Yesterday saw unrest following more unrest in the US, punctuated by the bread and circuses of the RNC. I've held off from posting this since June, at the height of the BLM protests, not because of procrastination, but because I wanted to see how this "westlessness" – whilst a risible term at first glance – would play out in the context of the shifting global order.
What follows below is not so much fleshed out thought as a response to Marco Valente. The exchange started on Twitter, as many enlightening exchanges do, and segued into a Zoom call that ran over time, as all good conversations do.
I expect Part II of this post will emerge as the Northern Hemisphere heads into autumn and winter. We shall see.
Dear Marco,
I'm well, thank you, and I can't help worry about you being in Sweden (or Europe in general, to be honest).
Before I go any further, I should disclaim that the past 23 days have seen a lot of soul searching with regards to my complicity in a majority race structure in Singapore, and my own experiences being a 'model minority' in the UK but still facing instances of non-violent racism. This is in tandem with the past 10 years of abhorring Pax Americana and the past 5 years of questioning the Anglocentric post-war international order.
As a Western-educated diaspora Chinese Singaporean who rediscovered her ethnic heritage, I feel uniquely placed to comment on some aspects of these unprecedented times.
Glad that's out of the way!
Now for the diagnosis. What are your thoughts on what could be causing this?
Arrogance
More than the second point, which a lot of left-leaning Western commentators will beat their breasts over, Western arrogance is causing the mess they're living in, and progressives are just as blind about their arrogance as any other faction.
I know in complex systems we are not meant to make such simplistic judgements, but this one is CLEAR / OBVIOUS to me.
Post-war Western societies have grown complacent in their arrogance about infectious diseases blighting only developing continents that they can foment an anti-vaxxer movement. My grandmother, a registered nurse, spent a good deal of her early career travelling from one village to another vaccinating people, especially children, by law. She reckons that if Westerners saw the ravages of polio, TB with their own eyes, they might think twice about believing a disgraced quack.
Arrogance also leads to the (mostly) white saviour complex that we see in international aid. It's a twisted form of reparations, especially for former colonies, that are more vehicles of control and influence than actual aiding of human beings with agency. Couple that with the evangelical proselytising mindset of Pax Occidental and you have at least three generations now who genuinely, disingenuously believe that the Western democratic way is the best way. They are also largely ignorant of the brutal, painful, shameful legacy of colonialism because, in many ways, it is almost too much to bear.
So, if infectious diseases are something that only happen in far away continents with subpar sanitation and infrastructure, and if America is the best and greatest nation in the world, what is there to fear? Don't they have the CDC and some of the best scientists and doctors in the world? For sure. And so many of them, ironically, are the immigrants they love to hate and hate to love. It's a lot for a brain to juggle.
Breakdown in solid public goods
There is a natural segue to this point. Americans and Europeans have enjoyed over 50 years of peace and stability in which they were able to build lives that were slowly being eroded by neoliberal capitalistic policies that had no regard for humans and the communities they form. The MNC is simultaneously America's most powerful and most devastating post-war invention. As much as it scaled and unified production, it stripped ecosystems of the diversity that is so important for resilience and cohesion.
The lightning pace of such progress, both economic and social, has the sort of unintended consequences we keep talking about in complex systems but can only see in retrospective coherence.
Take the example of equal marriage in many European countries. The loosening 60s and 70s of the white elite might have led many to believe that equal marriage would be possible before the millennium was out. Indeed it was, just slightly after, in the Netherlands, many Nordic countries, Spain, Italy, Portugal. The latter countries still retain a deeply Catholic core and lobby, as I'm sure you know. This sort of societal sea change, representing a boost in public status of homosexuals who have spent all of humanity's history being persecuted and hidden, represented a change too abrupt for many to tolerate. What happens instead of outright killings? Fomenting dissent, anger and plotting. The 'counter-liberal' reactionary waves we see in young people across the West is no surprise at all. In my personal opinion, as a member of the LGBT+ community, it would've been better for countries to ease into legislation, if at all, around equal marriage. A classic example of 1 step forward, 10 steps back. In contrast, Taiwan and Tokyo introducing equal marriage legislation are good case studies in how to do it organically and to evolve with society.
This is all to make the point about how the lightning pace of progress led to the breakdown in solid public goods. Free market capitalism running wild in America and post-2008 austerity in Europe slowly chipped away at the foundation until you are left with medical workers fashioning their own PPE in the so-called greatest nation on earth. Hate to break it to them, but in the nations they love to call shithole, medical workers have what they need. This is the bare minimum. Americans, however, can more easily conceive why it is madness to send a soldier into the field with no armour than to understand why a doctor needs PPE to battle a virus.
America's own experts have been Cassandras about the next pandemic for decades. Futurists add a pandemic to their scenarios as a matter of course. Historians, professional and amateur alike, know that every time is unprecedented, just a matter of how much. We have lost so much of our skill and knowledge in the humanities that trying to teach the lessons of 1918 are largely lost on the wider population.
We have an unsympathetically unimaginative, materialistic, aimlessly seeking void in humanity where we should have curiosity, purpose, compassion and empathy.
Can we blame anyone but ourselves for that?
Prognosis: what could help people see the idiosyncrasies of their thinking and – hopefully as as a result of that – shift them?
I'm convinced we have to start with rebuilding communities, de-stressing the sacred cow of the nuclear family, and change people's conception of education as a classroom exercise. There is so much to learn from the natural world (if we haven't already ravaged it beyond repair), from elders in every community. LGBT+ people are particularly skilled at community, because we've had to create them outside the biological bonds of tribes and clans.
We need to rediscover a purpose that is not linked to our economic output. We need to encourage children to exercise their intellect, not to be ashamed about it, particularly girls. We still need to work out why women hold up half the earth and are still systematically discriminated against. We need to dismantle free market systems that enslave us. We also need very honest conversations about procreation / continuation of the species outside the context of religion and culture.
Could we chat more about prognosis next week? 😉
Baci,
Jules
Postscript: A few paragraphs I sent to Marco from this article by Mark Tredinnick seem prescient, given the times we live in.
The project of economic rationalism, the elevation of the market over the common good—Chinese style, US Style, Australian style—depends on dumbing down the populace. It depends on frightening them into jobs and into degrees that “guarantee” them jobs. Tame the populace and let the managers get on with maximising the profits and commodifying everything else: this seems to be the unwritten lore of the ideology that has taken over conservative thought across the globe. Let them be consumers. Not citizens. Or, if you can help it, voters. Let them not, above all, think for themselves or rock the economic boat.
The project that enriches bankers and miners and management consultants turns on keeping too many people from thinking too much: get them spending instead, keep them fearful for their job; teach them that ownership of real estate is the embodiment of all virtue, Whatever you do, keep them from opening books and aspiring to something more for themselves and all selves than the servitude of the salary.
The humanities teach us how to think. How to Be. And how to do it for oneself. They teach one how to write and speak. For oneself, on behalf of interests greater than one’s own. They school us in ethics, in care, in imagination. They ask us to ask ourselves to do better with our living. And how to ask for better. For instance, from those in power. The humanities help us to know what, beside profit and security, counts. For any and every human life.
We need universities, specifically we need the humanities, because from time to time one will get a government like this. When the lesser angels of our nature, as Abe Lincoln put it, win out. We need the humanities because of the risk in all societies that the discourse of democracy and the syntax of civility will fail, and from time to time craven interests may prevail. Is this perhaps why this government wants to price humanities out of the reach of anyone who might still understand why they need to study them?