We are living in an age of dread – quite different from earlier periods since the Second World War. In most of the recent past, there seemed to be a sense that we could change or fix things – end war, abolish poverty, create social justice. That’s no longer the case.
Now there seems to be a sense that the world's problems are intractable: nuclear proliferation, terrorism and religious conflict; peak oil; increasing immiseration of the poor in much of the developing world, recently amplified by a food crisis; rising and possibly incurable homelessness in the rich world; greater threat of global pandemics; the cynical abuse of political systems in such hellholes as Zimbabwe and Burma; blatant destruction of ecosystems around the world. That sense seems far more dominant in Canada than it did in Thailand, where I lived until recently.
Despite years of prosperity and an economy happily based on resource extraction, Canada is yet less optimistic that global crises can be solved than I remember. Indeed, there seems to be greater cynicism about the willingness of government and the “international community” to act responsibly, and greater doubt about even their ability to effectively intervene. Thus, an age of dread - dread that even more problems of the seemingly intractable sort are on the way.
There are many ways to explain this. “I found your thesis on the Age of Dread interesting,” wrote my friend Peter Freeouf from Thailand, “especially since you compared it with how we looked at the world when we were young in the 1960s and the 1970s.”
Baby Boomer Theory: “I think you circled on the reason right there but didn’t hit on it directly,” he continued. “We’re getting old - into our 60s – and we dread our advancing decline and coming demise. And this colours our perspective enormously – in most developing countries the portion of the population over 60 is mushrooming in proportion to the rest of the population.
“There are horrific problems facing humanity – no doubt of that. There were, too, in the 1960s. With all the young people around then – the post-WWII generation was huge in America, Europe, Japan, and elsewhere – there was a certain air of optimism, frivolity even, in the way we thought we could change the world. But now that we’re much older and we can feel decrepitude creeping upon us, our underlying mood has shifted to one of ‘dread.’
“That doesn’t mean that the world isn’t facing some very dreadful problems and that life is not increasingly miserable for millions upon millions. It most certainly is – and since there are so many more humans on Earth than there were 40 years ago, the conditions for many have worsened. Africa is the most obvious example, but elsewhere too - in Central Asia, the Middle-East (especially places like Egypt, Sudan, Somalia), Latin America, Southeast Asia (Burma, Cambodia).
“And the most powerful country in the world – economically, militarily and culturally – has had the self-inflicted disaster of nearly eight years of rule by a clique of strutting, incompetent, ignorant and arrogant frat boys....”
I like Peter’s theory, but I think it is wrong. There are many moving parts in the Age of Dread, but in my view the represent several fundamental but intertwined global conflicts. These are economic, environmental, political and religious.
Asia’s Century: The optimists among us would point to the dramatic improvement in life expectancy and living standards in recent times, nearly miraculous achievements in science and technology, the rapid spread of literacy and numeracy in the developing world, and the creation of small-scale wealth and opportunity through such remarkable innovations as micro-credit and rapid developments in global infrastructure for mobile communications.
To this rejoinder, those firmly footed in the age of dread would point to dreadful interlinks among these optimistic developments. The harder China works, the scarcer oil will become and the more the natural environment will turn upon humanity. The faster India grows, the higher food prices become.
People from Dubai to Shanghai say this is Asia’s century, and they may be right. For example, according to the report from a 2006 economic forum,
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