What will we be remembered for?
What will our generation be remembered for? Our grandparents and great-grandparents fought in the two largest and most significant wars in modern history, World War I and World War II. The justness and morality of war can be debated all day, but suffice to say the world would be a very different place without their sacrifices. From the individual perspective, what they did took enormous courage — 17, 18, 19 year old teenagers who fought and died horrifically literally in the mud of Europe and across the world.
Our parents were lucky enough to be born in the most prosperous period in modern times, the post WWII industrial boom. A world of previously unheard of technology, economic growth, and social change. Even with the dizzying acceleration of industry and technology, social causes were not lost — civil rights, women’s rights, a cultural revolution that brought the fight for equality to the forefront of culture. They fought in and against the war in Vietnam, arguably the turning point when war went from ‘noble’ to — well, there isn’t a single word for it — brutal,evil, misguided, based on falsehood and not the fight for a greater good.
So what will we do? We have important accomplishments under our belt — gay marriage and gay rights are spreading rapidly across the Western world even as the struggle continues across the world. The end of the ridiculous War on Drugs (which drives home the case that the previous generations accomplishments were decidedly mixed, as any complex generalization will be) is in sight, and shouldn’t be underestimated as its struggle goes beyond just “Let’s get high, man,” and has serious implications on criminal justice, racial issues, economic issues, and more.
Still, these victories are in someways much less defining than the great wars or the Civil Rights movement in terms of their involvement and sacrifice. The vast majority of us have not been personally involved in these endeavors; we express our support in polling and opinion, and increasingly at the ballot box, but real change demands real sacrifice in many ways. Today we’re presented with one of the greatest challenges in our modern human society, a challenge not so easily overcome with tweets and op-eds alone.
It’s a challenge that isn’t easily summed up in a single world or sentence, but we can get a sense of it from the news and events from around the world today. At its heart it’s economic in nature, and may encompass as high a concept as our entire economic and political system. It has equally important branches into racial justice, environmental policy, technology, and culture.
To attempt a very brief summary — capitalism is the predominant economic system of the world, specifically global capitalism and trade. Viewed as a generic system or theory, it should be clear that capitalism is a benefit to all — it’s responsible for the enormous and unprecedented explosion in technology which we all take for granted; it’s increased the global standard of living for the entire human race; it’s prevented nuclear and wide scale conventional war between superpowers for 60 years now; and it’s created unparalleled levels of leisure and economic freedom for billions of people. Despite or because of its outsized effect on humanity, it’s created a rash of serious, serious problems: the massive shifting of wealth from across the world into the hands of a very small number of people; environmental destruction on a nearly unthinkable scale; the almost inescapable feedback loop of wage dependency — intentionally worded as such due the additional impact of actual slavery which still exists today; and the staggering opportunity cost of war in search of profit. Add to this the continuing racial and gender disparities across the world, and the dangerous level of bread and circuses that we’ve settled into, and we’re well into the era of late stage capitalism and all the problems it brings.
So the obstacle that stands before us is clear — the now very real and confirmable truth that capitalism, a system built on continuous growth, cannot continue to exist in a world which is physically limited in resources. Two issues arise, I think, when attempting to discuss and solve this issue. One is that the view of many who are aware of this problem is essentially anti-capitalism, but it’s undeniable true that capitalism in and of itself is not flawed concept — it is a very strong and useful system. The problem lies, as always, within the human flaws of greed and selfishness.
The second is that the de facto system of capitalism as it exists in the world today is inexorably linked to the white, male domination of culture and economy. It needs to be said that there is very likely no massive conspiracy, no shadowy room of men gathered in a Austrian hotel plotting the fate of the world, but that this is the result of thousands of years of complex interactions between societies and groups. Make no mistake, the current system is clearly taken advantage of by those in power but to blame them entirely for our current situation is no different than blaming a pack of wolves that hunt their territory’s prey to the point of extinction — they’re simply following their instincts and acting in their self interest.
Thus the difficulty of separating our economic and political issues from our cultural and moral ones, and the amount of energy being expended attacking the cultural off shoots rather than the heart of the problem itself. The system is a perfect Catch-22 — it has ensured that everyone, no matter how morally opposed they are to it, must live within it to physically survive — food, water, and shelter are all commodified and hence create hypocrites of all those who rail against it.
So it’s clear the challenge that our generation faces and must be known for — the total overthrow of a corrupt system of economic and political power that frames every facet of our lives, and impossibly one that has enabled the very space and time needed to observe and require this dissent in the first place. We are wasteful and indulgent, even as we demand that others consume less. We have at our finger tips the greatest volume of information ever known to humanity, but we recoil from truth and enshrine ourselves within bubbles and safe spaces and enforce our own biases.
It’s clear what our challenge will be, but it’s not at all clear what our solution will be. A violent physical revolution is clearly off the table — 200 years ago the notion of an armed population defeating a trained military was reasonable and even proven — one man with a musket was just about as good as another. Now, such a notion would be laughable — one man with a slightly better semi-automatic musket against a tank, a drone, a nuclear bomb. A virtual revolution is the narrow window through which we might see the light of the future, and I suspect that our battles will be fought with information and not with weapons, but the looming dangers of environmental and economic collapse provide a very narrow window indeed.
It remains to be seen what the future will hold, and if the history books will record this struggle in the same ways as those fought by our ancestors, but the task before us will undoubtedly be as difficult as any we’ve yet faced — though we may heartened by the fact that those who came before too did not have the benefit of clairvoyance; their outcomes were as unknown to them as ours to us, for what little hope that may provide.
