This is the third in a series of long-form essays which will appear here over the coming months. To distinguish them from other pieces on the site, they are numbered, and are probably best read in order. The previous essay is here.
Okay, it’s been a bit of a bumpy ride so far, with all the talk of impending doom. But there’s no point pretending things aren’t bad when millions of people are already suffering the effects of our failure to keep the clock of progress ticking over. Burying our heads in the sand will protect nobody, least of all ourselves. On the other hand, doom is only impending if we fail to act. And in a sense that has always been the case. Civilization didn’t just come in to being regardless of the what we humans did. We have been responsible for every positive development (and there are many), just as we are responsible for the negative ones. Right now though, with a conflation of challenges that has been described as a polycrisis, we need to ensure that the positive developments outscore the negative.
Adam Tooze helpfully defined the term polycrisis in an article in the Financial Times in 2022:
A problem becomes a crisis when it challenges our ability to cope and thus threatens our identity. In the polycrisis the shocks are disparate, but they interact so that the whole is even more overwhelming than the sum of the parts. At times one feels as if one is losing one’s sense of reality.
Tooze neatly sums up the situation we find ourselves in, especially its emotional impact: it can indeed feel overwhelming. It is the task of this project to ease that feeling by showing that the disparate elements of the polycrisis have common causes, and should, if we understand them properly, yield to common solutions.
To my mind, ‘civilization’ is the catch-all term we use to describe what it is about the way we organise our societies that sets us apart from other forms of life. But we also use the term to describe ancient civilizations that have come and gone, sometimes absorbed into new, larger aggregations, but often collapsing completely and leaving a historical gap during which many of the defining characteristics of civilization - especially progress - are absent.
In the first piece on this substack, I mentioned the need for a globalised approach to progress: common standards for all people, everywhere. This requires us to define civilization as a single global entity. Today, anyone with enough money can travel anywhere in the world. Many of us can buy goods and services created by people working in any location worldwide. And globalisation doesn’t just define the lives of the well off in rich countries. Many of the goods we buy are made by people working on the other side of the world. They too are participants in a single global economy, albeit not very well paid by our own standards.
It’s thanks to this process of globalisation that we now all inhabit a single global civilization. This is a good thing: it means we have a common interest in addressing our shared problems. It doesn’t however, mean we can ignore the factors that led to the fall of earlier, non-global, civilizations. The civilization we have built over the last century, largely as a result of developments in technology, is not immune from overstretching itself just like the ancient Greeks or the Romans did.
So what do I mean by the rather hysterical sounding term: ‘civilizational survival’?
If a comet struck our planet and the resulting dust cloud blocked out the sunlight for years, then it’s probable our species, along with most other life on Earth, would die out. If a full-scale nuclear war broke out, small groups of people may survive but it would take centuries before their descendants could build an advanced technology-based civilization like our own. Civilizational survival is not about avoiding this kind of total collapse (fingers crossed though). It’s about avoiding a slow deterioration, and the steady loss of historic civilizational gains, which reduces the quality of life for gradually more people, and ultimately costs many not only their livelihoods, but also their lives.
So how bad is it? I’m not going to reel off statistics about the number of people who’ve lost their homes due to wildfires, flooding and rising sea-levels, all of which are the clear result of human-made climate change; nor the numbers who die prematurely each year (in rich countries and poor) for want of access to medical treatments which could easily be made universally available; nor the growing tally of migrant deaths cruelly inflated by the policies of rich country governments (especially here in the UK) in their determination to make political capital out of people’s lives.
Each of the ten threats to civilization (they’re here if you want a reminder) already limit the life chances of millions of people, but climate change is the one likely to affect all our lives before very long. Even scientists who’ve been warning about it for decades have been surprised by how quickly it has begun to cause chaos around the world. And it’s happening while average global temperatures remain below the 1.5 degree above pre-industrial level threshold, previously considered safe. The consequences will not be confined to economically-excluded people in poorer countries. Just ask the winemakers who lost everything in Californian wildfires in 2022.
We need to tackle climate change with the most urgency, but not in isolation from the other threats. They all derive from our failure to design an economy which can deliver a just, inclusive and sustainable society and lock in the social gains of progress.
There is no simple answer to the questions of how bad things really are, or how bad they’re going to get. But with the minimal efforts currently being made, things are bound to get worse. Without a change of course, it’s unlikely that anyone will be able to protect themselves from the consequences of our civilisation giving up on progress.
Should we even be asking how bad are things going to get? Instead, the question should be: how much better could they be? A forthcoming piece will look at the question of moral ambition. It is down to us to overturn the pessimism inherent in Reinhold Niebuhr’s conclusion in Moral Man and Immoral Society, and work out how the moral ambition of individuals can be translated into collective action for change through a properly functioning political system.
Encouragingly that work has already started: The data scientist Hannah Ritchie, whose forthcoming book Not the end of the World looks to be the perfect antidote to the unhelpful but widespread doomerism infecting the minds of too many people, reflects on the progress we have already made:
As the lead researcher for Our World in Data, an organization that aims to make data on the world’s biggest problems accessible and understandable, I’ve written extensively on the reasons to be optimistic about the future. The prices of solar and wind power, as well as of batteries for storing low-carbon energy, have all plunged. Global deforestation peaked decades ago and has been slowly declining. Sales of new gas and diesel cars are now falling. Coal is starting to die in many countries. Government commitments are getting closer to limiting global warming to 2°C. Deaths from natural disasters — despite what news about climate change-related fires and hurricanes might appear to suggest — are a fraction of what they used to be.
In Hannah’s piece at Vox, from which this paragraph comes, she goes on to say:
Scaring people into action doesn’t work ….. we need optimism to make progress — yet that alone isn’t enough. To contend with environmental crises and make life better for everyone, we need the right kind of optimists: those who recognize that the world will only improve if we fight for it.
It is not my intention here to scare people into action, but denialism can be as unhelpful as doomerism. I don’t for one minute think Hannah is denial, but many people are. She is right: progress requires optimists who are prepared to fight for change. But that fight will only be successful if we acknowledge how serious things are, and understand how we got here. Are we in time to make a real difference to climate change? Yes! Any and all mitigating actions will reduce the impact of climate change. And large, coordinated, carefully targetted mitigations could make an enormous difference.
Save nuclear annhiliation (still a real possibility despite it having rather fallen off the news agenda), climate change is the one threat that demands urgent action lest its effects become irreversible. And the scale of change will need to be bigger than anything we have ever tried. So why not use the threat of climate change as an opportunity to create a better world for everyone?
I should be clear at this point: there is no solution in turning the clock back to a previous age. Despite the endless complaints of ‘things ain’t what they used to be’ or similar, there was never a golden age. The misty-eyed remenisences of people who long for a return to what they romanticise as the certainties of yesteryear are, quite frankly, delusional. A return to the 1950s would require us to ditch not only the very real progress we have made in terms of women’s rights and the rights of minorities to be treated equally, but also the huge improvements in our capacity to create wealth. In any case, the challenges we face today are quite different to those faced by societies as they emerged from World War II.
There is some learning from the past though. The post-1945 period can be divided into three parts: 1945 to 1979, 1980 to 2008, and 2008 to present. (I accept that the terrorist attacks of September 2001 changed the world politically and culturally, and are certainly not irrelevant, but they made little difference in economic terms, my principal concern here).
In 1945 the world emerged from three decades of unremitting civilizational disaster, with a determination to create institutions to ensure there could be no repeat of:
an unprecedented global depression following the Wall Street Crash of 1929.
two world wars, the effects of which few nations escaped, and
a genocide in The Holocaust that shook the world to its moral foundations.
Moves towards greater cooperation in Europe; the establishment of the United Nations; and the agreement of an economic framework at Bretton Woods in 1944, all paved the way for period of sustained expansion and improved economic security, even if most of the benefits were felt in the advanced industrial economies.
Kate Pickett, co-author of The Spirit Level, wrote recently about how this wider context played out here in the UK:
The economic vision that won out has largely been attributed to the genius of John Maynard Keynes, who argued that straitened economic times call not for fiscal conservatism but a generous and ambitious package of public spending. Britain’s postwar economy needed investment to get it back on its feet. That had to be coupled – as William Beveridge argued and championed – with a social safety net that ensured everyone could lead a decent life. The spirit of collectivism that saw Britain through the war had its legacy in the political and economic agenda that followed it.
It was not just about creating the right kind of international economic framework. Political commitment was crucial too. But what politics creates, it can all too easily undo. This isn’t to say that the post-war settlement could have endured indefinitely; policy should and could have been adapted to a rapidly changing world, but it wasn’t necessary to trash the post-war moral vision.
But a new generation of politicians didn’t care. It took just three short decades for these era-defining catastrophes to fade from memory sufficiently to lose their power as the driving force in both international relations and national politics. With the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 and Ronald Reagan in 1980, normal political and economic service was resumed. This meant the privatisation of many state-owned ‘natural’ monopolies, the abolition of controls on the flow of capital across borders, and the abandonment of the regulation that had tamed the worst excesses of the free market. Coupled with the technological transformation of the financial system, the result was a world in which financial markets played a ever-increasing role, prioritising the making of more money for people who already had lots, and neglecting the proper purposes of economic activity. This inevitably led to increasing inequality and a steady lack of investment in manufacturing. And before you say: ‘yes, but at least the free-market revolution finally brought decent levels of economic growth’, it did not.
In the 1950s, global GDP growth (a problematic measure of economic success, but the one which advocates of current economic arrangements prefer) averaged 5 per cent, before rising to 5.2 per cent in the 1960s. In the 1970s, when the post-1945 settlement began to be dismantled, it fell to 3.8 per cent, before falling again, to 3.2 per cent, in the 1980s and 3.0 per cent in the two decades to 2010. From 2011 to 2022 it continued to fall, averaging just 2.76. This final figure includes the bounce back from the Covid-19 contraction in 2020, most of which was made up in the subsequent two years.
The decades after 1945 were unique. With so much rebuilding to be done, it’s no surprise that growth was strong. On the other hand, moving from a war economy to a peacetime one was incredibly difficult, with resource shortages, the need to retrain labour and difficulty in getting finance for capital investment. Looked at that way, the level of post-1945 economic growth is nothing less than miraculous.
But the subsequent move towards free markets and less government interference in the economy was supposed to empower people to do even better; to grow the cake even faster and ensure everyone got a bigger slice. Instead, in the developed world, we got endemic unemployment, at times at levels not seen since the 1930s, a series of boom-bust cycles and chronically low levels of investment.
You might think that the developing world, starting as it was from an even lower base, with many countries throwing off the shackles of colonialism and finally free to develop their economies in the interests of their own people, would have experienced better growth. But no: as the economist Ha-Joon Chang pointed out in his excellent book 23 Things they don’t tell you about Capitalism:
Per capita growth in the developing world fell from 3 per cent in the 1960s and 1970s to 1.7 per cent in the 1980s and 1990s. During the 2000s there was a pick-up …. bringing the growth rate up to 2.6 per cent for the 1980 to 2009 period, but this was largely due to the rapid growth of China and India - two giants that, while liberalizing, did not embrace neo-liberal policies.
Instead of capitalising on the massive investment required to rebuild the world after 1945, this new age of unfettered free-market capitalism pretty much ignored the need for ongoing investment in infrastructure, instead creating ever more complex ways to increase the wealth of the already wealthy, and (for electoral reasons) making sure that the people on the next rung of the ladder saw the value of their only asset (their home) go up and up.
The economic and social successes of the period were largely chimeric. In the UK, the Blair/Brown government set out to grow the economy in order to increase tax revenues and so provide for those for whom the economy didn’t. But it did this by exploiting the money creating mechanisms of the new economic order without recognising that order for what it was: essentially a giant Ponzi scheme.
It’s true that substantial social gains were made by the UK Labour government between 1997 and 2010. If you can induce and successfully ride a wave of economic growth to pay for improved health services, build new schools and fund free childcare, this is certainly better than the systematic dismantling of those gains via austerity after 2010, when Labour lost power. But it was never sustainable: even if Labour had remained in power, because of the way the economy is configured, and especially the way financial markets exert power far in excess of the numbers whose interests they represent, those gains could not be made permanent.
Despite these improvements funded from increasing tax revenues, things did not improve much in the real economy: fewer people were involved in the creation of new wealth while an elite at the top were were getting richer from an increasingly rentier economy. There will be a piece shortly on Rentier Capitalism, and another on the difference between money and wealth, and how, unless these two distinct things are in more or less in snych, there is little hope either for economic growth or a more equitable distribution of wealth.
The efforts to keep enough people on board to ensure that neo-liberal economics remained unassailable, through cheap credit, along with ever more convoluted schemes to make money out of money dreamed up by financiers, eventually brought the financial system, and therefore the real economy it dominates, crashing down. Like all Ponzi schemes.
Since then, we’ve been living in a kind of zombie economy, with average real wages in many countries stuck at pre-2008 levels and only the super-rich benefiting as more of the economy is allowed to come under the ownership of fewer people. A decade of historically low interest rates again gave the impression that we still had solutions to an unprecedented crisis. But the COVID pandemic, with its long-term impact on global supply chains, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, leading to shortages of grain, oil, gas and microchips, soon put pay to that notion.
This double whammy led to levels of inflation unseen in decades, driven by reduced supply rather than increased demand. Nonetheless, central banks responded in the only way they know: by raising interest rates, as if the problem was too much money sloshing around the economy. With record numbers forced to use food banks, and rising interests rates adding further to the cost of living, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that those responsible for economic policy are either clueless, or that they simply don’t care.
But they really need to start caring, or else be replaced by a different kind of politician that does. We already see the darker side of the response to the crisis among people offered neither solutions nor hope by elected politicians. In some of the oldest established democracies, many have already given up on democracy. Their response might be intellectually incoherent and sometimes even violent, but it would not be happening if democracy was delivering on its promises and offering some hope of improvement, as it did for their parents’ generation.
The USA currently offers the world a vision of what could well happen everywhere unless we buck up and get our economies in order. In The Atlantic earlier this year, Adrienne LaFrance concluded her investigation into the rise of extreme political violence in the US with the following:
Ending political violence means facing down those who use the language of democracy to weaken democratic systems. It means rebuking the conspiracy theorist who uses the rhetoric of truth to obscure what’s real; the billionaire who describes his privately owned social media platform as a democratic town square; the seditionist who proclaims himself a patriot; the authoritarian who claims to love freedom.
Adrienne is right. But rather than simply treating the symptoms, we also need to better understand why these things are happening now, and the extent to which economic failures and a the strong sense of injustice felt by many, are fuelling the flames of political violence.
What does this whistle stop tour of the last several decades tell us? There certainly never was a golden age. As Sir Salman Rushdie said just last week:
‘the thing about the golden age is that it never existed, and the myth of the golden age is always used to justify actions in the present’.
Nonetheless, the post war settlement, as with President Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s, shows that there are alternatives to a low-regulation, finance-dominated, increasingly unequal economy.
Economic history since the industrial revolution strongly suggests that the rising tide of capitalism only lifts all boats during a specific phase: when a nation (or the world) is forced to re-build after some great disaster, or when governments realise they will lose their grip on power unless they can drag their countries into the modern world, in the process creating a new middle class, as has occurred in India and China over the last two decades. Let me paraphrase that last sentence: capitalism only works for most people when governments are forced to intervene in the market.
I’m not advocating a return to post-war Keynesian economics, nor that we attempt to emulate the incredible economic expansion of the Chinese. No, the solution to our civilizational crisis will be different, but the principle holds: the economy can be directed to different ends, especially when democracy functions as it should. It’s time to explore what kind of alternative would be up to the task of facing down our ten civilizational megathtreats, and how we might implement it.