On the mongering of crises

Why it's right to worry

I was born in 1978. I’m old enough to remember the Soviet Union, and my sense of the world was formed in the 1990s, at a time when liberal democracy and free-market capitalism were enjoying a moment of triumph. I didn’t believe the world was perfect, but I felt strongly that things would only get better over the course of my life. It’s been kind of a let-down, then, to see how things have actually unfolded. Indeed, I find myself today feeling pretty pessimistic about the state of the world, and triggered a bit by Matt Yglesias’s newsletter this morning. He writes:

I think there are a lot of writers around these days propagating a fundamentally false and unsubstantiated notion that we are living through some acute “global social, political, and economic crises.” …

I would say that we are living through some problems that are both serious and difficult, but not necessarily any more serious or more difficult than the problems of the past, and certainly not serious in a way that should cause one to doubt the basic tenets of liberalism. And then on top of that, we are living through some pretty ordinary political contestation that, as is inevitable in the course of things, involves some people going overboard at times. But mostly I think we’re living through a time of toxic self-involved drama that threatens to make things worse through twitchy overreaction.

Matt’s argument is that on the whole the past two decades haven’t been that bad, and that we face real problems, like climate change, but that a lot of the public worrying that people do is a bit hysterical and fundamentally unwarranted. My first reaction to this was to chuckle to myself, because in my experience elites’ general approach to what’s happening around us isn’t excessive alarm but rather complacency. Social media can be crazy, but most elites aren’t acting as if democracy is in trouble or as if climate change poses a serious threat, and quite a few love nothing more than to tell the people who grouse about these things that actually it will all work out. “We’ve been through worse.”

But I also disagree with Matt about the state of the world and the appropriate response to that state, for a few reasons. 

Let me start with the point that “we are living through some problems that are both serious and difficult, but not necessarily any more serious or more difficult than the problems of the past”, which, as I mentioned a moment ago is something I hear pretty often and is also very much not a reason to not be worried. If you look back over the past two or three centuries or so there is clearly an arc of progress which is absolutely cheering, and yet it is also the case that many incredibly awful things happened over that timeframe which no one would suggest ought to be shrugged off as just the usual problems. Taking the 20th century alone, we see an unprecedented rise in global living standards, and also mass violence and death on an unprecedented scale. And similarly, it is very possible that the 21st century will also bring about an extraordinary rise in living standards, though it’s certainly not something we should take for granted. But that in no way rules out the possibility of horrors of all kinds to come. One can very easily be long-run optimistic about the fate of humankind and also deeply worried about the well-being of the flesh and blood humans walking around today.

Looking at the more recent past, I think Matt understates how difficult a couple of decades it has been. It isn’t correct to say that we were bored in the late 1990s and so overreacted to 9/11 and have been living in a fever dream ever since. These past two decades have been legitimately trying! There was a global financial crisis which carried enormous human costs, and which very easily could have been substantially worse. It was followed by a crisis in Europe, which carried enormous human costs (though Americans obviously didn’t bear the brunt of them) and which very easily, and I mean very easily, could have been substantially worse. There was—is—a global pandemic, which has killed millions of people around the globe, and whose long-run effects on the global economy, on geopolitics and all sorts of things are yet to be seen. As this pandemic was unfolding, the world’s leading military and economic power and erstwhile champion of democracy faced one of the most serious political crises in its history. And through all of this we frittered away our opportunity to keep global temperatures from rising by more than 1.5 degrees above the pre-industrial level—and made it far more likely that we face much more damaging scenarios. It’s not self-involvement to look at all this, and the way in which our institutions have responded, and worry that maybe we have something of a problem on our hands.

There have of course been other developments over this period, some of which have been really profoundly encouraging. Most notably, poorer countries enjoyed a period of broad-based economic growth which lifted roughly 1bn people out of extreme poverty. If all we were doing was looking back at the past 20 years and assessing how good it was, that alone would tip the scales toward historically great. 

But let’s be clear. Most of the world’s people continue to live in countries with incomes substantially below rich-world levels. In the 2010s, furthermore, real progress in poorer economies was largely limited to South and East Asia and to Central and Eastern Europe. And there are very good reasons to worry that in the decades to come, growth will become harder once more for poorer places. That’s a matter of grave concern, because the world’s poor are least able to manage the hardships posed by climate change and many live in areas which are highly vulnerable to the sorts of climate troubles we can expect over the next half century.

Moreover, progress has itself brought difficulties that the world will have to manage. China’s growth miracle essentially ended extreme poverty in the world’s most populous country. But it also means that the world’s other leading military and economic power is an authoritarian state, with a government that views liberal values as a threat, which is willing to engage in mass oppression of ethnic minorities, which is building up its conventional and nuclear capabilities, and which feels that it is being squeezed by the West even as it confronts serious challenges associated with slowing growth and demographic change. It’s not a certainty that tensions between America and China will lead to major, dangerous geopolitical crises in the years ahead. But I can think of better places to be, civilizationally speaking, than on the brink of a new Cold War.

But what really worries me is something slightly different. I think many of us have this sense that progress obeys Newton’s laws, such that a civilization in motion will continue along its trajectory unless acted upon by other forces. So long as we don’t lose our heads, in other words, we can expect the broad sweep of progress that’s borne us all along these past centuries to continue. That, certainly, was the worldview I held at the turn of the millennium: that liberal institutions like democracy and a free-market economy held the secret to human progress, that while this was a matter of dispute and thus conflict for some time those disputes had at last been resolved, and that the future would be an exciting era of technological and human advancement.

But what these past two decades have taught me is that everything is much more difficult and tenuous than that. Democracy and capitalism aren’t tangible things with an existence of their own. They are what you get when people within particular societies observe particular norms and adhere to particular values. They function differently at different times and can vanish into nothing if people, for one reason or another, stop behaving in ways which support them. If ever that were unclear, the events of this past winter ought to have driven it home: the nature of American democracy and perhaps its very existence hinged on the actions of individual people, who had to weigh up matters of personal loyalty and self-interest against mere ideas—like the virtue of doing one’s duty or abiding by the law.

The capacity of our institutions to survive the novel challenges we face depends upon whether they continue to enjoy broad legitimacy, and, furthermore, on whether we can find effective ways to adjust how they respond to these novel challenges—because perhaps a liberalism can effectively manage climate change but for the moment at least the liberalism that we have isn’t cutting it—while staying true to the values that keep them operating. Adjustment isn’t a matter of technocracy. That it might be is a foolish conceit. And that so many of us, myself very much included, mistakenly held this belief over the past few decades is part of what has gone wrong. We were busy arguing for a carbon tax, as if efficiency were the key to keeping the planet from warming dangerously rather than an engaged public which cares about the rights and dignity of every person. “But the public isn’t going to care about poor people in sub-Saharan Africa; they just want to drive their big cars with as little interference from meddling bureaucrats as possible.” The inability to conceive of a world and a solution to its big problems in which values matter, despite a wealth of historical evidence that values have often made all the difference, is the crisis of liberalism. 

This is why the late 1990s ennui is so fascinating. We wanted something of consequence to care about, and there was something of consequence to care about: the values that underpin a prosperous liberal society and the long, arduous work of bringing reality into ever closer alignment with them. But for decades what we’ve told people instead is that the best way to serve society and contribute to an ever better world is to consume. 

So yes I do think we are in trouble. I don’t know what exactly we ought to do about it; it strikes me that it’s much easier to fuck up a moral consensus than to build one. And it is probably right that shouting about the end of the world on social media doesn’t help. But that doesn’t mean that the warnings are wrong.