We Need to Think a Lot Bigger About a Better World If We Want to Save Our Civilization From Collapse
Jan 12
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When I look around the globe these days, at the state of ideas, politics, economics, there’s a question going unasked. But it’s perhaps the most crucial one of all.It’s as daunting as it is simple to say: what kind of world, future, planet should we want?
“We” just means sane and reasonable people. You can expand or contract that group however you like. Those of us who put the great projects of civilization and progress first — above and before things like pleasure, self-satisfaction, gain, and advantage. If you’re in that group, good. If not, I suppose that maybe you should ask yourself why you aren’t. But I digress. Let’s attack this question — because I think answering it is a lot simpler than it sounds.
Imagine for a moment that the world was run like it’s most successful societies. That’s only reasonable, isn’t it? What else should we model a world after? So imagine that we simply took their social contracts and political economics and values and so forth — and just zoomed them out to the world.
The world’s most successful societies aren’t hard to discern.They couldn’t be clearer. There is a single kind of society which outperforms all the rest. Not just in one way — but in every way imaginable. Not just by a little bit, but by a lot.
Those societies are of course European social democracies.In particular, the Nordics. But even Germany, France, Holland — all these are tremendously successful societies. European social democracy is so remarkably successful in fact that I call its story “the European Miracle.”
Think about it: after the last world war, Europe lay in ashes. It had nothing. Let me repeat that, because it’s important. Europe hadnothing. No colonies, no slaves, no resources, no money. And in that way, it serves as a profound and real-world test case. What is prosperity really made of? How was a continent that reduceditselfto ashes to ever thrive again?
It’s just one human lifetime later — and Europe, in that short span of time, has gone from nothing, to enjoying history’shighest living standards, ever, period.Now, when I say this — I don’t want to be mean, but I have to scold a little — Americans give me a blank look. But what could be more telling than this story? Europeans enjoy history’s best lives — by a very, very long way. Yet they had nothing just seventy years ago — just devastated cities, barren fields, and lost generations. How did that miracle happen? Isn’t it astonishing? Aren’t you curious? I certainly was and am.
The reason for the European miracle issocial democracy.That is, people enjoy — as basic human rights — things that they don’t anywhere else in the world, or never did before in history. Healthcare. Education. Transport. Media. Retirement. Childcare. The list goes on and on. Europeans made a pact after the war to give another these things, beginning in nations, and then across them. Today, we call that the EU, and despite the criticism, the fact remains: the EU is history’s most successful political project, by a very long way.
The difference is so vast, in fact, that it’s astonishing.Today’s young Europeans areprobably going to end upliving a fulldecadelonger than young Americans. What the? Europeans arehappier,healthier,saner, closer than essentially everyone else: put all that together, and European nations simply blow away everyone else.
(The tragedy of the European Miracle, of course, is thateven Europe didn’t learn from it, and have now cut their investment levels, so that even Europe is veering far right.)
So if we were to think about what kind of social contract to give the world, we’d decide, naturally, on social democracy.At least if we were wise enough to see the obvious. What would that really mean? Something like this: that every life on planet earth would enjoy what modern Europeans do.
For example, we’d give every child on planet earth an education. We’d give every person on planet Earth healthcare. We’d give everyone retirement, every family a safety net, every person a retirement, make transport public, create worldwide media, and so on.
Are you beginning to see the scale of this vision?And do you also see how different it is from anything that we really talk about much, in say, the august pages of the New York Times or on CNN and so forth? That’s why I say: we don’t ask the question of what kind of world we want, but we should.
To create that kind of world, we’d want moderate levels of inequality. For example, in Scandinavia CEOstend to earnmaybe 40 times what average workers do — whereas in America, they earn400times what the average person does. Yes, really: that’s an order of magnitude difference. It’s not too hard to see why America ended up arich nation of broke people— the ultra rich took all the gains, the middle class imploded, and the working class became a new poor. What else is going to happen when the CEO’s taking 400 times what everyone else is…because they’re mostly on starvation wages?
That kind of moderate inequality would give us a way to “fund,” as the pundits say, the social contract above. Do you know what the world’s average income is? (How come you don’t? Like I say: aren’t you curious? How is it that most of us don’t know basic facts about our world?) It’s about $10K. To lift that up, we’d have to redistribute income from the ultra rich to the average person. In other words, nations would have to agree to tax their ultra super mega rich, and instead distribute the winnings of society downwards, across the globe.
Let’s take the example of giving every child on planet earth an education.How would we do it? Maybe we set up a Global Education Fund. It’s job is simple: to hold an account for every child on planet earth, which contains the money necessary for their education. Who funds it?Everyonedoes, with rich countries paying proportionally more.
You can see how simple the task is — but how hard the job is. What would it take to set up that new global institution? How many new jobs and careers would be involved? Ah, but that’s the point, my friends. This is the work we really need to do.
Slaving away to make a Creepy Billionaire richer, by delivering stuff to people a microsecond faster? At this point in human history, literally nothing could be more pointless.The real work of tomorrow is all the above — giving every child an education, every person a retirement, every family stability and security, every illness healthcare, and so on. That is what creativity, imagination, enterprise, and endeavour are really about in this century.
Let me do another example. My social contract above doesn’t go far enough. Even Europe isn’t making progress fast enough to outrun the shock wave of capitalism imploding. One area in which we need obvious progress is ecology. One of the great shifts that will happen this century is that we human beings will give nature personhood. Why aren’t forests, rivers, oceans, and reefs “people” too? How about great schools of fish and flocks of birds? You see, because they’re not “people,” legally, formally, socially, culturally, it’s possible to exploit and abuse them economically. So corporations and hedge funds go out and pillage all these things for maximum profit, with impunity. Hence, the climate crisis.When the planet isn’t a person — but Google, Inc, or Amazon, Inc…is — what do you expect to happen, but massive planetary destruction?
So let’s imagine that we created a Global Planetary Agency. Its job wasn’t just to catch poachers and so on — but something much deeper: making sure that every great component of every major ecosystem on earth was a person. Every glacier and mountain was to be granted personhood. Every major group of animals, or even every minor one, and so on.
Then, when the rights of these persons were violated, they could do what corporations and hedge funds are so adept at doing: sue, for their rights to be met. When they won their cases, and were granted settlements, those who harmed them would be in literal debt to them. And thus, a new kind of economy would be born.
Think about all it would take to make our Agency for Protecting the Planet a reality.We’d need to hire ecologists, to decide on precisely which ecological components should be persons — this river? That glacier? All of them? Then we’d need lawyers, to amend constitutions. We’d need diplomats, to work with governments. And we’d need a worldwide monitoring and enforcement arm, which would keep track of whose rights were being violated. Finally, we’d need investment officers of some kind — to make sure all the persons were really being legally protected, with genuine investments in them, that all those settlements were being paid, and so on.
Whew. That’s a lot — a lot — of new jobs, roles, careers, industries. But again, that’s the point. That is the work we need to be doing. Work of meaning, purpose, grace, resonance. Work which defies the emptiness of this age, and replaces it with things like love, truth, beauty, and goodness. Yes, really. Would you rather do the work above — or work for a billionaire? That’s what I thought.
Here’s my point.
The world that should be born — as Adorno once said — isn’t arriving precisely because we are not doing the hard and difficult and beautiful work of envisioning and imagining and creating it. We’ve settled, too meekly and timidly, for what we imagine we can have. Which is just slightly less dystopian variant of now.
My friends — our challenge isn’t surrendering our souls to the bad guys in a slightly less compromised way.We must envision and imagine the highest good that we can — and then go out there and create just such a world.What is the highest good we can imagine — educating every child, giving every life healthcare, ensuring every tree reaches for the sky and every little creature dies in the arms of their loved ones, just as we ourselves wish to? That world is the one it’s our job to create. Why? Because we have a responsibility — not just to ourselves, but to life itself. Yes, really.
Remember that Golden Rule by Kant, Jesus, Gandhi, and assorted other great minds?Treat others as you wish to be treated. It’s time for us to apply that moral logic to the world, the planet, the future. To the fish, trees, oceans, rivers. To all the orphans of war and poverty. To the billions still starving. To the climate refugees who will be left with nothing. We must apply that rule — and not compromise, not settle for the lesser evil. But once again pursue the highest and greatest good that we can again. When did we forget all that? Do you ever wonder? I do.
Along the way, we’ll have to reimagine and reinvent everything. Institutions, economies, measures, jobs, roles, titles, social contracts, cultures. Even ourselves. It will be hard work. But it will be beautiful and joyous and improbable work, too.
That is what “growth” really is — the idea of us asking the question of how to build a better world, answering it in the tiny ways that we can, and then doing the hard work of creating one.It’s in the work of the highest good we can envision that we ourselves begin to mature and develop and unfurl as moral and social beings, too — and so our happiness and wisdom and gentleness expands.
The journey towards maturity is always the expansion of one’s capacity to love. That is the fundamental challenge of now. Expanding our capacity to love. And love, of course, is never settling for the lesser evil — but defying it, for the pursuit of the highest good.
UmairJanuary 2023
