In Decline, a Few Thoughts

Western civilization is in decline and it still has a long way to go. We had better get used to it. That's according to author, newspaper editor and professor, Andrew Potter, in his aptly titled book, "In Decline." It's not a long read and I heartily commend it to you. 

Potter's theory is that western societies have entered a one-way retreat from the Enlightenment. It began, in his view, in 2016 with the election of Donald Trump and the death of David Bowie and a gaggle of other artists.  This caused newspaper, year end reviews, to proclaim 2016 "the worst year ever." Since then all we've had is a succession of worst years ever. 

So profound is the sense of relentless decline that an entire genre of cultural commentary has sprung up building off the uneasy feeling that none of this is entirely real. We’re living in some sort of parallel universe, a “bizzaroverse,” or stub, or alternative timeline in which the joke is on us, the playthings of an alien intelligence. Egged on by Elon Musk, the pothead Falstaff of Silicon Valley, there have even been serious (or at least semi-serious) efforts at trying to figure out whether we’re actually living in a simulation.

The Cascade Begins. 

ONE OF THE more salient features of our current moment is how everything seems to be going wrong at the same time. Again, the 24/7 obsession with Donald Trump was a constant distraction. For his entire term, Trump and his White House served as a catalyst and a cauldron for the seething culture war that has consumed politics in the United States, and which has now spread to countries across the West. But while we’ve been arguing over weaponized free speech and pronouns and statues of old white guys and the merits, or existence, of cancel culture, the apocalypse montage has been droning away. But unlike in the movies, where it’s usually a sudden Big Event that shocks humanity, ours is a slow-moving thing, a relentless secular decline that never quite grows into The Big One, but never really reverses itself either. 

Below deck on the Western techno-consumerist pleasure cruise, all is not well. The economic, political, demographic, environmental, and cultural foundations of our civilization are all under enormous stress, and our long-standing failsafe—the essentially rational character of our problem-solving and decision-making—is in crisis.

 

On the political side, our longstanding faith in the virtues of liberal democracy appears to be coming to an end. The decline of trust in democracy, the rise of anti-liberal convictions and a growing openness to authoritarian rule, especially amongst the young, are widespread in both the emerging democracies of Eastern Europe and the more entrenched democracies of the West. An extreme polarization in society has led to the politicization of virtually everything, with conspiracy theories metastasizing in an information ecosystem that has become entirely unmoored from reality.

The patterns of the past few decades are what decline looks like: a punctuated equilibrium of disruption and recovery in which each disruption is a little worse than the previous one, each recovery a little less robust.  ...Decline is a bunch of little things that add up: the planet warming, the oceans filling with plastic, our political institutions decaying, the economy stagnating. And the one big backstop we’ve relied upon for centuries now, the Enlightenment safety net of science, reason, and progress that has helped us confront and solve the problems we’ve faced, is failing us.  ...We are in decline precisely because we have run up against the limits of reason and our capacity to deal with our problems. For all its comforts and pleasures and fascinations, modernity turns out to be its own worst enemy, and the extended period of growth and stability we thought was “normal” turned out to be an aberration. Humanity is in serious trouble, and while it isn’t the apocalypse, it might well be the beginning of the end.  

Liberal Democracy on the run.

It’s not just that countries such as China and Russia are now challenging the United States and its erstwhile allies in the West for dominance in an increasingly Hobbesian international order. It’s that there’s little evidence that the leadership of either country feels obliged to pay the slightest lip service to the virtues of liberal democracy and global capitalism. China in particular is defiantly illiberal, given to describing ideals such as the rule of law as a quaint Western fetish. If anything, it is in the United States, and in many of the seemingly entrenched democracies of the West, where liberalism is on the run, democracy is in retreat, and capitalism is in question. In place of these things we’re getting right-wing populism, identity politics, and protectionism, and these are not merely features of an “incomplete” transition to liberalism. Things are going in the wrong direction even in the countries where it seemed like history had most resoundingly come to an end.

 So what happened? Our mistake was believing that the world had figured things out in a way that was more or less stable and permanent. It turns out that it was this period of stability and growth that was temporary. Progress itself was something that fed off a massive one-time windfall we gained access to in the nineteenth century. We didn’t climb a ladder, we stumbled into a buffet. We’ve been feasting off that buffet for a few centuries now. Unfortunately, it looks like the party is coming to an end.

 The Great Slowing.

Compared to the amazing pace of invention and discovery that was the norm from the late 1700s until the first half of the twentieth century, the last fifty years have been a bit of a snooze. To give a quick run-through: The period from 1770 to 1820 saw the invention of the cotton gin, the electric battery, the steam locomotive, and the Watt engine. If you entered your fifty-year cryogenic sleep in 1820, you’d have woken up to a planet transformed by cement, the telegraph, the typewriter, cameras, bicycles, antiseptics, pasteurization, and dynamite. If you fell back asleep for another half century, you’d wake up to an entirely different world filled with telephones, movies, electricity, motorcars, airplanes, machine guns, air conditions, vacuums, radio, and radar. And if you embarked on another fifty-year sleep in 1920, you’d miss the development of jet planes, space flight, lunar landings, nuclear weapons, nuclear power, penicillin, electric guitars, VCRS, computers, video games, the internet, and just about any other mod con you can imagine. 

For two hundred years, every half century of sleep would have you waking up to a new age of miracle and wonder: new technologies, stunning advances in health, wealth, and comfort, amazing new products and consumer goods, and a world steadily shrinking thanks to new forms of transportation and communication. Politically, things would keep changing enormously as well, the age of monarchy, colonialism, and empire giving way to a world order focused on nation states and led by an ever-growing alliance of liberal democracies. And then in 2020 you’d wake up maybe a little disappointed. At first it might seem that economic growth had once again worked its magic; in particular, in the way everyone was carrying the world’s entire cultural inheritance in their pockets. But that would just be the logic of networked computing flop. 

Aside from that, the world would look, in many respects, like things had stalled or even gone backwards. It wouldn’t be just an illusion. Since the 1970s, real wages have seen little to no growth, especially for middle-and low-income earners, while public goods like education and health care are more expensive than ever. Our infrastructure is crumbling, traffic congestion gets worse and worse, our airports are decrepit, and the trains almost never run on time. Nuclear energy, once hailed as the energy of the future, has been a flop. Domestically, there have been huge advances in consumer electronics, like enormous flat-screen televisions and AI-driven sound systems that will play any song you like, all you have to do is ask. But in the realm of the kitchen or the laundry room, there has been a reversal. Dishwashers are slower today than they were forty years ago, hold fewer dishes, and don’t get them as clean. Ditto for clothes washers. We’re spinning our wheels, and have been for a few decades now. 

The full speed of freedom is a clarion call from another era. Where democracy, technology, and progress were once aligned and facing full-on toward the future, today democracy is in retreat, technology is stagnating, progress is a dirty word. Politics is eating the world and we have become a culture obsessed with the past. 

A Shift in Course.

ACROSS THE WEST, politics in the twenty-first century has been dominated by two features: nostalgia-based populism and identity politics. Not only has liberal democracy, with its pleasant mix of consumer culture and rights-based individualism, failed to triumph, in many places it’s in retreat, while the hope for a technocratic political culture based on reason, science, and expertise is increasingly forlorn. 

The Populist Insurgency.

The main features of this populism are by now familiar: the rejection of science and other forms of expertise, hostility towards immigrants, hatred of the mainstream media, and a deep antagonism towards elites of all stripes. The animating core of populism is the notion that a pure, true, authentic tribe or “people” are at every turn being subjugated, insulted, denigrated, and exploited by a class of globalist and cosmopolitan elites. The narrative of an authentic folk betrayed by a false elite has fuelled a reactionary conservative agenda, to the point where the predominant form of conservatism that exists in many Western countries is the populist version.

The Rise of the Fascist Right.

What makes the alt-right a countercultural phenomenon is that it has internalized the essential feature of the counterculture: the celebration of rule-breaking or norm-violation in whatever form. What makes it a conservative phenomenon is that the rules or norms of collective action or conformity that it seeks to undermine are those championed by the left under the guise of political correctness. The alt-right’s nonconformist gambits run from the refusal to be “politically correct” (e.g., objecting to using the preferred pronouns of trans individuals) to the ubiquitous online use of racist and misogynistic language, from the embrace of Nazi tropes and symbols to the rejection of virtually all forms of expertise and authority and even the repudiation of the legitimacy of the state and the rule of law. In general, whenever a norm or rule is designed to facilitate collective action in the name of progress, the alt-right sees itself as duty bound to violate it. Dissent is seen as an intrinsically political act.

 It’s important to underscore how unexpected this development is. For well over half a century, it’s been an article of faith, agreed to by all sides, that the right was the side of rules, order, tradition, and circumspection, while the left was the party of rebellion, individualism, freedom, and transgression. Now the political valences have reversed themselves, with the right setting itself up as the true countercultural opposition to the left’s restrictiveness and enforced conformity.

The ultimate goal isn’t to exchange ideas, engage in public debate or deliberation, or improve relations in the workplace, but to gain attention, incite a mob, attract followers. In the end, both the alt-right and ctrl-left are interested in one thing above all: to accelerate and entrench the polarizing in-group/out-group tribalization of politics and of society at large. 

The course of the industrial age has witnessed the shift identified by Bertrand Russell: we’ve become so comfortable as a society that, for the vast majority of people in the West, mere survival has completely faded away as a concern. Instead, we spend more and more of our time and energy engaged in status competitions with other people. Our behaviours and beliefs no longer affect our survival in any serious way, they only impact our relative social, political, or economic status.

This has two important consequences. The first is that the need for our beliefs to connect or respond to reality has become increasingly unimportant. We are free to believe literally anything, from the wildest alt-right QAnon political conspiracies to the wackiest Gwyneth Paltrow health-nut fantasies of the contemporary wellness movement. None of it really matters—the lights still come on in your house, your car still runs, the grocery stores remain stocked with food. As J Storrs Hall puts it, humans have an enormous capacity to believe things not because they are true, but because they are advantageous to hold. Once upon a time, it was more advantageous to know the facts of the world than not to, so we developed science. Today, our beliefs are less a reflection of our reality than a means of identifying our respective political tribes and negotiating our status within them. 

The Failure of Reason.

 ... “dual process theory,” posits that we are cognitively equipped with two distinct modes or systems of reasoning. System 1 is fast, automatic, and opaque, and represents what we usually call our “gut instinct.” Evolutionarily speaking, it is ancient, and well-adapted for survival in small groups of hominids. System 1 is activated when we react in fear to a big hairy spider, or in disgust to the sight of worms. We rely on System 1 when we catch a ball thrown from a few feet away, or when we’re driving straight on a highway on a clear day. These things take little to no conscious effort—indeed, it takes effort to not do them. Overlaid on this massively parallel System 1 structure is the slow, serial, and explicit System 2, which is what we generally mean when we talk about “reason.” Where System 1 relies on associative reasoning and emotional resonances in order to offer rough-and-ready judgments, System 2 allows us to entertain hypotheticals and engage in abstract, precise reasoning. System 2 is also what allows us to escape our tribal instincts and recognize when large-scale cooperation is in our long-term and collective interest. If System 1 represents our barbaric past, System 2 is the hope of civilization. We actually need both systems, and each serves us well in its proper domain. The problem is, the original “proper domain” for System 1 was the African savannah, where its biases and snap judgments

 Potter warns that "reason is being elbowed off the playing field." The gains of civilization, the benefits of the Enlightenment are at risk of being reversed. Barbarism waits in the wings and it's not clear that we are able or willing to resist it.

To truly reclaim the virtues of the Enlightenment we would have to take a common decision to have a culture of a certain sort, to take collective action to reinforce the institutions of rationality that have served us so well for so long, but which are now threatened. It would have to be the sort of collective action that free societies typically only take when faced with an existential threat from without. But the barbarians aren’t at the gates. They’re in our heads. 

The author claims we may have lost the ability to get the genie back in the bottle. He uses the pandemic to illustrate his point.

Whether it was maintaining acceptable stockpiles of PPE, securing the nation’s borders, implementing a robust testing regimen, properly tracing contacts, overseeing and enforcing quarantine or self-isolation orders, guaranteeing safe work conditions for temporary foreign workers, managing and staffing long-term care facilities—if a ball were being tossed, it’s safe to say that some Canadian government or regulatory agency was dropping it.

The Enlightenment in Retreat, a Quaint Artefact.  

With enlightenment we grew up and said goodbye to the church, to tradition, to myth and superstition. All of it. In place of these things we have embraced the adult virtues of reason, logic, science, and evidence, as we became increasingly self-directed in thought and action. When will we be truly free? Only when, in a phrase incorrectly attributed to Diderot, we have strangled the last king with the entrails of the last priest.

...As our beliefs have become disconnected from the need for survival, they have become functional only to the extent that they allow us to engage in various forms of status seeking and tribal signalling. Otherwise, we can believe literally anything, with no material consequences for our lives. But as privately rational and self-serving as these “luxury” beliefs are, collectively they are leading humanity to its doom—it is the tragedy of the belief commons played out on a global, epoch-long scale. Economist and futurist Robin Hanson has called our era “the dream-time”: an extended period where history is driven by delusion.

The popular conceit of enlightenment, Potter argues, is a delusion. Our "progress" was mainly a technological ability to harvest the low-hanging fruit that eluded our ancestors. It was a one-way journey down a dead end street. It wouldn't last forever.

Homo Sapiens has been around for approximately 300,000 years, and for almost that entire time we foraged, and, later, farmed, at something close to a subsistence level in a fragmented world with either a stagnating or very low-growth economy. And as Robin Hanson argues, while our ancestors “suffered many misconceptions, those illusions rarely made them worse off.” Their beliefs and behaviour were, for the most part, reasonably adaptive for their world and their environment. This only changed within the last two hundred years or so, or 0.0007 percent of humanity’s total time on Earth. Our current era—with its sharp rise in economic growth and tremendous pace of invention, discovery, and change—would be completely foreign to our ancestors of even three hundred years ago. But it’s not clear that we are in any way better adapted to our environment than were our subsistence-existence ancestors.

Our age is dominated by consequential delusions that are neither functional myths nor harmless entertainments. Instead we take our delusions as the real thing, to the degree that our descendents will remember our era as the one where the human capacity to sincerely believe crazy, non-adaptive things, and act on those beliefs, was dialed to the max.

...One side effect of our cognitive heritage, and the ease with which we immerse ourselves in fictional narratives, is our extreme susceptibility to advertising, fake news, conspiracy theories and other forms of propaganda, much of it triggering the tribal instincts that underpin identity politics. This in turn helps initiate a vicious cycle of group polarization where the narcicism of small differences that is the hallmark of healthy democratic politics becomes the pathology of mutual incomprehension.

Which goes a long way to explaining why the world is such a mess. Civilization advances when people are able to set aside their private, family or tribal interests and behave in ways or just accept policies that further the common good.  ...It's looking like humans have reached the limits of our capacity for global collective action.

Our inability to take collective action in the face of a predictable and entirely-manageable planet-wide public health crisis is almost certainly a sign of what's to come. For so long our wealth has protected us. Over the past two hundred years or so, thanks to relentless economic growth and a tremendous discovery in invention, we've become rich in ways that our ancestors would find miraculous. To them, our age would look like one big party.

But this wealth has also shielded us against the most serious effects of our crazy beliefs and  irrational practices. A species can tolerate a great deal of maladaptive practices when what it needs to survive and thrive is just lying around waiting to be exploited. But now the free ride, and the party, are over. The bill is coming due and dreamtime is coming to an end.

What does the future hold? Potter has little idea of what awaits except that it will probably be some shade of bad. He does seem to accept that upwards of 80 per cent of us may have to go. How, and what the aftermath looks like, are open questions.

We may yearn for a return to "normal" but the author reminds us that we've never known normal. It's all been anomalous. 

Life will simply get more and more difficult every year as Earth's remaining humans retreat ever further into their various tribes. ...This is what decline looks like.