The Past Is Another Country.

A book review from the future.

I’ve been travelling extensively over the last week, and have had very little time for writing. (It has truly been said that Man is born free, but is everywhere in planes.) And the big news this week was the assassination attempt on Donald Trump about which, frankly, I have nothing original to contribute.

So I was about to produce a brief apology for no essay this week when, unexpectedly, I received a message (as occasionally happens) from a distant descendant of mine, attaching a copy of a short book review from a century hence. For want of anything else I reproduce it here. I’m not sure that I understand all the references, and some of the judgments in the review (and evidently in the book) are perhaps different to those we would make today. But then times and attitudes change. See what you think.

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The New Dark Ages?: Moral Blindness and the Fall of the Global West, 1990-2040.

Bartholomew Chen, New Harvard University Press, 2124.

Few questions are more eagerly debated among historians these days than whether there are absolute moral standards which we can apply uniformly to every actor in every historical period, or whether a historian should try to present the events of the time as they might then have been seen, and the actors of the time as representatives of their epoch. Until the eighteenth century, of course, it was taken for granted in the West that moral standards and great figures of the past were there for instruction and emulation of later generations. It was only much more recently that historians started to look back at their predecessors from a position of moral superiority, and to take pleasure in pointing to what were, by their standards, moral failings and unacceptable behaviours.

For a century or more now, the resistance to “presentism”—the idea that the present has the moral right to sit in judgement on the past—has been largely unsuccessful, and many would argue that the teaching of history has consequently degenerated into nothing but a series of moral sermons. And few eras are more morally vilified these days than the approximate half-century between the end of the Cold War in 1989-91 and the fall of the Global West, usually dated between 2040 and 2045.

However, as Bartholomew Chen, Professor of Modern Western History at New Harvard University, makes clear in the introduction to his recent book, his intention is not to praise or condemn the events and personalities of that epoch in all their variety, or “to sit in judgement upon those who sat in judgement” but to describe the era objectively, in all its variety and confusion. The title carries a significant question mark, and Chen frequently returns to the issue (without giving a final opinion) of whether that period was actually as “dark” as we now have a tendency to think it was.

That said, Chen is not a radical. He comes from a long line of distinguished members of the Asian-American ruling class. His father, also an academic, had several important jobs in government under the Patel administration, his uncle was a Senator, and his aunt a distinguished political scientist. Moreover, as he explains in his Introduction, his family personally suffered during the Great Fear of the 2020s: a distant relative, a Professor of Biology, used a technical term in a lecture which one of his students mistook for an insult. He was dismissed from his job, sentenced to a year’s compulsory re-education, and eventually took his own life. “I do not think that such a society can be defended” he says, with commendable restraint “but I do think it needs to be explained, rather than simply condemned.”

The book is deliberately conceived and priced to be popular and approachable. There is an expensive electronic version, but also physical versions for those outside universities and large organisations who do not have the luxury of Internet. Accordingly, Chen passes quickly—perhaps too quickly—over some of the more detailed and complex disputes of the time. But as a popular introduction which tries to be scrupulously fair it has, in my view, succeeded well, even if the book has mostly attracted hostile reviews, criticising the author for “revisionism” and “defending the indefensible.”

The book is organised into three main parts, each with a question as its title. The first, The Age of Fear? is inspired by Philip Anandi’s The New Inquisition (2098) which set the tone for a whole generation of negative and condemnatory interpretations of the 2010s and 2020s. Anandi’s own great-grandfather was one of about five hundred Canadians sentenced to between three and five years’ imprisonment for allegedly sexist or racist remarks reported by their neighbours, or recorded from random broadcasts by the Sensitivity Detectors which many organisations required their senior employees to install in their homes up until the late 2030s. (Such controls and punishments, whilst unusually extreme in Canada, were also used elsewhere.) Here, I think, Chen is perhaps too indulgent. Whilst it is true that the worst of the repression lasted only a decade or so, and that only a few thousand suicides have been directly linked to it, nonetheless the lives of tens of millions in the West were palpably affected by the general atmosphere of repression and fear which had been increasingly evident since the turn of the millennium, and which increasingly stifled independent thought and judgement, as well as having an apocalyptic effect on personal relationships. (The terrifying mental health statistics from 2015-2035 reproduced as an appendix to Anandi’s book are not challenged by Chen.) And as Chen concedes, this outbreak of mass mental deviance was not imposed from outside: it was generated from within institutions by those seeking power, and voluntarily adopted by those who found freedom impossible to cope with. In the famous judgement of Sayigh, “in three generations, westerners went from demanding freedom without accepting responsibility, to rejecting freedom for fear of being held responsible.”

The second part, entitled The Age of Extremes? is the most interesting and will be the most controversial. It is, as Chen argues, important to keep a sense of proportion. Whilst a great deal of nonsense—much of it ludicrous, some genuinely frightening—was perpetrated at the time, it was often marginal in scope and limited in application. For example, the doctrine of Culturally-Sensitive Personal Relationships (which legalised polygamy and reduced the age of consent to eleven) was introduced in a number of countries, but there is real doubt how widely it was actually put into practice. Similarly, whilst the concept of power over Differently-Lived Entities (ie children who were as yet incapable of surviving without parental attention) was established by the European Court of Human Rights as a logical extension of the rights of the mother to terminate pregnancies at any time, popular opposition and a refusal of many doctors to participate meant that few terminations of young children actually took place.

Stepping back from often lurid and sensationalist treatments of the period, Chen argues, I think convincingly, that what happened was a natural consequence of the fragmentation of politics that began in the 1990s. Traditional political parties, he suggests, pursued a varied set of policies, according to their ideology and their judgement of what would be popular. These broad-spectrum parties were increasingly replaced by loose and fractious coalitions of special-interest groups, often pursuing micro-level objectives, and competing for attention and power. Thus, no special-interest group could declare victory and close down, since that would be the end of the careers of those in charge. There was consequently an endless, enforced rush to adopt more and more extreme demands: “an escalator that no-one could get off” in Chen’s formulation.

The third part, entitled The Age of Slavery? is perhaps the least controversial, but also the most thorough and interesting. It’s been accepted for a long time now that slavery is not so much unpaid labour, as imposed labour, where the victim has no choice about whether, and how, to work. Thus, slavery actually lasted longer in places like West Africa and the Ottoman Empire than it did in, say, North America, because there were social and political obstacles towards the development of a wage-based economy with its consequent mobility. The return of slavery at the end of the twentieth century was in many ways the logical culmination of neoliberal thinking, which viewed workers as simply disposable raw material. The difference, of course, was that, whereas traditionally slaves were traded within a region or forcibly exported by local entrepreneurs, slaves of the last century “volunteered for the status, and paid for their own trafficking”  in the well-known formulation of Yusuf Iqbal, the great historian of early twenty-first century slavery. (His books, incidentally, are full of the heartbreaking stories of entire families selling all their possessions and borrowing money to go to a promised utopia, only to find themselves adrift in leaky boats, to be rescued if lucky, and left to find the most degrading and ill-paid work available.)

But as Chen notes, the defenders of slavery made essentially the same arguments that their predecessors in the eighteenth century had done: that the slaves were doing jobs that whites would not do, and that in any case slavery was essential if the economies of the West were to remain competitive and have a sufficient supply of people of working age (although labour shortages, as such, were never really a problem.) Of course, a policy of trafficking more and more desperate migrants into slavery under worse and worse conditions and casting them aside when the next more desperate batch arrived was only going to work until it didn’t. (Added to that, of course, were the slave-like conditions of surveillance and control under which even quite well-paid and well-educated people were expected to work.) And what happened then is the subject of Chen’s concluding chapter.

The story of the reaction and its consequences has been told often enough, and Chen doesn’t add much that is new. But he’s right, I think, to object to words like “reactionary” or “nostalgia for the past,” or similar dismissive terms that were used in the last desperate stages of resistance to the inevitable. As he says, left to themselves, ordinary people would not have freely chosen the social and economic changes that were forced on them after the 1990s, and, finally presented with the possibility of throwing them off, they duly did so. But of course by then it was too late: the damage was irreparable. It takes much longer to rebuild a society than it does to destroy it, and it wasn’t even clear, then, that rebuilding was possible. Universities had largely stopped functioning, one-parent families living in poverty were the norm in the middle and lower social classes, adult illiteracy was around 30% in most western countries, large cities were increasingly run by drug- and trafficking gangs, hospitals were for the wealthy and all sorts of state functions were no longer provided. Most culture produced before the year 2000 had been suppressed and was no longer taught or performed because it was impossible to do so without offending someone. But by then, the cure, had there been one, would quite probably have been worse than the disease.

The “Fall of the West” is something of a misnomer. It would be truer to call it the end of indigenous western domination of their own historic societies. With the destruction of communities and families, and of any shared culture or history, and thus any basis for collective organisation, the traditional western population progressively lost influence to Asian and African groups which had largely retained their culture, their social cohesion and their historic attachment to education, and had by then established parallel structures to those which were breaking down around them. Progressively, over several decades, they moved into the top positions in politics, business and the media. As the sociologist Jun Hashimoto put it: “a society that knows what it wants and organises to get it will always do better than a society that doesn’t.” To be fair, some of the efforts to raise educational standards among whites did have an effect, but it was too little, too late. The logical consequence was the expatriation of western institutions to safer environments, such as the relocation of Harvard University to Shanghai.

Faced with the disintegration of their own culture, westerners and those who had been long-term immigrants turned elsewhere in search of inspiration. The established churches had been so fully complicit in the social agenda of those fifty years that they were swept aside in favour of other beliefs. Islam became a major faith and a major political force: by 2045, fully a quarter of the populations of France and Belgium identified as practising Muslims, and already separate education of boys and girls was being introduced, and the sale of alcohol banned on Fridays. As Abubakir Coulibaly, France’s first Muslim Education Minister said, “if you don’t like it, take it up with God.” And there was a similar, though much smaller, move towards the doctrines of the Eastern Orthodox Church, and the remnants of the pre-Vatican II Church with its Latin Mass. But it was all too late.

To the questions How could they have done that? and How could they have thought such things?, there is no real answer except the famous statement by the twentieth century novelist LP Hartley: The past is another country. They do things differently there. Although Chen’s work doesn’t provide a complete account (much of the neoliberal economic theory is left out: as he says, it has been well covered elsewhere), it is a solid attempt to tell a complex story which we find hard to believe today, no matter how often we visit the ruins of what was once the West.