A divided world on a roasting planet

The Syrian rebellion displaced millions of people who sought refuge inside Syria, in neighbouring countries, Turkey, Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan, and beyond in Europe. That war is almost over, and refugees are trickling back. But most of them have nothing to go back to, just rubble and unexploded ordnance. They have saved their lives but lost their livelihoods, their homes and their past. The rebellion in Yemen has also displaced millions, but Yemen is surrounded by the sea and Saudi Arabia, so refugees had nowhere to flee to. They could only pile up in rebel held towns and be subjected to bombing, famine and disease. In Syria the “baddies” as seen by Western eyes were the government, its leader Assad and their Hezbollah, Iranian and Russian allies, until it got complicated when ISIS, al-Nusra and other radical groups took over the rebellion. In Yemen the “baddies” are the rebels and their Iranian supporters. The opposition between the Islamic Republic and the Wahhabi monarchy, between Shia and Sunni, has made a playground of these two deadly conflicts. And Russia’s involvement, because of its only remaining Mediterranean naval base at Latakia, has helped to revive the Cold War divide.

Hundreds of thousands have been killed, millions are displaced and an unknown number have been crippled physically and mentally. Meanwhile Western powers have debated “red lines”, gas attacks and migratory flows, and have objectively supported and strengthened the Shia coalition by destroying ISIS strongholds. In fact the US had already assisted Iran in 2003, when it invaded Iraq, deposed Saddam Hussein and his Sunni/Christian power base, and handed over government to the Shia majority. At present, Iran’s influence is continuous up to the borders of Turkey, Jordan and Israel. Hence the Saudis’ determination in stamping out the Houthi uprising in Yemen, and their increasing friendship with Israel is due to their total dependence on American, British and French arms supplies, also my enemy’s enemies… The Middle East has become the proxy confrontation between Iranians and Saudis, with a strong sectarian element, and when politics clothes itself in religion, certainties can reach fever-pitch. Having been refused European membership, Turkey seemed to be on that path, but the rift between Erdogan and Gülen, and the former’s sudden dependence on the army and police after the failed coup, have reinstalled a nationalist neo-Kemalist autocracy. Erdogan is back to crushing Kurds and is ever closer to despotic rulers in the Caucasus and the steppes of Asia, and to their master in Moscow. But Putin is the major sponsor of the Alawi/Assad dictatorship in Syria, which is another reason for Erdogan to play the Turkish nationalist fiddle rather than the Sunni religious one.

Sometime soon the fighting in Syria and Yemen will have simmered down, Daraa and Hodeida will have fallen, and Sana may have capitulated. But what happens then? Prince Salman will be master of the whole Arabian Peninsula and Iran will hold sway over Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, with Jordan stuck in between. It seems unlikely that these two opposing powers will accept this situation, and Jordan will probably be the next victim. However, Saudis are too few and too rich to have large infantry units. They must rely on proxy and mercenary troops. On the other side, the Alawi minority in Syria face a similar problem – without the riches – and have lost a lot of lives in the war. Without the Lebanese Hezbollah, the Iraqi militia, and Iranian advisors and supplies, the Assad regime would not have survived. Russia’s participation in the air more than on the ground also helped, especially as it blocked any all-out intervention by the US and its European allies.

Iran and Saudi Arabia will soon be confronting one another across the border between Syria and Jordan, with Israel lurking in the background. And their respective backers - Russia and China behind Iran and the US & Co. behind Saudi Arabia - are also shaping up for conflict over trade and territorial control. Published in 1957, Nevil Shute’s post-nuclear apocalypse novel “On the Beach” gives this brief explanation of events. “Here he learned for the first time of the Russian-Chinese war that had flared up out of the Russian-NATO war, that had in turn been born of the Israeli-Arab war, initiated by Albania.” A sort of butterfly effect, long before the concept was publicised. Sixty years on and life on planet Earth has not been wiped out by radioactive fallout, but the risk still exists along with climatic disturbance and financial collapse. And the arms race is on again with stealthy ships and planes, hypersonic missiles, space troupers and tactical nuclear war-heads. So far no one has pushed the fatal button of nuclear destruction. Tensions in Syria and the seas around China have not flared up into a face off, and nobody wants to destroy the world, “I hope the Russians love their children too” (Sting). At least not by nuclear holocaust, because parts of the planet’s inhabitants are being exterminated on a daily basis and rising temperatures may scorch everything in a not very distant future. Synthetic pollution and carbon dioxide are just as deadly as nuclear fireballs, but on a longer time scale. Humanity and the rest may be about to disappear with a whimper instead of a bang.

Repeating the past with new masks

Nationalism is raising its ugly head again in Europe and elsewhere. And the collective memory seems to have lost trace of its last eruptions a century ago. Intense propaganda during the First World War had pushed nationalism to the extreme. The war did not have much else to stand on. Each side depicted the other as inhuman beasts, and those notions did not dissipate once the fighting stopped. They led to one-party dictatorships in Italy, Portugal, Turkey, Russia, Rumania, Hungary, Germany and Spain. Japan, in its own way, followed suit. It all ended up with the atrocities that preceded and accompanied the Second World War. During the Cold War, nationalism was very subdued, as all nations were obliged to give allegiance to one or the other of the contending parties, the US or the USSR. And anti-colonial national uprisings around the world were merely a change of master.

Since 1991, global capitalism has done its best to blur all national boundaries, and to encompass the planet. It has failed dismally, except with pollution. It has, through its organisms (WTO, IMF, etc.), managed to open borders to trade, but “free trade” obliges nations to compete with one another, a price competition that concerns means of production and wages. This began with nations of high productivity and wages competing with nations of low productivity and wages. But technology travels and patents are copied, so that nations are now competing with equivalent technology, while the wage differences have only been partly reduced. Low wages have risen and high wages have fallen, though a considerable gap remains, and the price competition between nations depends essentially on that factor. Global technology no longer favours the richest nations, and the coming trade wars are in fact wage wars. Import tariffs and subsidies are put in place to protect wages and profits. But global corporations reap their profits globally. They wish to produce as cheaply as possible and sell at the highest possible price. This leaves small businesses and labour, which must make do with falling margins and shrinking wages.

Nationalism is rooted at the junction of middle and working classes. The hierarchical level where up and down movements are the most apparent, and where social aspirations are the strongest. That is where alien competition hits the hardest, with immigrants at home and goods from abroad. And those external pressures make it the cradle of xenophobia. Nationalism is the sentiment of belonging to a special species, and cannot be separated from jingoism and chauvinism. When a nation is in a dominant position, at least inside its borders, these sentiments may be benign. It is when that dominion is questioned or threatened that things can get nasty. Nationalism is the great unifier of us against them and is always a temptation for reckless politicians, who may play with it and be overwhelmed by the fury they have unleashed.

Europe has already been down the road to fascism and totalitarian power. That past experience could possibly help Europeans avoid the same pitfall again. But, though it has often supported atrocious governments under its imperial rule, the US has not yet undergone the weight and tragedy of an absolute regime. Americans do not know that it installs itself progressively. Its method is to implicate everyone by conviction, social promotion, apprehension or indifference. The nation is redefined, and increasing numbers are excluded, political rivals, minorities and, finally, any form of difference. At this point, the nation is the party and the party is the leader. The state is totalitarian. Orwell described it, but Arendt detailed how it came to be the last time around. A major factor was the mass migration of refugees and “stateless” persons. “Once they had left their homeland they remained homeless, once they had left their state they became stateless, once they had been deprived of their human rights they were rightless, the scum of the earth.” (1) When nations begin to specify who and what they are, it is the prelude to making it a reality. And, when the ball starts rolling, there is no equivalent force still around to stop it. The free market wasteland is the seed-bed of savagery. And socialism or barbarity resounds too late once again. Just like climate change, there is already too much momentum for a conceivable turn around. The choice, as ever, is whether to collaborate or not.

1. Hannah Arendt, the Origins of Totalitarianism, Harcourt, Ch. 9, p. 267

The whole chapter entitled “The decline of the nation state and the end of the rights of man” is about the 1920s and 30s, and the similarities with today are astounding.

Tools determine evolution

Marx is best known for the Communist Manifesto, where he put forward the idea of history being shaped by class struggle. He was writing in the early years of the First Industrial Revolution, when technology could still be seen as a secondary effect of human evolution. Since then the mediation of the environment has become so preponderant that the direct effect of technology on social structures and individual behaviour seems obvious. And this has probably been true from the start, with the mastery of fire, tools and language. If no one had learnt to shape hard, shock-resistant stones into axes and hoes, there would have been no agriculture (flint, like glass, is hard, sharp and brittle). Later, metallurgy and phonetic writing changed everything, and so it goes on. Class opposition is an ongoing struggle, because dominion and oppression are never acceptable. But it is technological transformations that bring a new social category into the circle of power. The bourgeoisie came to share power with the landed aristocracy because they mastered trade and finance, and later industry. Merchant bankers became rich and powerful because of evolutions in ship building and accountancy, and industrialists because of fossil energy, electricity and countless machines. Gunpowder also played an important part in changing society, as did printing.

One of the earliest tools invented by humans was language. The upright position had developed vocal cords that could produce an almost limitless variety of sounds. This allowed the distinctive naming of everything, and the oversized brain could remember it all. Language can conjure up presences from the past, from elsewhere and from nowhere by imagination. It transmits ideas, beliefs and knowledge, and has moulded the human mind. Writing changes the perception of language, as sounds become signs. The emphasis is on the eye that transforms the script into an inner voice. Writing also perpetuates words, passing them on through time without the modifications inherent to oral transmissions. Writing means that Iliad, Odyssey, Genesis and Exodus are still very similar to their originals written some two thousand six hundred years ago. Writing passes a message through time, but it also congeals the words and halts their evolution. The invasion of the Western Roman Empire by Goths, Vandals, Franks, Saxons and others put a stop to writing in that part of the world, and destroyed a large part of existing manuscripts. For several centuries writing was confined to copying a selection of mostly religious texts on costly parchment. Books were rare and difficult to consult, but during the 14^th century the technologies of paper making and wood-cut printing were introduced from China via the Middle East, and then Gutenberg had the idea of movable type, which suddenly multiplied the production of books and made them far more accessible.

The Renaissance, which was a revival of Roman and Greek Antiquity, and the Reformation, which was a return to Christian fundamentals, were both made possible by the proliferation of printed words. The bible was translated into spoken idioms, as were the classic works of pre-Christian authors. Europe stepped back into its distant past and then set about transforming its future. The Maccabees and the Gracchus were more inspiring than all the Middle Age saints. The power of diffusing ideas brought by movable-type printing meant that Luther could oppose the Pope, and that Aretino could be “the Scourge of Princes”. Printing spread literacy and more people had access to more information, both official and subversive. But the printed page is more than a set of signs to be transformed into words and meaning, it becomes the form to which the world must comply. McLuhan went into this at length and convincingly in “The Gutenberg Galaxy”. Literacy modifies the mind and the way it perceives the environment, as do numeracy and all the technology that mediates the world, even the most mundane.

For a while the printing press ruled supreme and allowed nobodies such as Diderot, Rousseau or Tom Paine to be very influential. Then the 19^th century industrialised everything, including print with a process for making paper out of wood pulp and the steam driven rotary press. That gave rise to the press barons who shaped public opinion and could make or break a government. By the 1900s printed words were omnipresent, in books, periodicals, newspapers, pamphlets, leaflets and billboards. Then, in the 1920s, sound came back with a bang, in loudspeakers and radio. The psychological shock must have been tremendous. And it meant that the voice in the microphone could be heard by thousands and millions. However, controlling what was said was much easier than controlling what was printed, because radio waves are limited and emissions are by nature centralised. Radio was a powerful propaganda machine and the waveband belonged to governments that decided who could transmit, when they did not monopolise the wavebands themselves.

The 1930s were the aftermath of the 1929 financial crash. But they were also the dawn of electronics, plastics and radioactivity, of accelerating carbon dioxide emissions and the use of insecticides and herbicides, and the prelude to total war, with destructions and deaths on an unprecedented scale. And it was technology that made it all possible. Class struggle was completely overwhelmed by ideologies that used the mesmerising effects of sound on minds structured by print, ideologies intoxicated by the power of machines that could imagine shaping humans to their particular requirements. The notions of ethnic/racial purity and redemption by hard labour were pushed to the extreme, and murderous violence reached a summit in Kolyma, at Treblinka and over Hiroshima. After 1945 the killing abated somewhat to the level of National Liberation struggles in Asia, Africa and Latin America, while the US and the USSR teased each other over planetary control and ideological dominion. The 1960s saw a revival of popular movements, such as civil rights, gender equality or nuclear disarmament, that were not founded on class divisions and whose participants were largely middle-class. 1968 was marked by the Tet Offensive, the Prague spring, a massacre in Mexico, political assassinations in the US, rioting and mass student protests. It was followed by the dismal 70s, and its industrial wastelands that offered no future. Then came “government is the problem” Ronnie and “there is no alternative” Maggie. Social militancy had been diverted to minority and gender rights, and class struggle would be reduced to market forces and trickle-down, with worker’s unions in disarray and the political spectrum being displaced to the right. The 1990s witnessed the breakup of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact, a military build-up in the Middle East (Desert Storm), the Clinton years of sex, drugs and deregulation, and China’s opening to foreign investments and technology. The US was the start-up nation of get rich quick, as digital went global almost overnight. This high level of inebriety led to a hangover in the new millennium, with the dotcom crash, 9/11, perpetual war and the 2008 banking breakdown.

The middle-class has been under siege since the 1960s, when young radical drop-outs poured scorn on the drab lives of their parents, their moral consensus and their work ethics of a previous age. The middle-class was no longer an aspiration, just a spring-board to personal success. And as it slowly crumbled away, so did the class structures and political balance founded on it. Wealth became the ultimate goal and the unique scale of values. Welfare and social solidarity were swept aside as hindrances. And governments were up for biding by corporate and banking hierarchies, with generous returns in contracts, tax cuts and deregulation. By then the dominant idea was “More”, which brings to mind Schroder’s 1969 film about heroin addiction. However, back in the 1970s, and even earlier in the case of Rachel Carson, some researchers were noting measurable modifications in the atmosphere, the oceans and in animal populations. They warned that if this continued the planet would become uninhabitable for most existing species. Four decades later, human dejections cover the earth and fill the seas and the sky. “More” it has been, with a vengeance and without hesitation, but the catch was that most of it went to those who already had everything, to the inbred addicts who load up at conception.

For most of human history horses and camels offered the fastest form of transportation. But over the past two centuries there has been such acceleration that today’s virtual transportation is almost instantaneous. It began with steam engines and railways. That was followed by internal combustion engines, cars and planes. In the 1870s Jules Verne imagined traveling round the planet in eighty days. It could probably be done now in two or three. Material acceleration was progressive and comprehensible. What has been harder to grasp is the immediacy of electronics, of being here and here at both ends of the line. The analogic telephone was an introduction, but digital technology allows two people to look each other in the eye, to be visibly and audibly present in two or many places at once. This is not some TV talking-head invading peoples’ sitting rooms. It is a two-way egalitarian transmission and it is transforming society in unforeseen and unpredictable ways.

Previous media of information/propaganda (print, movies, radio, TV) were one way transmissions from centre to periphery. They imitated and confirmed the power structures of politics, commerce, finance and industry. Audiences were passive, and the only measure of approval was their numbers. The World Wide Web has opened the way to a torrent of feedback and countless contradictory sources. It has brought back the public meeting, with heckling and insults. Being told what to think by pontifying “experts” is no longer acceptable, and everyone is able to assemble their own tailor-made beliefs. Digital technology has revived the market place, the Roman forum and the Greek agora, where public policies and private transactions were discussed and decided. The concentrated control of print and Hertzian transmissions has been diluted in the internet ocean. Though Big Brother is still watching, he is no longer dictating what is read, heard or seen. Not quite yet, even if Google, Facebook et al, and governments everywhere, are doing their best to filter, censure and obliterate. Their difficulty in regaining control of content is that, on the web, every receptor is also an emitter.

Technology shapes personal habits and social interactions. And the pace of technological change determines the rate of communal and private transformations. As that pace speeds up, as it has over the past two centuries, it becomes more difficult to predict the future. No one can foresee the consequences and permutations of new machines. The incremental change of the past has become a rush into the unknown, utopian literature has turned dystopian, and the notion that minute causes can have massive effects has blurred all perceptions of tomorrow. Humanity has always advanced in the dark, knowing neither where it was going nor why it was going there. But the movement was slow, as imperceptible as continental drift, with occasional violent earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. At today’s speed, planning the future is an illusion, and there is a strong temptation to bolster the past, which is even more elusory. Parts of the world experienced similar accelerations before, with printing, fossil fuels and analogic electronics, but this time the speed up is greater than ever and global, and it has gone beyond the planet’s capacity to absorb the waste.

Technology developed from the study of nature, of animals, plants and minerals. However, understanding the intricate mechanisms and interactions of chemistry, biology, physics and astronomy, is a recent achievement that is still incomplete. In the past, understanding had been empirical and the unseen was attributed to supernatural forces and beings, whose actions could be benign or evil. Greek and Roman Antiquity was developing a rational interpretation of natural phenomena when Christian myths and dogma put a stop to the process for over a thousand years, until the Renaissance rediscovered ancient knowledge, and polishers of precious stones started polishing glass to make lenses. Telescopes and microscopes increased the eye’s capacity to see distant and small objects, and this completely modified humanity’s perception of its surroundings. At about the same time, universal laws began to be formulated. Reform and religious wars were a setback, but then Enlightenment gave a boost to questioning, research, experimentation and revolution. Absolute monarchy was anointed by an absolute God, their destinies were linked. But the laws that governed the cosmos could not be changed, even by their creator. And if the gods could not act arbitrarily, neither could kings. Technology has constantly brought about the unexpected, and this is more the case today than ever before. Its effects can be catastrophic and extremely deadly, or they can be beneficial, only time can tell. At present the detrimental effects of the Industrial Age are increasingly apparent (nuclear waste, plastics, insecticides, herbicides, CO2, NOx etc.), but the effects of the digital revolution cannot yet be measured. Will they bring solutions, or just accentuate the world’s dire situation?