With the rapid advance of industrialization over the past 200 years, and the digital revolution over the past few decades, it is tempting to believe that humanity is on the crest of the wave and the only direction is upwards. In fact if you read books such as Factfulness by Hans Rosling, or Enlightenment Now by Steven, you will be convinced that the world has become a better place with less wars, less poverty and general happiness all round. But is the progress of civilizations always upwards? With unresolved issues, such as global warming, increasing authoritarianism and unfettered capitalism, should we be optimists or pessimists?
The problem is that each of us as human beings lives for such a brief period that it is for us to appreciate the span of history: we live but a moment, while the universe has been here for 13 billion years, and our species for 300,000 years, with modern humans having existed for 65,000 years. We can trace human civilizations from around five thousand years ago when we had the biblical Old Testament empires of the Mesopotamians, the Assyrians, the Medes and Persians, then the Egyptians and the Chinese Song Dynasty in the east. We then moved on to the Greeks, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Arabs, the Turks, the Huns and more. The journey from one civilization to another was not always onwards and upwards and some great civilizations vanished along with their skills and talents, with some of these skills only to be rediscovered centuries later.
Between the fall of the Roman Empire and the age of enlightenment there was one thousand years of backwardness in Europe including the period of the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the practice of burning witches at the stake. The way out of these dark ages began with members of the Church questioning the morality of the practices of the church hierarchy in selling indulgences (promising an escape from hell for money). Martin Luther protested the lies and corruption that had become the accepted norm of his day and years later in the Enlightenment leading thinkers advocated liberty, religious tolerance, science and reason as the basis for progress. These changes have resulted in steep gains for civilizations over the past two centuries.
The most recent empire was the British Empire, which not only used the discoveries of the industrial revolution to dominate nations across the world, but took the opportunity of naval conquest to carry out scientific measurement and data collection on a global scale. For this reason the British Empire is regarded by some as the greatest empire that ever existed – until it didn’t. Today the United States of America is seen as the greatest economic and military power in the world, and also as the land of opportunity, where anything was possible if one only works hard.
Some groups have sought to bring America down from the outside, the most notable being Al Qaeda with the 9/11 attack, resulting in President Bush’s war on terror, embroiling America in a war with Afghanistan from which it is now ignominiously retreating. However, other more insidious forces have been eating away at the soul of America – the erosion of truth, and the tolerance of inequality and corruption, as was the case in the days of Martin Luther. Much of this did not start with George W Bush or even Donald Trump, but with Ronald Reagan, when his government proclaimed that market forces must be left alone, and there was little need for government intervention.
This economic theory (which is really the theory of greed) has led to the widening gap of incomes in America over the past forty years, and to the ‘winner takes all’ syndrome, where a few individuals now control most of the world’s wealth. The system is set so that the rich get richer while the rest eek out an existence, and in order that the masses in America do not rise up, they are systematically fed lies through social media and mainstream outlets, such as Fox News, that their enemies are ‘those radical liberals’, the ‘fake News’, or the scientists trying to kill or sterilize people through vaccinations – whatever myth or conspiracy theory that will keep people preoccupied.
History teaches us that civilizations have not always gone onwards and upwards, some have regressed, especially when they ignored truth, and inequality and corruption were part of the system. Will the civilization of today continue on an upward trajectory with a better life for all, or will it be a one world for an elite, but a very different world for the rest?
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