As an intrepid street photographer, I make a point of documenting urban life in my little corner of this pale blue dot we call home. I make an annual habit of culling my observations to the best 100 or so photographs and printing them in a large hard-cover glossy format so that I have a personal record of the built environment where I live and the people with whom I share that environment. Typically, I defer to the images and restrict my text to bare labels.
My habit served me well enough until 2020 arrived. But with the WHO’s March 11th declaration of a global pandemic and, locally, with the Government of Ontario’s March 17th declaration of a state of emergency, I realized that 2020 wasn’t going to be like previous years. My photographs deserved a more extensive commentary. By the time I was done, I had written 60,000 words to accompany my visual record of the first pandemic in more than 100 years. As with my previous annual summations, it was a personal gesture with no thought to publication. That may change. But for the time being, I imagine my book forming part of a growing family archive, a gift to as yet unborn great great grandchildren who may wonder what life was like for their ancestors during the Covid plague.
When I finished my 2020 summation, I assumed I would return to my old habit of producing a simple visual record. But by the time I sent it off to the printer, 2021 was well underway and, again, it was apparent that this was no ordinary year. Still in its early months, 2021 was proving to be at least as astonishing as 2020 and equally deserving of an extended commentary. How else would viewers make sense of the anti-vaxx protests, the smoke-laden skies, the flood waters, and, at the end of it all, the arrival of the omicron variant?
Now well into 2022, I continue to work on my 2021 summation, yet realize that this year—with the trucker convoys and marches through the streets and Russian invasion of Ukraine and very real threat of nuclear holocaust—is even more deserving of an extended commentary. How else will I make sense of it? And then I pause and take a deep breath and realize that I’ve climbed onto something that looks a lot like a hamster’s wheel.
In what is essentially a fat pamphlet (120 pages), Andrew Potter offers me confirmation that my experience accurately reflects a trend at play in the wider world. He would put it more like this: if you think this year is a little worse than last year, and last year was a little worse than the year before that, and that year was worse than the year before that, and so on through the preceding years, you’re probably right. Things really are getting worse. We are in a state of civilizational decline.
The measure of decline isn’t obvious. It happens more in line with T. S. Eliot’s “not with a bang but a whimper.” We still enjoy celebrations and periods of prosperity. But viewed from a macro perspective—the same perspective, incidentally, we adopt to measure the trends of an epidemic—the civilizational trajectory has an unmistakeable direction.
Potter adhere’s to a central narrative and, like his basic thesis, his narrative is straight forward. Since the earliest rumblings of the industrial revolution, we have sustained a myth of progress, technological, moral, social, and all of it resting on a perpetually advancing prosperity. However, we have sustained this advancing prosperity by picking low hanging fruit. For example, we have enjoyed cheap energy by using readily available fossil fuels. Similarly, we have enjoyed cheap labour by exploiting those we don’t include in our economic calculus, like slaves, children, women, and more recently labour-displacing automation. And communications have advanced to the point where we can contact anyone anywhere instantaneously. However, each of these developments produces externalities, uncounted costs, and now these externalities are clamouring at the door and demanding a reckoning. Fossil fuel consumption destroys the environment. Exploited peoples don’t just sit there blithely twiddling their thumbs; they want justice. And new media are producing social and environmental costs we have yet to understand. We’ve pretty much run out of low hanging fruit and if we want to sustain our advancing prosperity while also recapturing the externalities we’ve generated, then it is incumbent upon us to cooperate.
We could reach to higher branches, but that throws us up against a second issue that civilizational decline exposes: the collective action problem. Potter frames this in terms of the prisoner’s dilemma. Authorities hold two conspirators, each in his own cell. A clever interrogator tells each conspirator that he will be released as long as he testifies against the other. From the perspective of the conspirators, the optimal outcome would have each say nothing. The authorities would have no evidence to convict either. But invariably self-interest prevails; each testifies against the other; both are convicted.
Potter scales up this scenario to account for our international failures to cooperate on matters of dire importance. For example, signatories to the Paris Accord treat it as a suggestion. And fresh attempts to muster the will to international cooperation, like Glasgow’s Cop26, prove laughable. Personally, I might tweak his model by grafting on the free rider problem and summoning game theorists to the table, but his basic observation can almost be taken as axiomatic: although our evolutionary success is predicated on our capacity to coordinate our efforts within our tribal groups, we don’t know how to scale up that capacity. Perhaps at the core of the collective action problem is an inability to address difference in a meaningful way that allows us to reach across our tribal boundaries.
Potter applies his analysis of the collective action problem to the pandemic experience, investigating why there was such a disparity between scientific innovation and political action. If ever there was a moment to bolster the narrative of technological progress and undermine Potter’s central thesis, it would be the scientific achievement represented by the development of mRNA vaccines to provide immunity against the SARS-Cov-2 virus. As Potter relates, on January 10th, 2020, before the virus even reached North America, Chinese health officials had shared the genetic sequence online. On January 11th, Moderna researchers designed a protein for the vaccine. And within six weeks, Moderna had developed a product for clinical trials. The speed of the response is breathtaking.
However, the gains the scientific community delivered were offset by media and public health compromises aimed at appeasing right wing groups who were hostile to values like reason and education and who rejected the authority of science. A vaccine loses its effectiveness when even a relatively small proportion of the public refuses to participate in the program. Similarly, the public health benefits of widespread masking vanish when certain groups deliberately flout masking recommendations.
I find it tempting to point my finger at such people and throw labels at them. Anti-intellectual. Anti-social. Ignorant. Uneducated. Selfish. Irresponsible. Potter offers a more nuanced and perhaps more empathetic approach to understanding the anti-vax anti-mask anti-democratic Trucker Convoy freedom touting protesters. He begins with an observation from Steve Bannon, founder of Breitbart News and Donald Trump’s one-time campaign strategist. Bannon observed that politics lives downstream from culture. Even though Republicans effectively control Washington, they have had limited success retaining power because Democrats effectively control Hollywood. You can control all the levers of power, but if you don’t control the hearts and minds of the voting public, those levers will have limited effect.
In the history of countercultural movements (at least in the West), an assumption has arisen from the 1960’s almost to the present day that protest is a left wing activity. The civil rights movement. Women’s lib. Vietnam protests. Gay rights. Environmentalism. All major movements for social change have been framed as left wing protests against right wing corporate and political power. But, as Potter points out, Steve Bannon sees no necessary connection between the act of protest and the political valence of the protester. Bannon challenges the traditional assumptions around protest and encourages people on the right to adopt strategies that once were regarded as the sole province of the left.
In turn, that forces people like me to rethink our attitudes to movements on the right. What we have labelled ignorant or selfish is more likely to be a strategic act aimed at eliciting a particular kind of response. I revisit recent encounters with protesters—the party mood, the barbecues and hot tubs, the way they co-opt familiar left wing mantras (e.g. “My body, my choice!”), the conspiracy theories delivered with a nod and wink—and I acknowledge that my personal feelings of bewilderment have blunted my own reactions. I have failed to understand that the object isn’t to win arguments; it’s to trick people on the left into making fools of themselves.
While Potter’s analysis doesn’t offer any assistance in addressing the collective action problem (a task which may well be impossible in any event), it does offer assistance in understanding the situation that presents itself to us. It provides tools we can use to frame future conversations and steers us away from fruitless encounters. Civilization may well be in decline, but it does no good to close our eyes and pretend everything is unicorns and rainbows.
On Decline: Stagnation, Nostalgia, and Why Every Year is the Worst One Ever, by Andrew Potter (Windsor: Biblioasis, 2021)