The World

CONCLUSION

There is such a thing as too much history. This may be a strange reflection for a historian who is just finishing a world history in a time of pandemic and European war. But the fetishistic obsession with curated versions of nations and empires in the past can blind one to the present and what really matters: people living today, and how they and their families wish to live. That is one of the reasons I chose to write this book through families – the measure of happiness for what one wants for one’s family defines what one wants for the world. Yet it is a balance. History matters: we long to know how we came to be who we are. ‘Life can only be understood backwards,’ writes Søren Kierkegaard, ‘but it must be lived forwards.’ History never dies; history is never history; it is kinetic, mutating and dynamic, a deathless arsenal of stories and facts to teach us how humans lived, but also to be deployed in the causes of today, good and evil, a mission complicated by the internet – that cesspit, treasure-trove and reliquary of hatreds and hobbies, truths, randomness and revels, calumnies and conspiracies. Yet it is our reverence for the legitimacy granted by history that gives it such lethal, propulsive power.

The Ukrainian war marks the end of an exceptional period: the Seventy-Year Peace, divided into two phases – forty-five years of Cold War, then twenty-five of American unipotency. If the first era was like a chess tournament and the second like a game of solitaire, today is a multi-player computer game.

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is not a new way of exerting and expanding power. Its flint-hearted ferocity is a return to normality in a way that the dynasts in this book – warlords, kings and dictators – would find routine: normal disorder has been resumed. Many of today’s empire nations seem keen to expand spheres of influence that mimic old empires. The wanton killing of Ukrainian civilians, the bodies in the streets and the escape of families from the war, reminds us what much of history was like in times when there were no mobile phones to record atrocities and refugees, and court historians praised murderous conquerors as heroes. We have met plenty of those in this book, and this is not the only sign that human momentum is not just a march of progress but also a stuttering spasm of contingencies. It is a struggle not just between clashing states and ideologies but between contradictory facets of human nature. If nothing else, the Ukrainian invasion demonstrates the real difference between the open world of the liberal democracies and the closed world where the combination of traditional menace and digital surveillance increasingly allows control states to police their people in a way scarcely imaginable even by a Stalin.

Family power is also resurgent for it too is characteristic of our species. Dynastic reversion seems both natural and pragmatic when weak states are not trusted to deliver justice or protection and loyalties remain to kin not to institutions. Leaders who can trust no one usually trust family. In a growing number of Asian, Latin American and African states, from Kenya to Pakistan and the Philippines, demo-dynasties deliver some of the magical reassurance of family power; others from Nicaragua to Azerbaijan, Uganda to Cambodia, are becoming absolutist republican monarchies. It is certainly a bad way to run a country – even worse than democracy.

But today’s dictators and dynasties are not a return to earlier centuries. Even in iPhone and dagger states, they are part of a new world where events move at unprecedented speed, where contenders and markets are interconnected and where the jeopardy of nuclear catastrophe is ever present.

This, coupled with Covid and global warming, foster fears of apocalypse. A sense of impending eschaton seems to be part of human character, perhaps a recognition of the miraculous but fragile conquest of earth by one species. But the stakes today make the End of Days ever more possible.

Yet in some senses Homo sapiens has never been so healthy, and is living longer and better than ever before; society may, in places, be more peaceful than it ever was. While our forefathers were likely to die of infections, violence or famine, today humans are dying of diseases – coronaries, cancer and neurodegeneration – because we live so long and often eat so much. Many of these diseases will soon be cured by new technologies of genetic modification. These improvements are so striking that even the poorest countries today have higher life expectancies than the richest empires of a century ago. Sierra Leone now has a life expectancy of 50.1 years, which is the same as France in 1910. In 1945, Indians lived until thirty-five; now their life expectancy is seventy. Naturally this has changed the shape of families: parents have many children when they expect most to die; now low child mortality, along with female education and contraception, encourages later marriage and smaller families.

In the next eighty years, the population of Europe and east Asia will plummet, that of Nigeria will quadruple to 800 million, making it larger than the entire EU, the second biggest country after India; Congo will triple to 250 million, Egypt will double, Russia will shrink and its Muslims will form a majority. China will halve, its power and economy possibly challenged by the drawbacks of its own autocracy; the US will remain much the same, its ingenious power, however flawed and fragile, likely to endure longer than doomsayers predict. The African giants, Nigeria, Egypt and Congo, could thrive, but it seems more likely that their rulers will be unable to manage or feed their peoples. It is not so much ‘winter is coming’, more like the interminable broiling of a world furnace: climate change – heat and flooding – will make it harder to produce enough food. Already many countries are iPhone and dagger dispolities, realms that barely protect or feed their populations; many states will subside, borders, drawn by imperial powers, will blur into exsurgent warlands – as is already happening in Sahel in perpetual wars for water and resources – or they will succumb to the protection of empire nations, keen to secure their rare earth elements – and old fashioned diamonds, gold and oil. Their peoples will migrate to northern comfort states on a scale unseen since the nomadic invasions. A book of this span has many themes but a key one is that all nations are formed by families in movement: the challenge for the open states is to absorb the migrants they need while being rich enough to sustain the comfort that makes them attractive.

Scale matters in the World Game, but one thing is certain: whoever wins will not win for long. If this history proves anything, it is that the human ability to self-mutilate is almost limitless. ‘In individuals, insanity is rare,’ wrote Nietzsche, ‘but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.’ It is easy to criticize politicians but this interconnected world makes it ever harder to govern: ‘You philosophers … you write on paper,’ Catherine the Great warned. ‘Unfortunate Empress that I am, I write on the susceptible skins of living beings.’

One of the mysteries of such times of crisis is the absence of great leaders, but they are made by their opportunities: ‘We’re little men serving a great cause,’ said Nehru, ‘but because the cause is great something of the greatness falls on us also.’ Kissinger mocked the very idea of greatness: ‘In retrospect, all successful policies seem preordained. Leaders like to claim prescience for what has worked, ascribing planning to what usually starts as a series of improvisations.’ History is driven as much by clowns as by visionaries. ‘History likes to joke,’ said Stalin; ‘sometimes it chooses a fool to drive historical progress.’

‘I’ve seen the future,’ sang Leonard Cohen. ‘It is murder.’ Today’s problems are deep and colossal. Globalization was part of the progressive development that raised living standards, ended most diseases and most famines, but its conveniences have a cost: some are left out of its bounty and some of its bounty requires perilous compromises with enemies. Covid pandemic and Ukrainian war show how fast its food and energy supply lines can fray. Even the miraculous health improvements could be corroding: US life expectancy fell in the three years up to 2020 – for the first time since the Spanish Flu. Microbial resistance to antibiotics could make routine operations much more risky. Covid is probably a dress rehearsal for a graver influenza pandemic.

Even though no empire nations have fought each other since 1945, the time will come when they do and they are developing new killing machines – intergalactic and thermobaric – as well as improving their traditional heavy metal. ‘Never place a loaded rifle on the stage,’ wrote Chekhov, ‘if it isn’t going to go off.’ He was talking about theatre, but this is true in warfare too: ultimately all those weapons will be used. Thousands of tanks can still clash like steel cavalry as they did in the last century, but in this new world cheap gadgets – tank- and plane-smashing drones and portable missiles – mean that smaller countries can destroy the expensive toys of larger ones. This is wonderful if they are being used against an evil empire, less so if used against us. Before nuclear weapons, the west would have gone to war against Russia for invading Ukraine – as it did in the Crimean War – and the US–Chinese rivalry would most likely have led to war too. There are only nine nuclear powers – not a bad record – but actually around forty states could adapt their peaceful nuclear facilities to get nuclear weaponry in a few years. The use of tactical atomic weapons would perhaps be equivalent to the Chernobyl accident; the use of hydrogen bombs could destroy the world. Nuclear war on some scale is not just plausible but likely – and it is worth reflecting that, at the time of writing, no nuclear power has ever lost a war.

The number of autocracies is surging, that of democracies ebbing. It is impossible to define exactly what causes one state to fall and another to rise, but Ibn Khaldun, a character in this story and its presiding spirit, identified asabiyya, the cohesion essential for a society to thrive: ‘Many nations suffered a physical defeat, but that’s never marked their end. Yet when a nation becomes the victim of psychological defeat, that marks the end.’

Control states disdain but also fear and envy the gaudy, outrageous, ingenious, clamorous mess – part fairground, part farmyard – that is freedom in our open world. Dictatorships move faster under experienced leaders, but violence and control are wired into the closed world. The rigidity and delusions of tyrannies are incorrigible, their virtue-spirals end in executions, not just cancellations, their adventures end in devastation and slaughter. When they fail, autocrats take state and people down too.

The only leaders more buffoonish and lethal than the fairground hucksters elected in our flailing democracies are the omnipotent clowns of the tyranny. The challenge for open states is to channel their freedoms and pluralism creatively, rather than indulging in schisms about small differences. Democracies are built on invisible trust: over and over again, when anomie strikes, trust is lost and so is openness. ‘As soon as any man says of the affairs of state, “What does it matter to me?”’ wrote Rousseau, ‘the state may be given up as lost.’ The lesson of recent years is that the gains that were taken as won – the lessons of 1945, the evil of antisemitism, the crimes of genocide and war-making; the right to abortion and triumphs of the 1960s great liberal reformation – have to be fought for again.

But there is hope too: during the American ascendancy, US-style presidencies and elections became essential for legitimacy in old and new post-colonial states. If Theodore Parker’s fashionable dictum that ‘the arc of the moral universe … bends towards justice’ seems over-optimistic, it says something that since 1945 even the most brazen tyrannies feel obliged to pretend to hold elections and respect laws and legislatures – even when they are ‘cosplay democracies’. The open world is still the happiest and freest place to live.

Open societies are slow, their leaders amateurish, their policies inconsistent, but when they mobilize they are flexible, efficient and creative. Technology undermines democratic solidarity and aids tyranny and conspiracy, yet it also advances openness and justice. Its very facility means atrocities and wars can be instantly recorded and viewed everywhere in our new virtual-arena world. The immediate challenge of technology is to learn to control its addictiveness and surveillance while enjoying its benefits. The unelected, invisible power of the despots of data must be diminished. States and individuals have to work that out.

Population growth and climate change can only be solved by either catastrophic population decline – pandemic, natural disaster or thermonuclear war – or by cooperation on a titanic scale. And here too the tendency towards power blocs might actually be helpful: when the time comes – if it comes – a cabal of potentates could make those decisions.

‘The real problem of humanity,’ said Edward O. Wilson, ‘is we have palaeolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology.’ Just because we are the smartest ape ever created, just because we have solved many problems so far, it does not mean we will solve everything. Human history is like one of those investment warning clauses: past performance is no guarantee of future results. Yet the harshness of humanity has been constantly rescued by our capacity to create and love: the family is the centre of both. Our limitless ability to destroy is matched only by our ingenious ability to recover.

In this book I have written of the fall of noble cities, the vanishing of kingdoms, the rise and fall of dynasties, cruelty upon cruelty, folly upon folly, eruptions, massacres, famines, pandemics and pollutions, yet again and again in these pages the high spirits and elevated thoughts, the capacity for joy and kindness, the variety and eccentricity of humanity, the faces of love and the devotion of family run through it all, and remind me why I started to write.