There’s a growing unease about the state of the world. But is this time different?
In politics we’ve seen Populism at it’s highest levels since WWII and parties seem to be as divided as they’ve ever been. Regardless of whether you’re on the pro or anti side of his policies, who could have ever believed that Donald Trump would be the POTUS?
In economics we’ve got the FAANG’s, most of which didn’t exist little more than a decade ago, whose collective value would make them the fourth largest economy in the world if it were a country. Wealth inequality has spiralled, the gilets jaunes looks very much like a revolution and there’s growing calls for an end to the capitalist system that has served us so well for so long.
Less than two decades ago September 11 shook the world. Recently, two of the most significant terror attacks in modern history have occurred in Christchurch and Sri Lanka. Christianity attacking Islam, Islam attacking Christianity.
Are we at a rare moment in world history and we’re seeing the beginning of the end for humanity?
Homo Sapiens took over the planet from Neanderthals 40 thousand years ago. The world became a fundamentally different place six thousand years ago when farming was introduced for the first time. More recently the Mongols expanded from the Asian heartland to conquer much of Eastern Europe in the 13th Century, killing some 40 million people to become the largest empire the world had seen. It was only in very recent times that The Mongols were surpassed, with the British Empire ruling almost a quarter of the world population just prior to WWI.
Put yourself in the shoes of the population at any of these times. I doubt that the perception of where their time ranked in the significance of world history is all that different from the general perception right now. Further to this, I’m not sure there’s ever been a period in time where the perception of the general public was that they were in a very ordinary era.
The Roman Empire dominated society and its culture for well over a thousand years. The Western Liberal Democracy that we have all become so accustomed to is still less than a century old. Are we so naive to think that our time in the 200 thousand years of human history is particularly special?
It’s human nature to overrate our own importance and underappreciate past history. Considering these two factors, it’s much easier to understand the current state of the world. And it’s the prevalent foolishness of each new empire or culture that their opinions are better than all before them that ensures this cycle will continue infinitely.
This seems obvious, but most still fall into the self-fulfilling prophecy without even realising it.
I’m a white heterosexual male who lives in metropolitan Melbourne. I’ve travelled much of the world, married a second-generation immigrant and work for a Chinese family. I’d like to think that I have an open and well-educated view of the world. I idolise sportspeople like the Islamic Moroccan, Hicham El-Guerrouj, and the Catholic African-American, Lebron James. My favourite musician of all time is the flamboyantly homosexual Freddie Mercury and more recently I think Lady Gaga may well be the biggest rockstar on the planet. I believe that capitalism has some chinks that are starting to show but that it’s still a far better system than any proposed alternatives. Australia largely aligns with my value system and clearly makes sense as a good place for me to be.
I might not be as well suited if I were living in an inner-city apartment in Brunei, or North Korea. The cultural differences of both countries from our way of living are well documented. The mistake that we continue to make is that we fall into the belief that our system is good and their system is bad.
I, or any of my fellow cultural aligned compatriots, might argue until we’re blue in the face that the stoning to death of a homosexual man in Brunei is a horrific act that must be stopped. Discussed within our own society, there is no possible way to see that the opposing view could be considered acceptable. The problem is that in Brunei, a country with a very different values system to ours, many would argue that the acceptance of public displays of homosexuality in our liberal democracy is just as abhorrent.
Unfortunately this argument of wildly opposing views can not be solved objectively. Biology certainly doesn’t suggest that all humans should be treated equally, just like it doesn’t suggest that white Anglo Saxon males should be the dominant species. The way in which humans have organised themselves into class systems throughout history has largely been unaffected by how science suggests it should be.
Nor can we rely on a deeply engrained historical precedence where practices have been carried out for thousands of years and therefore become globally accepted as truth. In our own culture in just the last half century we’ve seen acts that by today’s standards would be considered human rights atrocities.
So without scientific evidence or significant precedence, we are reliant on subjective measures to decide on what is right and wrong.
Herein lies the paradox. If we push hard for the adoption of what we perceive as our fair and just values system, then we create the exact self fulfilling prophecy that we know leads to more conflict and war. If we do nothing, then we’re not fighting for what we believe in.
The enemy is extremist views at both end of the spectrum. Contrary to the way many cultural debates have played out recently, a healthy level of disagreement should be not only expected but also encouraged. Without science or precedence to rely on, we as a society need to understand that our views and beliefs can never be considered absolute.
Ask almost any Western person in today’s society what they think on the topic of human slavery and the expected answers should be clear. But ask an upper class Roman in the 2nd century, a Southern American cotton farmer just last century, or a Mauritanian business owner and the answers on the topic will be very different. We might despise their views and vehemently disagree with them, but that does not mean that we are right and they are wrong.
Nelson Mandela will be remembered through history as one of its great leaders. His defining characteristic that separated him from so many others was his ability to view things from others perspective. Despite his very strong beliefs on the Apartheid regime, he know that imposing those beliefs on his counterparts would only induce extremism.
Most look to Mandela as benchmark for how we should resolve conflict and force change. But most of those same people, with all good intentions, fall into the trap of doing the exact opposite of what made Mandela so successful. We judge the extremists from the perspectives of our own beliefs system and that therein creates the ongoing cycle of conflict.
We probably are living in a very interesting era in human history. The world is as globalised as it has ever been and the rate of change is rapid. But have we reached a point where our western liberal beliefs on how society should operate will become accepted infinitely? Probably not. In a quarter of a century, societies will likely look at some of today’s commonly accepted practices in the same way we now look at the first fleets treatment of Aboriginals.
Our beliefs are not right or wrong, they’re just our beliefs. We don’t have to accept others beliefs, but society typically has a hard time applying perspective to the way in which we judge them. Unless that changes, we are destined to follow similar trends to the past 40 thousand years. That shouldn’t be surprising, but let’s not be so naive to think that it’s different this time.
