The Three Big Mistakes We’re Making in the 21st Century
Why Our Civilization’s in Decline, And What to Do About It
by umair haque
The 21st century’s young. We’re not even a quarter of the way through it. And yet it feels like an eternity. The days drag on. The world slips into regress. Civilization turns backwards. Ignorance and greed and hate and violence begin to rule, as democracy and its great values come undone. Economies slink into recession. The planet boils, and those of us who are still sane weep at it all, a little bit, if we’re honest.
Though the century’s young, it’s a calamitous one. It’s shaping up to be the most calamitous one in human history, because at our current rate of decline, it’s lights out in a decade or three — accelerating scarcity for the basics, from clean air to food to water to medicine, and all that takes decency and modernity with it, of course. So though the century’s barely begun, already, there are lessons to be learned — for those who aren’t too busy worshiping influencers and watching superhero movies, that is.
Let me discuss three of what I think are the most salient.
There are numbers, and then there are…numbers. Just today, the Tony Blair institute released a jaw-dropping estimate.
What he’s trying to say is this: since the summer, more than 25,000 people have died in Britain…because…nothing works anymore. You can’t get an ambulance, a doctor’s appointment, the once-renowned NHS broken and shattered after more than a decade of being starved, heating and electricity have become unaffordable, and so people are just…dying.
But let me put that in context for you. That’s more than a 9/11…every month. It’s more like a 9/11 every week, if you count the end of August as the end of summer. So it appears — not according to me, but according to its own thinktanks — that Britain is having a 9/11 every week. Every week.
There are few things that should cause your jaw to drop in astonishment, but that actually should. Because what we’re seeing here isn’t the result of terrorism, or natural disaster, or a giant meteor storm striking the entire Thames. It’s entirely self-inflicted. Britain’s having a 9/11 every week…because…well…
This is what happens when you turn your back on modernity. And that’s my first mistake of the 21st century. Turn your back on modernity? Be careful what you wish for — you might just get it. Let me explain that a little. From about 2010 or so, Britain was seized with a kind of regressive, atavistic, hyper-conservative mania. Instead of relenting, fed and fueled by Big Lies — like those famously on the sides of buses — it escalated, in great waves, until Britain became a nation that sneered at being part of the modern world.
Of course, one part of that was Brexit — Britain literally abandoned its position in the modern world, and broke off with the EU. Its economy is now in the process of implosion, as anyone vaguely thoughtful predicted, already shrinking by more than 10% — depression levels of contraction. And yet Britain’s mania to abandon modernity goes right down into the details — there it is, trying to do “deals” to…human traffic…refugees…to Rwanda…thumbing its nose at international law. It’s saying to the modern world: screw you. We don’t need you. We’re better than you. We don’t need your laws or your institutions or your organizations or your values or norms or ideals.
How’s that working out for Britain? Well, like I said, it’s having a 9/11 every week. Why? Because living standards are plummeting back to pre-modern standards. Britain is becoming something like a Victorian or Edwardian country again — the ruthless, Dickensian villains profit immensely, while the average person plunges into poverty. And what happens as a result of that is that people die. Because they can’t get healthcare, medicine, money, heat. The proof is in the pudding, and yet Brits, as a society, still choose to not quite see it. They lament Brexit, but they don’t understand the larger point that as a society, they gave up on modernity, and so now, they’re going right back to pre-modernity.
What does pre-modernity mean? Modernity is the era that began after the last World War. What was set up after that? The EU — the world’s first genuinely post-national democratic union, in a huge quantum leap for humanity, and we’ll come back to that. Britain chose to leave it precisely because it’s given up on modernity. What else was set up after the last World War? The NHS — and Britain’s given that up, too, precisely because, again, it’s abandoned modernity as something to sneer at in contempt, not value, enact, support, invest in. Or at least the governments it’s been electing for more than a decade, each more extreme than the last have, as its anti-modern frenzy mounted.
An easy way to put Britain’s lesson would be: nationalism leads to self-destruction. And that’s true, but it’s only part of the picture, really. What is nationalism? It’s not just patriotism. Patriotism is a sense of pride in your country or heritage or what have you. Nationalism is a kind of chauvinism. It says mine is better than yours. We’re supreme, and you’re beneath us. Nationalism is a poison because into it is woven the poisoned thread of supremacy.
And yet if we just learn that from Britain, we’re also missing much of the story. Because the details matter, too. What does nationalism do? Well, it might begin as chest beating Big Lies in referenda to betray and abandon your former friends and allies. But soon enough it becomes outright hate and xenophobia.
Britain, today, is literally a country in which “hostility” to anyone “foreign” is a policy. And yet though that’s eerily reminiscent of some of history’s darkest periods, Brits don’t shudder at it nearly enough. Xenophobia, too, curdles in on itself — and the final scapegoat left isn’t even the foreigner, but the “weakling” and the “liability” even within the “chosen people.” And that’s what’s happened in Britain, too — the cycle of scapegoating is complete, and Brits don’t just obediently hate foreigners with the passion their fanatics and lunatics taught them to — they have begun to shrug at having a society in which there’s a 9/11 every week, because, well, hey, the strong survive, and the weak perish, and that’s the Rightful Moral Law of the Universe.
That is what anti-modernity is. Britain reveals it to us with chilling, eerie accuracy. Let me now come to my second mistake, which is a kind of hidden one. It’s this. Not recognizing the European Miracle. That’s the mistake Britain made that led to Brexit, and yet many more are making it too, even Europeans.
Let’s go back to anti-modernity for a second: it’s this ugly, grotesque Nietzschean idea that only the strong survive, and the weak perish, and that’s the rightful moral order of the cosmos. Now, Nietzsche thought of himself as a Great Philosopher for coming up with this — but, really, it wasn’t new. That’s what justified the entire history of human caste societies, of feudalism, of empires. Some people had “noble” blood which meant they were superior, and their moral duty was to exploit the “peasants,” who had inferior blood. Some societies developed intricate systems of castes based on this logic, and all of them, more or less, had social structures divided up feudally, into noble and peasant and king.
Until modernity happened. It was only in the ashes of the last war that humanity took a quantum leap, and left that entire era — the feudal era — behind. It’s true that France had a revolution, and there was even an Age of Revolutions. But France was the exception, and it was Germany’s old aristocracy, for example, which promoted Hitler to power. And then after the war? Something like the socioeconomic equivalent of the invention of the steam engine happened. The European Miracle.
In one human lifetime — just one — something happened that had never happened before, anywhere, ever, period, full stop, in all of human history. Europe was ashes — quite literally. And within decades, it enjoyed the highest living standards not just anywhere on the planet, but in all of history. Think about that for a second. I talk about it a lot precisely because we don’t think about it nearly enough, any of us. It had never happened before, and nobody — I mean nobody — in those grim days after the war would have said: within a few decades, less than one human lifetime, Europe is going to have history’s highest living standards, and be renowned for them. Its people are going to live history’s longest, happiest, healthiest, most prosperous lives.
Nobody imagined that. Not even the visionaries who created modern Europe. They did it for a different reason. With investment from America — the Marshall Plan — they rewrote their constitutions to make all the basics, first the pre-modern ones, and then the modern ones, rights, for the first time in history, anywhere, ever. Now Europeans were to enjoy everything from pre-modern basics — decent food, clean water — to modern ones like healthcare, education, transport, and media — as rights.
But that wasn’t to create a Big Bang in Human Progress. It was to prevent fascism ever rising again, because as the great John Maynard Keynes had discovered, the seeds of fascism were sown by sudden plunges into poverty, which destabilized fledgling democracies. But that Big Bang did happen. The European Miracle is real.
How did it happen? Well, I’ve told you one part — investment, the idea of basics as human rights, not just pre-modern ones, but also modern ones, which especially at the time of contemporary Europe’s founding, were unimaginable. High-speed trains linking Paris and Barcelona in hours? Healthcare for anyone…in the union…anywhere…at anytime? Higher education for all?
Europe invested in public goods, and kept on doing so. Now, Europe had an advantage in this way — a cultural one. It had always valued public goods. Where was the agora born? Greece. The town square? Europe. The idea of the financial marketplace? Holland. And so on. Public goods were in Europe’s cultural DNA — in precisely the same way as today, just as for millennia, you can go stand in a great square in any European city, from Rome to Antwerp and so forth. But just because it had this idea, this value, doesn’t mean it had to go on enacting it — and developing it to modern standards. Because Europe didn’t just stop at pretty town squares and quaint little parks. It built all the things which today take the world’s breath away — cutting edge healthcare, great universities available to all, high-speed trains, the world’s finest media, and so on.