 'The New Rules of War' by Sean McFate published in 2019 sets out some of the power plays that are possible and already being practiced in ways that conventional geo-politics completely ignores. These new rules must not be ignored ... but I am not optimistic that there will be meaningful action anytime soon to address any of this any time soon.
Peter Burgess
Umair Haque,
Aug 28 2021
We live now in a world careening dangerously out of control. In this age, the world is going backwards at light speed. Decades of progress are being undone in years. From climate catastrophe to pandemic to the political breakdown underlying it all to the regressive attitudes spreading around the globe, this is the dawn of a new Dark Age. And central to it is the decline of the West. The West is adrift, directionless, bereft. It offers no orientation or guidance to a world spinning out of control — and little to itself, either. Every Dark Age is also the tale of a declining hyper-power, and in our age, that decline is the West’s. As the West declines, things fall apart. Threats of every kind proliferate.
I want to explore and explain how the West lost its way.
Let’s begin with its leaders. There are four major Western nations — you can add to that list if you like. One of the striking things about now is how little direction they offer, how narrow and stunted their agendas and visions are. There’s Emanuel Macron, a wily political survivor — but his France is a nation bewildered by what it should be. He is a consummate political animal — but hardly a statesman of high caliber. Then there’s Angela Merkel, the closest thing the West has to a true leader — but even she’s responsible for a set of economic policies which have pushed the EU to breaking point, privileging creditors over debtors, old over young, capital over labour, wages repressed, hence social tensions are rising alarmingly across Europe.
Boris Johnson, meanwhile, is one of the world’s great buffoons, having led a witless Britain off the cliff edge of Brexit, now pursuing bizarre oxymoronic fantasies of rebuilding a lost empire through isolationism. Soon, the NHS and BBC will scarcely exist. But will Brits enjoy living like Americans? The last of the four horsemen of our apocalypse is Joe Biden. American liberals love him. I like him. But he is a brittle fellow. Challenged, his lips purse. Criticized, he takes on a wounded air. His disaster in Afghanistan is a result of his inability not just to rectify mistakes, or to double down on them — but a deeper one: the total lack of a global agenda or vision. Biden’s America is, like Trump’s, sadly, an isolationist one.
But the world desperately needs leadership. From the West. Not in an imperial sense. Not even in a heavy-handed one. But for a pragmatic reason. The West controls all the resources. Of an entire world, of a planet. Without direction, guidance, orientation, a vision for what the world should be from the West — a vacuum is left. And in that vacuum rise all the maladies of now: stupidity, fear-mongering, superstition, fundamentalism, authoritarianism, extremism, fascism. These old, old diseases, spreading around the globe, spreading through the West, are a direct result of the West’s anemia and lethargy.
Let me make that much, much clearer, because to many of you I suspect it won’t quite be yet.
In 1971, the world finally eliminated smallpox. Around the same time, polio was not quite eradicated, but finally reduced to a relatively small-scale disease. These plagues had haunted humankind for millennia. Their conquest was one of the most important moments in human history.
And they were symbolic of a West that had three things it doesn’t anymore: vision, ambition, and will. How did smallpox and polio get conquered? Because the West made it a goal to end them. It took a massive, massive decades long effort. Coordinated across not just institutions, but whole layers of them. Hospitals, healthcare systems, governments, corporations, banks. Every kind of institution in the world was involved. Because there was vision, ambition, and will in the West to take on this problem which had literally plagued humanity, and end it.
Now fast forward just a few decades. Covid is not smallpox or polio. And the West can’t even eliminate it. It didn’t even try. What happened, instead? Precisely the opposite did. Instead of making a vaccine, and then distributing it around the globe, the West privatised its vaccines. The result was a complete disaster for the world, including the West. Covid cases now outpace vaccinations, because vaccines are kept in conditions of artificial scarcity, in order to boost profits. That means new variants are arising, which go right on threatening even the West. When will the world emerge from this pandemic?
The answer is: never. Who wins? There is no winner, except pharmaceutical corporations, who stand to make the biggest fortune in human history, charging everyone on planet earth a few hundred dollars twice a year for a booster. But even those foolish Pharma execs are at the mercy of the pandemic they’ve unleashed, too.
The West defeated smallpox and polio — but just a few decades later, it couldn’t defeat Covid. That parable is instructive. It reveals a West whose ambitions have shrunken, whose will is nonexistent, which is bereft, out of ideas, passion, vision. This West simply shrugs and throws its hands up. Its only real goal is to let its predators go on making more and more money, whether Bezos or Zuck or Big Pharma and so on. But that is not a vision or ambition. It is simply the lack of one. It reflects a sense of impotence, dread, and nihilism that has swept the West.
Let me now crystallise my analysis a little. The West is in decline because it is failing to provide what are called global public goods. What are global public goods? Well, a vaccine is one example. A vaccine is a public good in the purest sense. I benefit most when you take it. No matter where you come from. The rational thing for the West to do would have been to distribute vaccines and make them at light speed. We might have been on the road to defeating Covid that way.
And the world would have looked up to the West. Admired and respected it. Had a sense of gratitude for it. Instead, the world is now under no illusions. The West is in profound decline, unable to even provide basic global public goods. So why should anyone respect the West?
You might say to yourself: “it’s not our responsibility to care for the world!” And you’d be wrong. In every age, remember, there’s a hyper power. If that hyper power wants to stay one, then it must offer public goods, just as any government who wishes to stay in power must care for its people. Let me put that to you another way, because this point is badly misunderstood by today’s Westerners, who have been raised on a diet of the foolishness which spreads on the internet.
The West had a vision and agenda once. It wanted to eliminate global poverty and illness and disease and ignorance. Its better minds even wanted to end war and violence. Think about the magnitude of those goals for a moment. Ending hunger. Ending war. Ending violence. They are big and beautiful and noble. They reflect a culture and civilisation which is becoming beautiful and noble and good, more just, more true, more evolved and sophisticated and wise — the only kind which can, in the end, survive.
Now, the West didn’t accomplish any of those things perfectly. It didn’t even accomplish any of them by itself. But what did happen was something profound. Poverty around the world did begin to be reduced, by steep amounts. Billions around the globe did have better food and water and sanitation and education for the first time. And millions of Westerners themselves were employed in the provision of all this, whether directly, as doctors or teachers, or indirectly, as the lawyers and diplomats and managers and bankers who helped to make it happen.
The world did not become perfect, no. But it was improving. That is no longer the case. The world is now going backwards. Decades of progress are being undone in years. Entire Western nations have decided on courses of regress, isolationism, jealousy, even hatred. Witness Brexit Britain: if it hates Europe, what do you think it feels about Asia? Africa? No wonder today’s Britain could care less about the world. But its loss is a double-edged sword: the world, increasingly laughs at a Britain this self-absorbed and foolish, too. The world is not what it was anymore. The West’s failure is being felt now, keenly.
Not just around the world, but even in the West.
You see, right about now, at this juncture in human history, the world desperately needs global public goods. It needs education, to prevent fascism and authoritarianism and hate and other forms of stupidity. It needs water and food and sanitation. The challenge of global public goods hardly stops at people. The planet needs to be healed, whole ecosystems brought back to life. The animals need shelter and nourishment and investment, or else they go on dying off, and eventually, we go with them. Air, water, trees, rivers, forests, oceans — these are public goods of the first order, and we need to invest massively in them.
Now think of the West. It is creaking and coming apart under social tensions. A regressive right is rising in nation after nation, and in nation after nation, erstwhile liberal or even social democratic leaders are making concession after concession to that regressive right. This hard right rising is fundamentally because of an abandoned, disaffected, and furious old working class. The working class’s social contract does not work anymore. Nobody much is taking care of it, and even where they are, it has no future, and it knows it. No wonder it wants to go backward in time. Even if it means fascism. At least it was safe in the recent past, fed, clothed, had work, had dignity, had community, meaning, a purpose. Now? It just sees a vacuum at the end of neoliberal history.
The way past all this is to employ the West’s shiftless masses in the work which needs to be done today. The work of healing the planet, of educating a world, of sheltering and protecting the animals, of building clean and cheap power grids, of greening energy and steel. Let me make that even clearer. The West should be leading the way in building systems of global public goods. We call ourselves an advanced civilization — but the truth is we don’t have a single system at planetary scale. We don’t even have a system to educate every child on planet earth. Those are our kids. If we can’t take care of them, is it any surprise we don’t have systems to shelter the animals, replenish ecosystems, nourish the oceans and forests and rivers?
We need to build systems of global public goods now. That is the next step for a civilisation like ours. To truly advance, mature, grow. If we don’t do it, if we can’t do it, we die. Not as a species — but as a civilization. Because as the planet dies, as the animals die, as nature’s resources dwindle, conflicts will intensify. Fascisms and authoritarianisms of every kind will arise. Predatory elites will profit off it all — as they already have done from Covid. No planetary systems? No more civilization.
Our civilisation feels like it’s come to a sudden stop because it has. There are certain minds who get it, and interestingly, they mostly seem to be children. Greta understands we need global systems to nourish and replenish a dying planet, now, before it’s too late. Malala understand we need to educate every child on earth, or else conflict and ignorance spread like wildfire in an age of chaos. The children get it. The adults, though, don’t.
Sadly for the West, its leadership is a gerontocracy. Joe Biden is an old, old man, and these days, he looks it. Merkel is an old woman. Macron is a young man attached to old ways. That isn’t a slight against age, but it is a complaint against old ways. These graybeards are attached to ways they can’t seem to chip away at. They can’t seem to unlearn what they’ve been taught, and so here our civilisation is, creaking under the weight of a haggard, often gerontocratic elite, which is paralyzed, unable to take the next step forward.
Nobody in the West champions the building of systems of global public goods, really. Not even its social democrats do, anymore. What a loss. A few decades ago, these were the very institutions calling for these big, beautiful, brave goals — the end of hunger, war, violence, disease, ignorance. Forevermore. It didn’t come true — or did it? Go ahead and ask someone whose parents had polio or smallpox. For them, the end of disease and violence was a little more real, and very much so. Ask someone who’s parents never had an education. For them, the end of ignorance was lived.
The West’s social democrats have become cynical. And cynicism has made them pessimistic, passive, and nihilistic. They think that goals like ending war, hunger, violence, ignorance, disease — these are idealistic follies. The right has beaten them into submission, bullied and hounded and harassed them so long they have begun to believe in their own impotence.
But they shouldn’t. Yesterday’s social democrats did beautiful and astonishing things. They really did begin to end poverty and disease and violence and hunger. Those projects must not be given up on. That work is what the future of civilisation is. If it feels like our civilisation has stalled, it’s because the work of civilisation has.
That is not just the fault of the right, which resists it. It is also the fault of the left, which has been convinced that it cannot go on doing it. That progress is some kind of myth. The only thing the left fights for anymore really is gender pronouns. It’s not that those are bad, but it is that giving a world vaccines, education, water, food, healing the planet, nourishing ecologies, sheltering the animals — all that is a far, far higher priority. For a civilization. Sorry to have break that news to you, but that is reality. You cannot do much with a pronoun if you don’t have a planet to live on.
The left’s vision has shrunk and narrowed and imploded. It has internalised the lesson of its own impotence. But is far from impotent. It really was changing the world. Until it gave up on changing the world, and began to settle for changing lesser things, like discourse or pronouns or who’s allowed to say what to whom about what’s in who’s pants today. It’s not that that’s wrong, but it is that a left without a vision or will to make progress for the world is not really one.
The West is bereft and paralysed and impotent, in the end, for a very simple reason. It’s right is ascendant. And it’s right offers one solution to the problem of a world falling apart — a solution which isn’t really one. Go backwards in time. Towards patriarchy and supremacy and hate and violence. Find a scapegoat, blame them, and don’t change a thing. Don’t wear a mask, don’t take a vaccine — it’s all a hoax, from Covid to climate change. Never the summers getting hotter.
Yet because the left offers no real vision, no real will, no real agenda, at a civilizational level, people are barely excited by it. Joe Biden was elected because he wasn’t Trump — that is the only reason young people voted for him. Young people need a left, again, with a global passion, vision, mission. One that bridges the gap between the West’s immense resources, and the world’s enormous problems. That is the only West which can go on existing. One moving towards more jsutice, truth, beauty, and goodness.
This West — the paralytic, bewildered, paralysed one — is made of a cynical left and a regressive right. The left is cynical about itself. The right wants the rest of us to live in a Taliban-esque reality. Neither of these are good options. We need to get back to the business of changing the world. Our civilisation feels like it’s stalled because it has. It is not taking the next step towards maturing, growing, evolving, which is about building a fairer, better, truer, nobler world, for all of us, right down to the tiniest things or the biggest oceans, global systems which protect and nourish and elevate and expand each and every life.
That is the work the West must get back to doing if it wants to go on being the beating heart of a civilization. That step is the one untaken. That journey, towards really becoming a civilisation which can take care of itself at a planetary scale, has systems and institutions to do it, ones which involve hundreds of millions, in the hard, beautiful, difficult, illuminating work of caring for billions and trillions — that is one that the future is waiting for us to dare to embark on — and history is betting we can’t.
The West has spent centuries monopolising the world’s resources. Its failure to provide public goods to a globe badly lacking in them now only reflects its growing paralysis and impotence.
Umair Haque, August 2021
Eudaimonia and Co
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