Instant history is one of the riskiest activities. Trying to evaluate the significance of what is happening (or not) while it is happening (or not) exposes the weaknesses of our frames of reference, the gaps in our awareness and knowledge, and, not least, the frailty of our reasoning. But unless we take the risk, the prospects of learning something from the whirlwinds of the last decade will be even slimmer than they already are. So let’s take the plunge.
Moral hazards and natural hazards occupy center stage. Ten years back the “too big to fail” signboard pointed to a number of institutional players on the global financial scene. The asymmetry between their “right to risk” and the perceived responsibility of public entities, national and international, to bail them out, turned into a popular cry for greater economic justice. Over the decade the cry reached shattering levels. Rapid accumulation of evidence on a precipitous rise of economic inequalities, particularly in richer countries, which had been gathering steam since some 40 years ago, reinforced the anger. Something, maybe everything, was wrong. In each place, the blame game went into overdrive. The favorite trick (as so often) was to castigate “foreign forces”, of whatever type. Yet it was mostly just a thin cover for an assault on internal enemies. So the decade has been a great period for accentuating division within countries. Civil wars, with or without widespread use of weapons of destruction, are being waged across the globe. Cross border “alliances”, some fairly deep, others shallow and transient, are formed, unformed and reformed, according to convenience and calculation. Uncertainty and instability have become totems worshipped by those in power. Why? Because these groups can present themselves as the only ones able to offer protection against the storms.
The arts (mostly dark) of communication are essential to sustain the myth that somehow the powerful are protecting the weak. Of course the notion has been around forever, has nearly always been preposterous, and has been relentlessly backed by the peddling of false information. Yet recent years have seen a quantum leap in this vital business. Technologies, and their diffusion, have permitted the creation of confusion on the global scale. Most, nay, all of us are inhabited by prejudices and predilections, eager to come across snippets of information that comfort what we believe we already “know”. The critical society is supposed to fight this, in two ways. One is by seeking to ensure that most of what is widely diffused (through whatever medium) passes basic tests of authenticity. The other is by encouraging individuals to use their own skills of reasoning, forensics and evidence checking to ensure they are not fooled too often. But the means to sustain the critical society have been gravely impaired in the past few years. The contests for truth are now conducted in the most direct ways. Communication technologies permit direct bombardment of the individual with messages from all kinds of purveyors who, likewise through electronic tools, are extremely well informed about the prejudices and predilections of everyone of us.
Thus far, the places that aspire to be critical societies have been experiencing acute difficulties in coping with the assault. The reasons have become all too plain in the recent period. They are both technological and socio-political, socio-economic. On the technological side, the major developments have come from private entities, which have often been able to feed into concerns of important governments. The private firms earn huge profits from the knowledge their algorithms can extract from the “natural resource” which human beings en masse constitute, while political groups and governments can simultaneously use much of the same information to generate election and other results suitable to them. The social dimension comes from the frail foundations on which the practice of representative democratic government has always laid. What exists in various countries today has emerged from struggles, “concessions”, efforts to extend “rights”. There is nothing natural about it. While those holding political office have invariably paid lip service (and sometimes more) to the need to encourage criticism, there has, in most places, been a reluctance to let the criticism go too far. Representative democracy, as a phrase, is a bit like the word “house”. It covers an exceptional variety of designs, constructs, methods of maintenance, of repair, of redesign – and of robustness to destructive forces. Whether all these objects respond to the same fundamental criteria is very much an open question.
The perceived immanence of injustice has inevitably increased the stresses on the structures of representative democracy, indeed it has again led to questioning to what extent a so-called “rule of law” offers much in the way of guarantees to the majority of the population. Do people really believe that “all are equal before the law”? The past decade has undoubtedly registered in many places formal progress in the law regarding several aspects of the treatment of groups of the population previously suffering discrimination. That progress itself, however, has been fiercely contested and resented in a number of societies, and is not yet necessarily well consolidated. But in many other aspects of the practice of the law, things are not so positive. On issues ranging from measures to protect personal security, to matters affecting safety of medicines, and on to what is done to ensure environmental care and punish environmental abuses, the operation of many societies seems to be judged as, at best, not very effective.
The features of the last decade just highlighted relate especially to seismic movements within what used to be called “the West”. Globally, however, it is precisely the transformation of power relationships and of “axes of understanding” which the years from 2010 onwards have dramatically confirmed. Numerous things have been done by elements within the old West to try and demonstrate that they still set the rules and call the shots. It is glaringly clear, however, that they do not. Leaving aside the consequences of the seemingly erratic behavior of President Trump (to try and give meaning to that behavior, perhaps it could be called an approach of “risk transfer” – former allies of the US must now deal with the many adverse results of Trump’s actions), the complacence of Europe has received the strongest rebuffs. In just these final days of the year, we have seen President Macron’s statement in West Africa that “33 terroristes ont ete neutralises” met within 48 hours by actions from ISIS which, in turn, have “neutralises” a larger number of innocent people. Chancellor Merkel has announced an imminent visit to Turkey, where she will apparently seek a continuance of President Erdogan’s acceptance of refugees (thereby alleviating some of the pressures on the EU). Meanwhile, in behavior which might suggest parallels to European history of some 80 years ago, the Turkish President seems to be extending his territorial grip in what he sees as his zone of influence while other interested parties have yet to limit this behavior.
Hence the extraordinary period that opened some 500 years ago, and which saw a smallish group of countries set most of the rules of the geopolitical games, the commercial transactions, and the “norms” for governance, is over. These countries declared that they were defending a certain conception of society, embodied in “Western values”. Just who in those societies actually supported those values was never clear. Now substantial segments within those same societies are calling into question some, or all, of the “traditional” values and opposing fiercely any further extension of “values” into other areas. There seems to be a growing divide in the societies of Europe and the US (perhaps less so in Australia, New Zealand and Canada) between parts of the political apparatus, and elements of civil society, that still genuinely strive for those values, and substantial numbers of people who have their strong doubts. The notion of progress as a kind of “win/win” change has disappeared. Competition in the fullest sense rules – and not all those competing face anything like a level playing field (remember that phrase?).
Fortunately, as Ovid so superbly showed, all these metamorphoses are rich and multi-faceted. Countless positive things have been happening. People across the globe are making their voices heard in all sorts of ways. They are active, representing themselves rather than being represented. They are joining forces to protest, to launch major global initiatives, to tell the Emperor he is naked. They are underlining the inexhaustible value of observation reinforced by action. They are embracing the maxim enunciated by a famous Bishop of Hippo, namely “a free curiosity is more effective in learning than a rigid discipline”. It is that searching which is the essence of the societies we want to live in. To do that, things have to be told as they are. And those messages have to be spread. On this website, in the coming times, we will therefore continue to follow another open society, open access dictum of that same Bishop, St Augustine, to wit “Truth is not Private Property”.
Peter O’Brien, Brussels, 30 December 2019