It Could Have Been So Much Better: How the Modern World Failed and How to Get it Right Next Time
This is ‘book’ 3 in the series The Impossible Books of Keith Kahn-Harris. The cover was created by Gus Condeixa. For more on this series, read the introduction here.
What sort of book is it?
One that hits the sweet spot between scholarly rigour and popular accessibility –á la Thomas Picketty or Michael Sandel. Well, a guy can dream…
How likely is it that I will write the book?
This is my ‘big book’, designed to make a big impact. It brings together ideas I’ve had gestating for nearly two decades. I badly want to write it. The problem is that it doesn’t fit together with my existing publication record so getting a trade publisher interested would be a tough ask. An academic publisher might be more receptive, but here the problem is that it limits the possible audience. So this might be a book I write late in my career, on a wing and a prayer.
Am I happy for anyone else to write the book?
No — hands off, this one is mine.
Synopsis
‘Progress’ is a difficult concept. Post-enlightenment optimism has been gradually eroded as humanity has repeatedly demonstrated its inability to live without violence and conflict. It has also become painfully apparent, at least since the Second World War, that it is precisely those most ‘modern’ developments that can have the most catastrophic consequences. From industrialised mass killing in the Holocaust, through the unintended results of DDT and Thalidomide, and onto the terrifying blowback from the carbon economy — the triumphant achievements of modernity have a baleful habit of becoming disasters.
This isn’t an optimistic period in human civilization. We live in a time of amazing technological wonders that surprise and delight. But we are living on the brink of catastrophic climate change, violent conflict is endemic and in many places seemingly unresolvable, millions starve and are threatened with virulent pandemics while a tiny elite gets ever richer. While the future is unknowable, it would take an enormous effort of optimism not to believe that things will get worse before they get better.
Yet the aim of this book is not to wallow in pessimism. Nor is it to set out a plan that will solve everything. Instead, this is a book that seeks to remind ourselves that, as the title declares: It Could Have Been So Much Better.
Part elegy, part sociological-historical critique, the book’s starting point is that humans are astonishing creatures who have achieved astonishing things, particularly in the last 2–300 years. We now have the tools for human beings to be free from hunger, free from pain (for most of us, for most of our lives) and free from an unduly grueling existence. The human world can never be a utopia, but it could be a world free of a vast swathe of tribulations that for much of humanity’s existence had to be borne with stoicism.
It Could Have Been So Much Better takes the time for elegiac reflection on the world that might have been. The book then asks the question: so what happened?
At one level, the question seems superficially easy to answer: despite our extraordinary achievements, human beings have not been able to escape our selfishness and violence. Inequality, conflict and greed are just part of who we are. We humans are fated to disagree on how best to organize the world and we cannot ever ensure that the benefits of human civilization are shared equally.
There is something to that argument, but it can lead to a smug kind of apathy. This can prevent us from fully appreciating the enormity of the tragedy we have experienced. What is truly painful about humanity’s current existence is not that we have failed to transcend our nature, but that we have actively — and sometimes even consciously — used our most advanced tools to prevent a better world from emerging.
Consider one example, climate change. We can be relatively phlegmatic about some of the reasons for our failure to effectively deal with this looming threat: the naivety that went along with carbon-based industrialization, the difficulty of achieving international consensus about an appropriate response, the technological and social imponderables that make the envisioning a post-carbon society so hard. But what is horrific to contemplate is that some of the best and brightest minds of their generation are employed in a deliberate effort to at best stall progress and at worst actively deny that there is even a problem.
This is at the heart of our heart-breaking situation: that many of the most sophisticated minds and sophisticated techniques that humans have devised are employed in active efforts to prevent a better world from emerging. From the financial wizards whose mathematical genius precipitated the 2008 crash, to the brilliant minds enforcing the futile ‘war on drugs’, to the myriad think tanks that envisioned the catastrophic Iraq war, to the scientific geniuses coming up with ever more ingenious ways of poisoning ourselves and the planet — contemplating the wasted human creativity is enough to make one want to weep.
To create a better world — or at least the germ of progress in a world spiralling out of control — requires finding a way of turning this mass of misplaced ingenuity in a more productive direction. The mass of human effort expended in making the world a better place is currently outweighed by the effort expended in turning humanity against itself and against real progress.
This is where things become difficult…
Part of the problem we have at the moment is that very few people in the modern world can bear to face up to supporting policies that lead to human suffering. We are supposed to be enlightened moderns, not savages. So when we commit genocide, we can’t admit it is happening — even as it is going on. When we prevent action on climate change, we can’t admit to the suffering this will cause. When we support economic systems from which only a tiny minority benefit we cannot admit that mass impoverishment is a reality.
We are all good. We are all working for human betterment. We are all motivated by higher ideals.
Or so we want to believe.
And so we deny. We create baroque structures that provide sophisticated frameworks within which we can believe that we are working for the good of all. We turn our incredible capacity for invention against itself.
This is a very modern problem: the Romans celebrated the genocides they carried out, medieval monarchs reveled in their selfish splendor, no one argued that the pre-industrial economic system would lead to wealth for all. In the modern world, our human desires remained the same, but the ability to justify them was threatened in an ‘enlightened’ age.
The only way out of this trap is to do something painful and counter-intuitive: we need to make it okay to articulate our hateful nature. Debates with climate change sceptics and other deniers, neo-liberals and others have become fruitless — they collapse under the wait of a thousand ‘rational’ arguments.
But what if it became acceptable for people to publicly accept and even celebrate the suffering caused by climate change and other denied phenomena? At first it would be intimidating and scary, but perhaps it might lead to something better. Perhaps if we could have an honest debate about values we could find a way to hear and allay the fears and desires that at the moment retard human progress? Perhaps if we were honest about ourselves we could move beyond ourselves.
Well, perhaps.
At the very least though, it’s time to face up to the tragedy that the modern world has become. It’s time to stare into the abyss between what humans are capable of and the world we have made. It’s time to mourn the world that might have been.
Because it could have been so much better.
