5 Reasons Why This is a New Dark Age
The Lights of Reason, Truth, and Democracy Are Going Out
umair haque
If it seems to you that things aren’t going too well in the world, I’m here to tell you: you’re not wrong. I think that something very much like a new Dark Age is now falling, rapidly, with a vengeance. The lights are going out. They’re shattering, being extinguished, snuffed out by idiots and fanatics.
The lights of reason, truth, beauty, and goodness.
When I look at around the world, I see pretty stark evidence of an era of backwardness, ugliness, stupidity, and unreason dawning. Let’s take each of those one by one.
The death of reason is probably the easiest feature of this age to see. It confronts you everywhere you look. The canonical example of course is America. A place where 70% of Republicans believe the election was stolen, a land where fundamentalist religion has poisoned culture and bigotry and hate has rendered politics a fools game. The average American is reared on a diet of Ancient Aliens and Instagram and Facebook propaganda — these don’t exactly make for sane minds.
But to tell you a harsh truth, that’s the small way in which the light of reason is going out. The big one? Let me give you a much, much bigger example. You won’t like it, because it will make you think uncomfortable thoughts. The rich world is not interested in vaccinating the poor one, amidst a global pandemic which has already shattered normality for a year and counting now. The result is obvious, even to a schoolchild: new variants will arise, which will threaten even the health of the rich world.
In case you think this is abstract, let me tell you the woeful story of Britain, the dumbest country in the world. It’s on the cusp of a third wave, which is going to keep it locked down through the summer — and it’s been locked down since last winter. The third wave is made of the new “Delta” variant, which comes from India. The Delta variant is up to twice as transmissible, and twice as many people get hospitalized. It’s much, much worse than the original variant.
Worse still, the UK had a hare-brained plan not to vaccinate its entire population as fast as possible — it delayed the second dose. Worse still, rabid nationalism of the Brexit variety made the UK believe fervently in just one vaccine, it’s own, the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine. Unfortunately, that vaccine has just 30% efficacy against the Delta variant after a single dose. So Britain is now a country facing a massive, massive, deadly third wave: its population has mostly had just one dose, of a vaccine which offers little protection, against a variant which never should have been allowed to mutate in the first place, but did, because of the selfish stupidity of rich nations like Britain. Britain faces a public health crisis without end now because of twin forms of idiocy: nationalism and greed.
Vaccinating the whole world is the reasonable thing to do — not just the right one. Britain’s example shows in vivid detail what will happen even to rich countries now, much faster than they imagine: new vaccine-resistant variants will hit them, which come from unvaccinated poor countries. After the Indian variant, there’s the Vietnamese one, and on and on. Vaccinating the world is something we did before, too. We successfully eliminated smallpox and polio. But we didn’t with Covid. And that is a major, major, profound, colossal step backwards for humankind. It is the kind of epic, disastrous megafailure that says: we are entering a new Dark Age, where the light of reason is winking out.
So why aren’t we vaccinating the world? That brings me to the second way we’re entering a new Dark Age. A handful of people — all men, all white men, all billionaires — could single-handedly vaccinate the entire planet. Bezos, Gates, Buffett, Zuck. What would it cost to vaccinate the planet? The IMF needs $15 billion. These men are worth a trillion. Each of them could get the job done and never even know the money was gone.
We’re not vaccinating the world because we can’t. Not scientifically. But politically and economically. Gates literally stepped in and stopped Oxford from making its vaccine free to produce and manufacture anywhere in the world. So he’s stopped the world getting vaccinated in two ways: one, directly, and two, indirectly, by hoarding so much money there’s little left over for global projects.
Which light going out is this? The light of democracy. Democracy is failing around the world in much more visible ways. This was the first few years in modern history where democracy went backwards, came undone, reduced around the globe, instead of grew. That’s a grim portent. And by now we’re all familiar with the panoply of neo-fascist movements on the march around the globe — or we should be. Trumpism in America, Modi’s fanatical religious supremacism in India, Britain’s fervid, idiotic Brexit nationalism, and so on. Even in Canada and Europe, fanatical right wing movements have made significant inroads towards destabilising society.
Why are neo-fascist movements flourishing around the world? For a very, very simple reason. Because incomes are flat around the globe, too. The bargain of modernity is not working out very well for working classes. The gains of “growth” seem forever to go to elites — and their minions and henchmen. Lawyers formulating “free trade deals” and Prime Ministers signing them and economists forever predicting things will be great — they all do well, as do pundits who write books full of Panglossian prognostications which never come true. And who does the best of all? Billionaires. The already rich. The wealth of billionaires increased by about 50% during the pandemic. Think about that for a second. The world’s handful of richest people grew unimaginably wealthier while millions of people were dying. No wonder the world can’t get vaccines — the billionaires are hoarding all the resources.
Working classes have reacted in a way which seems bizarre — but is eminently predictable if you understand all the above. Folks like me predicted a global wave of fascism rising the instant we noticed incomes were stagnant since the 2000s or so. The working class, around the world, has reacted by rejecting modernity.
What does that mean? They don’t want to live in open, unstructured, free societies. They don’t want democracies. They want to be peasants and serfs again. They are causing their societies to regress at light speed because they are choosing pre-modern forms of social order. If that doesn’t make sense — why would anyone want that, you might wonder, baffled — take a look at America. The working class imploded into a vast, giant underclass. It has no hope, no purpose, it feels no worth or value, it’s completely adrift and unmoored.
What does fascism give it? Meaning, purpose, worth, value. Solidarity. Relationships. A sense that it matters again. Even if all that is only had at the price of becoming something very much like neo-serfs, reverting to an older social order of apartheid and feudalism.
What is the link there, between fascism and feudalism? Fascism is about purity of blood, the idea that some people are subhuman, and some superhuman. And so is feudalism. The only difference, really, is in the labels. In fascism some are Fuhrers and so forth. In feudalism, we call them kings. The idea that the “king” has the purest blood, which is divinely ordained, and the “nobles” have very pure blood, and so on, down to the average person, whose blood is barely acceptable. Below them come the subhumans, whose bloodlines are tainted by violence, laziness, stupidity, and so forth. Feudalism is the precursor of fascism — but feudalism makes up all of human history and civilisation so far.
Feeling a chill when I say that? You should. Working classes around the world are rejecting modernity because it has been a bad deal for them. For a short time — maybe two or three generations — they got bigger houses and cars and so forth. But those came with insecurity, a loss of value, the absence of worth, a sense of fatalism, as billionaires took all the gains, and left them, in the end, with nothing. Feeling that modernity has been a rip-off, a scam, a cheat — they are demanding societies revert to pre-modern forms of social order. They want feudalism all over again. They want to be peasants and serfs, and are willing to accept figures like Trump as nobles and kings, who can do no wrong, because at least in that social order, they have structure, order, and most of all, power.
Remember, even peasants and serfs had slaves and servants. They had privileges and rank. They had security and stability. They knew where they fit in the world around them — an eternal and unchanging one. Better that — prehistory — than the chaos and meaninglessness and unfairness of modernity.
Maybe they’re right. Not about the fascism — but about the failure modernity has been. The discomfiting truth is this. The lights didn’t shine very bright. The lights of truth, beauty, goodness, reason, fairness. They are going out now because they were barely flickering candle flames.
Let me give you one last example — one that will, again, make many of you angry, because you don’t like to be confronted by uncomfortable truths. This was the first year that the world went backwards, in terms of progress. Isn’t that a foreboding sign? All our efforts to make a fairer, better, nobler world — they stalled, and went into reverse, and all that happened before the pandemic.
But what is the world? Well, the world is about 15% rich, and 85% poor. The 15% that’s rich is also all white, and the 85% that’s poor is all the other “colours” of humanity. So when we say “the world is now going backwards,” the context is that it’s already really, really backwards.
Am I saying the world is racist? I’m saying, I think, something even more depressing than that. The world we live in is like a toxic waste dump. Of centuries of hate, stupidity, violence, and greed. It reflects the distribution of winners and losers in those endless centuries of war and slavery. The world’s poorest continent, Africa, is the one which was enslaved by its richest countries, America and Europe. The world is what it is because it reflects a massive failure by us, all of us, to really make a better one. We’re up to our necks in the toxic waste of history — and we wonder why we’re drowning.
The lights were never really that bright. Bright enough to reveal even that much to us. We’ve gone along our merry way, pretending that the world we lived in was fair, kind, just, true, full of goodness and beauty and so forth. It wasn’t, at least not for the 99% of humanity unlucky enough to really be average, or below it, in terms of power and money
We have a civilisation whose politics and economics are now beginning not just to fail, but to megafail — one which can’t provide vaccines during a pandemic where they’re needed most. So good luck fighting climate change, ecological collapse, mass extinction. But maybe that’s the plan, as my cynical friends say. The billionaires don’t just not care if the rest of us die. They’re happier that way.
And the best part is that they’re getting us to do just that job — of hate, violence, spite, and rage — for them, driven mad by despair, poverty, shame, humiliation, and worthlessness.
What does all that add up to? You can give it whatever name you like. I think of it as a new Dark Age.
Umair
June 2021
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