Between the start of World War One and the end of World War Two, an estimated 90-100 million people died as a result of the conflicts or the regimes connected to them. Those 31 years were almost certainly the most fatal period in human history.
Now, 80 years since the end of World War Two, estimates suggest that the number of people old enough to remember the war, who were, say, 10 when it finished and therefore 90 now, ranges from 40-80 million.
This sounds like a big number but it’s only 0.5 per cent of the global population. Their children and grandchildren may have heard the stories, but that is not the same as first-hand experience.
Arguably, the lessons learned in World War One didn’t last long enough to prevent the second. Nevertheless, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the combination of the two events, in such a short period, must have created a post-traumatic response on an unprecedented and therefore, by definition, anomalous scale.
A fractured sense of reality
More than 40 countries lost citizens in the two wars in ways that are sometimes romanticised as noble and heroic, but also as a result of acts of the most extreme human cruelty ever known. The enormity of this created a consensus in the West and beyond: that unprecedented mechanisms were needed to prevent such events from recurring.
The United Nations, NATO and the European Union are all examples. Models of distributed decision-making, constraints on power, shared economic and legal benefits and stability, designed to stop individual strongmen from abusing their positions and their peoples. Slower, more painstaking and bureaucratic, often less agile and more frustrating than other models but effective barriers to the cruelty and personal ambition of the despot.
These derive from a form of international social contract, in which we all agree to give something up individually to achieve a net benefit collectively. That is how society works and prevents the strong from dominating the weak, simply because they can. The alternative is the law of the jungle.
But 80 years is a long time and no one in power today can personally remember those horrors. As the statistics above show, few voters have visceral knowledge of what happened and what our system was created to prevent. This, it seems, has started to affect the consensus. The anomalous effects of two world wars in 31 years have started to wear off.
The rewards of our system seem to be less clear to the current generation of voters and politicians, and they were dealt a particularly severe blow by the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) in 2008. But there was a build-up of doubt and scepticism before that.
Following the hedonistic 1990s, the tech boom was the peak feeling that ordinary individuals could make themselves enormously wealthy via the capitalist system that had devolved wealth creation and technological mastery out to day traders in their bedrooms, making money in the new economy. However, the crash that followed the apex of the dot-com bubble in March 2000 showed that this nirvana was an illusion.
The crash was followed in 2001 by the 9/11 terrorist attacks – events so profoundly shocking and dramatic that it shook our sense of security to the core. They scarcely seemed believable, and went on to spawn a great deal of conspiracy theories. The relatively new landscape of the internet proved to be fertile ground in which such theories could flourish. Our sense of reality was fractured.
In 2003, the Iraq war added to the public distrust: the so-called dodgy dossier in the UK, the Weapons of Mass Destruction never found, and the argument, subsequently discredited, that unseating Saddam Hussein would destroy Al Qaeda.
Empty promises
Event after event has since undermined public trust in our public institutions so that in 2008, when the GFC hit, it felt like the final, fatal blow to the philosophical consensus that had kept the peace for so long.
Ordinary people looked at the dishonesty and criminality coming out of Wall Street and the City and decided they had been sold a lie by the system. Not only were they not in line for a share of the promised trickle-down wealth, the whole thing had been a scam all along, promoted by greedy, immoral conmen in high finance, supported by the political classes.
Revenge was taken, most conspicuously in 2016, when UK voters preferred the empty promises and self-harm of Brexit as long as it punished the as-yet unpunished bankers. The same year, US voters rejected globalist ‘liberals’ who had abandoned blue collar Americans on similar terms, in favour of Donald Trump’s nostalgic promise to Make America Great Again.
At the time, this all seemed like a reckless experiment. What has happened since strongly indicates that the pattern has set in and the relatively harmonious and stable 80-year period, dominated by the anomalous effects of two world wars in 31 years, is over. A more historically typical ‘Hobbesian’ norm has returned.
The 16th century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes argued in his book Leviathan that, without government and the social contract it is built on, life would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”, In this “state of nature”, survival depends on your strength relative to those you compete with for life’s resources. The coercive style of politics that dominates the headlines today, including the ‘spheres of influence’, strongly echoes this way of thinking.
In this context, it is natural to expect an unconstrained US president, willing to use force against his own people to support his political agenda, and threaten the sovereignty of allies with economic and military warfare in order to satisfy his personal ambitions. If this is not ‘might is right’, law-of-the-jungle fascism, then nothing is.
This sets the tone from the geopolitical top, but look across Europe to see how many countries are flirting with increasingly influential political groups and leaders adhering to the same philosophy. Some, such as Putin, have achieved unassailable positions of power. Paradoxically, this reinforces the messages of our own fascist wannabes that we must arm ourselves to the teeth and forego wishy-washy liberalism in order to avoid being crushed and bullied. Such messages and thinking have now become mainstream.
Repeating the mistakes of the past
We are not good at learning the lessons of history. In his Philosophy of History, the 19th century German philosopher GWF Hegel highlighted another paradox that the only lesson we learn from history is that we do not learn the lessons of history. He wrote: “What experience and history teach is this: that peoples and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it. Each period is involved in such peculiar circumstances, exhibits a condition of things so strictly idiosyncratic, that its conduct must be regulated by considerations connected with itself, and itself alone.”
We think that this time it is different, and, in some respects, it is. But certain mistakes are repeated. We are repeating some of them now, and, as a result, enlightened self-interest is on the way out, chased off by simple self-interest, defined by ‘us and them’ thinking, stronger borders, and scapegoating of foreigners.
It is often said that our political leaders are not good enough because they lack a clear vision. Perhaps what people really mean is this: since the post-war consensus broke down and the Hobbesian norm returned, centrist politicians can no longer articulate a benevolent philosophy that underpins our societies and political system because it no longer exists. None of us know what our underlying, unifying philosophy is anymore.
Consequently, all politicians can do is produce an uninspiring shopping list of practical ideas, none of which seem likely to succeed. Conversely, the strong man who gives you someone to blame for your troubles, promises to look after you, and trots out simple messages about taking control and making things great again, seems more attractive to many, or at least on their side.
But they don’t make things great again. They make things worse. Much, much worse. We should remember that.
By Little Bird
