Will the 21st Century be a turning point in human history?

 The short answer, I believe, is Yes, but whether it will be positive or negative is up for conjecture. If history is any guide, I’d have to say things don’t look particularly promising. There have been a number of things I’ve read recently, and viewed on TV, from various sources that have made me reflect on this, and it’s hard to know where to start. 

Maybe I’ll start with something I wrote on Facebook recently, which was the seed for this rumination.

 

Humanity has always had both the capacity and inclination for self-destruction. It is our Achilles heel. One can't help but think that the 21st Century is our turning point, one way or the other.

 

There are lots of examples, the Roman Empire being one of the most cited, but also the ancient Egyptians and the Mayans, not to mention Easter Island. Curiously, I’ve just started watching Foundation, on Apple TV, based on Isaac Asimov’s famous books, which is premised on the fall of a future galactic empire founded and run by humanity.

 

But there is another TV series by the BBC called Capital, very contemporary, which I’ve also just started watching, and seems to encapsulate our current situation. I’ve only watched one episode, which centres on a single street in England, but is rendered as a microcosm of global politics and social dilemmas. 

There is the corporate middle manager whose ambition and greed is only outdone by his wife, who mentally spends his money before he’s even earned it. There is the refugee from Zimbabwe who is working illegally, therefore exploited by an ‘agent’, while she faces imminent deportation even though she fears death on arrival. Something that refugees in Australia can readily identify with. There is the Pakistani corner shopkeeper, who is a diligent neighbour, with 2 sons, one who has become religiously conservative and the other who has started, but not completed, 3 university degrees (I can identify with that). He’s the target of a stalker, covertly photographing him and his family. Like everyone else in the street, he’s receiving postcards with the ominous warning, We Want What You Have. In other words, there is an undercurrent of class envy which could fester into something more sinister. Another of the recipients is an elderly woman, whose son and daughter have all but abandoned her, and who is facing terminal illness, but she’s inherited the sin of living in a capitally inflated home.

 

Also, on TV recently, I watched a programme on (Australia’s) ABC 4 Corners, called The Pandora Papers, which is about tax havens for the ultra wealthy and powerful, and really identified an ‘alternative universe’, as one commentator described it, that the rest of us are largely unaware of. The programme showed how, in Australia, unidentified foreign investors are driving the price of homes beyond the reach of ordinary citizens who live here. There have been other programmes about corruption in the food industry in Europe, which goes beyond the borders of Europe.

 

I’ve read other stories in newspapers, and what they all have in common is inequality. Curiously, Philosophy Now (Issue 145 Aug/Sep 2021) had as its theme, existentialism, but included an article called The Stoic’s Lacuna by Alex Richardson, a History teacher at Croydon, UK. Its relevance to this topic was a reference to the Greek stoic, Epictetus, who said, “Seek not that the things which happen should happen as you wish but wish the things which happen to be as they are, and you will have a tranquil flow of life.” In other words, accept one’s lot in life and stop whinging.

 

Richardson’s essay extends into the modern day by referencing Katherine Birbalsingh (given the sobriquet, Britain’s strictest headmistress), Dr Michael Sugrue and Jordan Peterson as ‘modern day stoics’, who all advocate in varying degrees, that inequality is the natural order of things. Birbalsingh may be the most liberal of them, when she says, “Of course the world is run by an old boys’ network, and of course it’s not fair.” I admit I know nothing about her outside Richardson’s essay, but he puts her in the same sentence, therefore category, as former Navy SEAL, Jocko Willink, who effectively argues that a person’s day-to-day struggle with paying off a mortgage and generally making ends meet is completely disconnected from ‘political management of the economy’. 

 

Peterson is someone I’m more familiar with, who effectively argues that inequality is an evolutionary consequence of the survival of the fittest, not only in the natural world but in human affairs. People, especially males, get to the top of the heap, where they are especially attractive to females, who copulate and subsequently procreate with them to ensure the survival of both parties’ genes. As it happens, this exact scenario is played out by one of the families represented in the aforementioned TV show, Capital.

 

Richardson believes that Peterson is a ‘follower’ of the ‘Pareto Principle’, expressed in the Bible (both Mark and Matthew): “For to everyone who has will more be given, and he will have abundance, but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away.” In other words, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Or as Richardson puts it, “wealth and power naturally accumulate in the hands of a few exceptional individuals at the top” (my emphasis).

 

But, according to Richardson, Dr Michael Sugrue is the most blunt and dispassionate, when he said in a popular lecture on Aurelius that ‘Stoicism teaches us that the social structure is “not our problem” and that, “if God, or nature, or whatever is controlling the world makes you a slave then be a good slave.”'

 

The common thread in all these admonitions, is that they are made by people who see themselves among the privileged elite, who would never contemplate that what they advocate for others could befall them.

 

I think inequality drives injustice, corruption and an upside down economy. To give an example, Italy. It’s well known that there is both social and wealth disparity between the north of Italy, which is the capital of supercars and high fashion, and the south of Italy, which is the home of agriculture and the country’s food bowl. But this dichotomy is worldwide. The production of food, which is essential, is one of the lowest paid occupations in the world.

 

Now, let’s add another factor, called climate change. I don’t find it altogether anomalous that climate change has a dichotomous effect on humanity. It’s the consequence of all the ‘progress’ we’ve made since the industrial revolution, and it’s a juggernaut that can’t be stopped. Yet it will affect the poorer nations first. As the Prime Minister of Samoa, Fiame Naomi Mata’afa, recently said, ‘Pacific Islanders don’t want to be the canary in the coalmine for climate change’. If one looks at Italy again, one could argue that supercars have contributed to climate change and the agriculture sector will bear the consequences.

 

I recently did an online course provided by New Scientist, called Greener Living, which was ostensibly about climate change, its causes and its effects on future generations. According to the people running the course, it will require enormous changes to the way we live, including what we eat.

 

In the 25-26 September issue of the Weekend Australian Magazine (a Murdoch publication, btw) there was an interview with 33 year old Anika Molesworth, a scientist who also runs a farm near Broken Hill in NSW. She says that modelling for 2050 (based on nothing changing) would see 30% decrease in rainfall and 2 months of days above 40C, which would make the property effectively inoperable. But she also claims we have the means at our disposal to change this outcome, and she’s a founding director of Farmers for Climate Action. She’s frustrated by the missed opportunities in our country for renewable energy; we have a government that is stubbornly resistant to changes to the status quo.

 

I made an allusion before to the well known meme of evolution as the survival of the fittest, but much of evolution has occurred through symbiosis. Your body is an entire ecosystem to organisms that thrive in order for you to live, largely without your cognisance. I know from a working lifetime in engineering that successful projects are the result of people collaborating and working together. Environments, including our political environments, where people are antagonistic and work against each other, achieve little except blame and finger-pointing. A perfect example of that is the current political climate in America.

 

If we don’t want to self-destruct, we need to work together, punish corruption that erodes the wealth and agency of ordinary people, adopt sustainable economic models, not dependent on infinite consumerism and keeping people in debt for their entire productive lives. If we stick to the mantra that inequality is the ‘natural order’, we will fail and it will ultimately be catastrophic, worse than the Roman Empire, the Egyptian empire or the Mayan empire, because it will be global.