If you think western civilization is withering away by almost every measure possible, it is not just your imagination. But the trajectory of the past few decades is not necessarily irreversible. “This is not the end of the world,” Andrew Potter writes in his new book 'In Decline'. Decline is not extinction. Nor is it the end of hope or happiness.”
Still, it’s time to give our heads a long overdue shake and come to terms with reality. No matter how willingly we surrender to the delusions our political elites encourage in us, sooner or later the facts will intrude and force us to face them. As potter says, “It’s time we accepted that we’re in a state of decline.”
Quite a few of us, rightly or wrongly, have already accepted the argument. Three years ago, a team of researchers working with the Our World in Data project at Oxford University undertook an opinion survey of 26,489 people in 28 countries, which showed that most people appear to agree with Potter’s thesis.
Anyway, those Oxford researchers asked this question: “All things considered, do you think the world is getting better or worse?” Globally, most people said it’s getting worse, and the pessimism was most pronounced in the world’s wealthier countries. In France and Australia, for instance, only three per cent of respondents thought the world was getting better.
This might seem to suggest that Potter’s kicking at an open door. And there are nuances in play that seem to contradict Potter’s thesis. But on closer examination, they don’t.
If civilization itself is on the decline, so is extreme poverty, almost everywhere. Only one in five of the Oxford survey’s respondents were aware of that — most people thought it was getting worse. The data shows that not only has the scourge of extreme poverty been vanishing from the world for the past two centuries, what’s left of it in the 21st century is disappearing faster than ever before. Likewise, only about four in 10 of the respondents knew that child mortality is on the wane. In fact, since 1998, child mortality rates have been cut in half.
It’s not as though there’s anything new about the future looking grim. The boomer generation grew up in the certain dread of either an imminent nuclear apocalypse or mass famine owing to a human population that was expected to continue expanding exponentially until the planet was inevitably incapable of feeding and sustaining our species. As things turned out, we haven’t nuked ourselves into oblivion, and the earth’s human population is expected to level off and go into steep decline well before the end of this century.
But Potter acknowledges all this, and goes further. For about 150 years, with more than a few grotesque collapses into barbarism, there’s a steady pattern of civilization’s inexorable rise. The arc of history bends in the direction of “progress,” as the word was once understood, and it’s bent in that direction by the pre-eminence of reason, liberal democracy and the rule of law. All those charts and graphs that show up in the works of Steven Pinker and other optimists are headed towards light, not darkness. They’re among the most obvious universal benefits of the Enlightenment.
Potter’s point is that we’ve been living off the fruits of that bounty, and for all the astonishing achievements in digital technologies over the past few decades, it’s all been built upon achievements from our grandparents’ time. “We’re spinning our wheels,” Potter argues, “and we have been for a few years now.”
In the world’s advanced economies, real wages and salaries among the middle class have barely budged since the 1970s. Housing, education and health-care costs continue to go through the roof. A single-income household with several children, once the norm among the working class, is now a way of life reserved for the rich.
In Canada, a $10-a-day daycare subsidy, one of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s selling points during the just-concluded federal election campaign, is supposed to be a big deal. We boast about our immigration rates being among the highest in the world, but Canada’s population would shrivel without a constant stream of newcomers because this is a country where millions of people can’t even afford to have children.
The federal election itself was an ample illustration of Potter’s case. With liberal democracy in full retreat around the world, police states like China and Russia in the ascendant and fragile democracies reverting to strongman regimes, Canadians were exhorted to go to the polls for the third time in six years. The campaign ended with a replication of the 2019 election, with Trudeau returning to power with only a third of the popular vote.
Even so, after the votes were counted Monday night, Trudeau declared: “Thank you, Canada, for casting your vote, for putting your trust in the Liberal team, for choosing a brighter future.”
"But it’s not easy to imagine a bright future when our governments can’t seem to get anything done. From the big stuff — meeting global carbon-emissions targets — to the relatively smaller stuff of being able to pay wages, Canada’s predicament is typical," suggests Terry Glen in his review of "In Decline."
"Potter doesn’t mention it, but a case in point is the federal government’s attempts to fix its broken payroll process with the Phoenix pay system, which collapsed as soon as it was booted up five years ago. Thousands of federal employees ended up underpaid or overpaid, or went without pay, and it’s only now that the new Ceridian human-resources software is coming online. Last month, the backlog of unprocessed payments was still in excess of 100,000."
"In the teeth of COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve fared no worse than most developed countries, but that’s hardly saying much. The world was well into the pandemic’s maelstrom before Canada’s chief public health officer, Theresa Tam, admitted that an outbreak in Canada was even likely," Glen adds.
Central to Potter’s thesis is the proposition that the Enlightenment did not eradicate the magical thinking of superstitious preliterate societies. Unreason has lingered, on the right and on the left, and we’re all submitting to rigidly enforced belief systems that affirm irrational beliefs rather than illuminate the real world all around us.
It is not as though we’ve reached the Enlightenment’s summit and pulled up the ladder behind us, Potter contends. “Life will simply get more and more difficult every year as earth’s remaining humans retreat even further into their various tribes.”
In a recent podcast interview Potter alluded to the fact that there is no declineometer in his book, adding "I hope I'm wrong!"
I certainly do too, but now he's got me thinking.
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