We’re Going to Have a New Dark Age — Unless We Have a New Enlightenment

We Need to Get Serious About Fixing the Future If We Don’t Want it to Get Much Worse, Faster

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My friends, it’s grim out there. Fascism is relentless in its advance across the globe, democracy is backsliding, our global economy is struggling, and most people are in a state of either resignation or denial. We’re entering a new Dark Age, and we need a series of Enlightenments to fight our way out of it. Or else it’s lights out for our civilization. 

If you doubt me, take a hard look at the world’s richest country, America, which for the first time in recent history has a leader with a sweeping vision to make America a world leader again — a leader who’s mostly undermined in the media while fascists and fanatics block his path. Take a look at Britain, which is in far worse shape, falling into full-blown collapse where people wait hours for ambulances that never come. America and Britain teach us where we might all end up, if we’re not careful: caught in a cycle of economic despair, the fascist hate it breeds, and the relentless lunatics who block progress at every turn. 

How did we get here, to this grim and strange juncture in history? There’s a certain person in the world whom I’ve come to have a great deal of respect for, in the midst of this crisis. And I’ve been thinking a lot recently about these words of his:

“For the first time in 30 years, poverty is rising. Human development indicators are declining.”

“Huh?” You might say, baffled. “So what?” But to an economist like me, that is what spelt deep, deep trouble.  It’s not just about Covid — human development indicators are still declining. Over a quarter of a billion more people were expected to fall into extreme poverty in 2022. Our global economy no longer works, in the most profound ways possible. Think about what the above really means with me for a moment — let me put in context.

You might think, like some Americans still do: “well, at least destroying the planet and letting billionaires duck taxes made us rich!” The truth is that it didn’t even do that. In fact, now we are getting poorer. That is what “poverty is rising” means.

Despite having pushed the planet to breaking point — climate change, ecological breakdown, a mass extinction of life — human poverty is now growing. Even though we’ve chewed through life on the planet, polluted the skies, poisoned the rivers, chopped down the forests. Enough of them, at least, to begin causing our planet to warm, which is unleashing a new wave of catastrophes. Even though we’ve wiped out 60% of Earth’s animal populations since 1970. Even that wasn’t enough to make us all rich, which is more or less the ultimate disproof that we could exist as a species of self-interested, hostile, aggressive predators — the American way, or at least the way American economics and thinking taught us would work out best for everyone. It didn’t.

Our global economy is badly, badly, broken. It’s better to say that it never really worked at all. And that is the prime mover of this age of apocalypse. Because for a civilization, economics might not be everything, but it’s where everything begins.

If that makes your head spin, let me put it more simply.

We destroy too much to create too little. Another way to think about that is that our economy has too high a death factor, for too low a life factor. It takes chopping and burning down the lungs of the earth, or polluting its skies, or turning its oceans to acid…for us to o]nly slowly get poorer. As a world. If that doesn’t make sense to you, it’s because it doesn’t make sense. That is what a broken economy means: what kind of civilisation destroys its own planet…only to get poorer? What the? It sounds absurd and wrong because it is.

What does poverty create? It unleashes the next death spiral we know all too well by now.

Poverty of the economic kind then goes on to cause human development to fall. In plainer English, it means that we begin to live worse lives, and our living standards plummet. Instead of longer, happier, wiser, gentler lives, we live shorter, harder, and dumber ones. We can’t invest in education, in health, in ourselves or those we love.

The result of that is bitter disillusionment, anger, and despair. Social bonds begin to break and fray between people who once trusted each other. Resentments between social groups grow. Old racial and ethnic hatreds reignite. People grow suspicious of each other, regarding neighbours who were once friends as adversaries and maybe hated enemies in a brutal battle for self-preservation. Trust and community die.

Elites fail to notice all that, because they live in comfortable bubbles of privilege. And soon enough a demagogue comes along who takes advantage of all that. He points to failed elites, and blames a society’s woes on vulnerable groups.