Maybe it is just our Lawyers, Guns & Money?
I am in the midst of reading Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature. The book basically argues that despite all the chaos in the world, we live in damn good times, well peaceful times. I paraphrase. In short, he argues that the last 80 years since World War II have been peaceful. He goes the next step even and claims that even if you factor in the two world wars, including the Holocaust, Hiroshima, Dresden, Nagasaki, and the like, it is still a more peaceful less deadly world than it was.
He is not denying that more people than ever have died, but that we just have more people than we have ever had. He is looking at the picture proportionally. There is he claims, less crime, less war, just less violence in proportion to the number of humans populating the planet today. In short, he is claiming that it is a better bet to live a safe and happy life today than a safe and happy life one, two, or ten thousand years ago. He goes further and claims it is a safer more peaceful world today than four or five hundred years ago.
Anyway, I write all this because Fareed Zakaria on CNN this morning in a matter of seconds blew this long tedious book out of the water. That is the pleasure of Fareed, it all too often comes down to the first five minutes of his show. He has his moments. Today, he was looking at the “Long Peace”, that fifty years, that relatively peaceful stretch that we had from the end of World War II to the mid-nineties, and which has largely continued. Fareed argued it was / is largely the courtesy of the US.
This idea of a “Long Peace” is a concept Pinker examines thoroughly in his book. Without it, Pinker would probably be in trouble. Basically, Zakaria asserts that it was the US’s lawyers, guns and money, and not necessarily in that order, that has facilitated this “Long Peace” between 1945 and today.
That is quite different from Pinker, who claims it was democratic states, commerce, cooperative action (my bastardized term / abbreviation involving non-profits, NGOs, and the like both internal to states, and internationally), and lastly a literature of empathy (Think books such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Catch 22, and / or All Quiet on the Western Front, and dare I say it the Bible). The last item, the literature, shows us that those beyond our tribe are in fact like us. Together, it is these items that for Pinker, have allowed us to continue to be in this special moment, the “Long Peace”.
In one sense you can say that all of the above have played a role in the last 80 years. Assuming you want to grant that there has been a “Long Peace”. Most historians and political scientists do grant that it is a ‘real’ thing. But we are, I suspect entering into a time where we will have the opportunity to find out whether Pinker or Zakaria nailed it. We probably will at the least see the diminishment of at least one of these. Hopefully not both!
Fareed’s speculation that it was the hegemony of the US that kept the peace will be tested. Tested? More a question of can it be maintained, and what happens if it cannot. The US is simply getting tired of funding all kinds of projects across the globe, much less policing the planet. Whether it is for Aids, infrastructure, elections, defense. . . whatever. We just cannot continue to take care of the planet.
Much of the globe is resentful that we have audacity to even try to do such, and more and more US citizens asks why we do it. Many have returned to some form of isolationism for better or worse. It might have been necessary right after World War II, but that was seventy years ago now. Forget about all of that, the question simply becomes can we maintain such? Does globalism boil down to the US trying to control too much of the planet, and for how long can we sustain such a policy?
You ask such questions, and you quickly see that we have to some degree had some effect. The US has clamped down on certain conflicts. Would Taiwan be a thing today if not for the US? Ukraine may not exist today if not for the US. What would be the state of Israel, Iran, and Palestine if not for the US? And what happens in each of these if the US essentially in the years to come walks away, fatigued, and tired, exhausted after seventy years of maintaining the peace, or trying to do something like that? What becomes of all of these things the US has attempted to impose some kind of peace?
I do think the US has largely succeeded, but we cannot keep it up much longer. We just do not have the wealth, the riches to do it. Our GDP will not allow us to keep going. Meanwhile, China will continue to strive for such a role, economically and geopolitically, and we will have to contend with that. And they probably will at some point take Taiwan back. Likewise, the European Union and NATO, with or without the US, probably will have to deal with the likes of if not Putin then Russia. Add to this the dynamic of the BRICs and of Africa, and the waters only get muddier.
In short, we will witness over the next ten or twenty years, whether Zakaria had it right, or Pinker. It simply is the case that the US will become more and more a regional power. We just do not have the cash to maintain what we were. And with that we will see and test the power of what Pinker points to. We will see whether democratic states, commerce, NGOs and the like, and lastly paperbacks which allows us to see others — what today are often read on Audible and Kindle, are up to the task. We will find out soon enough.
A last thought, these questions are relevant now, today, this election year. Both Biden and Trump see that the US cannot continue as we do. Both are variations on the above themes. One difference between them is that the one is reliant upon the guns and little interest in democracies and the like, and the other is largely with Pinker. Anyway, we have now wandered to a whole different essay. . .
