The liberal phoenix ( phượng hoàng tự do )

This is not the first time the liberal story has faced a crisis of confidence. Ever
since this story gained global influence, in the second half of the nineteenth
century, it has endured periodic crises. The first era of globalisation and
liberalisation ended in the bloodbath of the First World War, when imperial
power politics cut short the global march of progress. In the days following
the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo it turned out that the
great powers believed in imperialism far more than in liberalism, and instead
of uniting the world through free and peaceful commerce they focused on
conquering a bigger slice of the globe by brute force. Yet liberalism survived
this Franz Ferdinand moment and emerged from the maelstrom stronger than
before, promising that this was ‘the war to end all wars’. Allegedly, the
unprecedented butchery had taught humankind the terrible price of
imperialism, and now humanity was finally ready to create a new world order
based on the principles of freedom and peace.


Then came the Hitler moment, when, in the 1930s and early 1940s, fascism
seemed for a while irresistible. Victory over this threat merely ushered in the
next. During the Che Guevara moment, between the 1950s and the 1970s, it
again seemed that liberalism was on its last legs, and that the future belonged
to communism. In the end it was communism that collapsed. The supermarket
proved to be far stronger than the Gulag. More importantly, the liberal story
proved to be far more supple and dynamic than any of its opponents. It
triumphed over imperialism, over fascism, and over communism by adopting
some of their best ideas and practices. In particular, the liberal story learned
from communism to expand the circle of empathy and to value equality
alongside liberty.

In the beginning, the liberal story cared mainly about the liberties and
privileges of middle-class European men, and seemed blind to the plight of
working-class people, women, minorities and non-Westerners. When in 1918
victorious Britain and France talked excitedly about liberty, they were not
thinking about the subjects of their worldwide empires. For example, Indian
demands for self-determination were answered by the Amritsar massacre of
1919, in which the British army killed hundreds of unarmed demonstrators.

Even in the wake of the Second World War, Western liberals still had a very
hard time applying their supposedly universal values to non-Western people.
Thus when the Dutch emerged in 1945 from five years of brutal Nazi
occupation, almost the first thing they did was raise an army and send it
halfway across the world to reoccupy their former colony of Indonesia.
Whereas in 1940 the Dutch gave up their own independence after little more
than four days of fighting, they fought for more than four long and bitter years
to suppress Indonesian independence. No wonder that many national
liberation movements throughout the world placed their hopes on communist
Moscow and Beijing rather than on the self-proclaimed champions of liberty
in the West.

Gradually, however, the liberal story expanded its horizons, and at least in
theory came to value the liberties and rights of all human beings without
exception. As the circle of liberty expanded, the liberal story also came to
recognise the importance of communist-style welfare programmes. Liberty is
not worth much unless it is coupled with some kind of social safety net.
Social-democratic welfare states combined democracy and human rights with
state-sponsored education and healthcare. Even the ultra-capitalist USA has
realised that the protection of liberty requires at least some government
welfare services. Starving children have no liberties.


By the early 1990s, thinkers and politicians alike hailed ‘the End of
History’, confidently asserting that all the big political and economic
questions of the past had been settled, and that the refurbished liberal package
of democracy, human rights, free markets and government welfare services
remained the only game in town. This package seemed destined to spread
around the whole world, overcome all obstacles, erase all national borders,
and turn humankind into one free global community.


But history has not ended, and following the Franz Ferdinand moment, the
Hitler moment, and the Che Guevara moment, we now find ourselves in the
Trump moment. This time, however, the liberal story is not faced by a
coherent ideological opponent like imperialism, fascism, or communism. The
Trump moment is far more nihilistic.

Whereas the major movements of the twentieth century all had a vision for
the entire human species – be it global domination, revolution or liberation –
Donald Trump offers no such thing. Just the opposite. His main message is
that it’s not America’s job to formulate and promote any global vision.
Similarly, the British Brexiteers barely have a plan for the future of the
Disunited Kingdom – the future of Europe and of the world is far beyond
their horizon. Most people who voted for Trump and Brexit didn’t reject the
liberal package in its entirety – they lost faith mainly in its globalising part.
They still believe in democracy, free markets, human rights and social
responsibility, but they think these fine ideas can stop at the border. Indeed,
they believe that in order to preserve liberty and prosperity in Yorkshire or
Kentucky, it is best to build a wall on the border, and adopt illiberal policies
towards foreigners.

The rising Chinese superpower presents an almost mirror image. It is wary
of liberalising its domestic politics, but it has adopted a far more liberal
approach to the rest of the world. In fact, when it comes to free trade and
international cooperation, Xi Jinping looks like Obama’s real successor.
Having put Marxism–Leninism on the back burner, China seems rather happy
with the liberal international order.

Resurgent Russia sees itself as a far more forceful rival of the global liberal
order, but though it has reconstituted its military might, it is ideologically
bankrupt. Vladimir Putin is certainly popular both in Russia and among
various right-wing movements across the world, yet he has no global world
view that might attract unemployed Spaniards, disgruntled Brazilians or
starry-eyed students in Cambridge.


Russia does offer an alternative model to liberal democracy, but this model
is not a coherent political ideology. Rather, it is a political practice in which a
number of oligarchs monopolise most of a country’s wealth and power, and
then use their control of the media to hide their activities and cement their
rule. Democracy is based on Abraham Lincoln’s principle that ‘you can fool
all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you
cannot fool all the people all the time’. If a government is corrupt and fails to
improve people’s lives, enough citizens will eventually realise this and
replace the government. But government control of the media undermines
Lincoln’s logic, because it prevents citizens from realising the truth. Through
its monopoly over the media, the ruling oligarchy can repeatedly blame all its
failures on others, and divert attention to external threats – either real or
imaginary.


When you live under such an oligarchy, there is always some crisis or other
that takes priority over boring stuff such as healthcare and pollution. If the
nation is facing external invasion or diabolical subversion, who has time to
worry about overcrowded hospitals and polluted rivers? By manufacturing a
never-ending stream of crises, a corrupt oligarchy can prolong its rule
indefinitely.

Yet though enduring in practice, this oligarchic model appeals to no one.
Unlike other ideologies that proudly expound their vision, ruling oligarchies
are not proud of their practices, and they tend to use other ideologies as a
smoke screen. Thus Russia pretends to be a democracy, and its leadership
proclaims allegiance to the values of Russian nationalism and Orthodox
Christianity rather than to oligarchy. Right-wing extremists in France and
Britain may well rely on Russian help and express admiration for Putin, but
even their voters would not like to live in a country that actually copies the
Russian model – a country with endemic corruption, malfunctioning services,
no rule of law, and staggering inequality. According to some measures, Russia
is one of the most unequal countries in the world, with 87 per cent of wealth
concentrated in the hands of the richest 10 per cent of people.9 How many
working-class supporters of the Front National want to copy this wealthdistribution
pattern in France?


Humans vote with their feet. In my travels around the world I have met
numerous people in many countries who wish to emigrate to the USA, to
Germany, to Canada or to Australia. I have met a few who want to move to
China or Japan. But I am yet to meet a single person who dreams of
emigrating to Russia.


As for ‘global Islam’, it attracts mainly those who were born in its lap.
While it may appeal to some people in Syria and Iraq, and even to alienated
Muslim youths in Germany and Britain, it is hard to see Greece or South
Africa – not to mention Canada or South Korea – joining a global caliphate as
the remedy to their problems. In this case, too, people vote with their feet. For
every Muslim youth from Germany who travelled to the Middle East to live
under a Muslim theocracy, probably a hundred Middle Eastern youths would
have liked to make the opposite journey, and start a new life for themselves in
liberal Germany.


This might imply that the present crisis of faith is less severe than its
predecessors. Any liberal who is driven to despair by the events of the last
few years should just recollect how much worse things looked in 1918, 1938
or 1968. At the end of the day, humankind won’t abandon the liberal story,
because it doesn’t have any alternative. People may give the system an angry
kick in the stomach but, having nowhere else to go, they will eventually come
back.

Alternatively, people may completely give up on having a global story of
any kind, and instead seek shelter with local nationalist and religious tales. In
the twentieth century, nationalist movements were an extremely important
political player, but they lacked a coherent vision for the future of the world
other than supporting the division of the globe into independent nation states.
Thus Indonesian nationalists fought against Dutch domination, and
Vietnamese nationalists wanted a free Vietnam, but there was no Indonesian
or Vietnamese story for humanity as a whole. When it came time to explain
how Indonesia, Vietnam and all the other free nations should relate to one
another, and how humans should deal with global problems such as the threat
of nuclear war, nationalists invariably turned to either liberal or communist
ideas.

But if both liberalism and communism are now discredited, maybe humans
should abandon the very idea of a single global story? After all, weren’t all
these global stories – even communism – the product of Western imperialism?
Why should Vietnamese villagers put their faith in the brainchild of a German
from Trier and a Manchester industrialist? Maybe each country should adopt
a different idiosyncratic path, defined by its own ancient traditions? Perhaps
even Westerners should take a break from trying to run the world, and focus
on their own affairs for a change?

This is arguably what is happening all over the globe, as the vacuum left by
the breakdown of liberalism is tentatively filled by nostalgic fantasies about
some local golden past. Donald Trump coupled his calls for American
isolationism with a promise to ‘Make America Great Again’ – as if the USA
of the 1980s or 1950s was a perfect society that Americans should somehow
recreate in the twenty-first century. The Brexiteers dream of making Britain
an independent power, as if they were still living in the days of Queen
Victoria and as if ‘splendid isolation’ were a viable policy for the era of the
Internet and global warming. Chinese elites have rediscovered their native
imperial and Confucian legacies, as a supplement or even substitute for the
doubtful Marxist ideology they imported from the West. In Russia, Putin’s
official vision is not to build a corrupt oligarchy, but rather to resurrect the old
tsarist empire. A century after the Bolshevik Revolution, Putin promises a
return to ancient tsarist glories with an autocratic government buoyed by
Russian nationalism and Orthodox piety spreading its might from the Baltic to
the Caucasus.

Similar nostalgic dreams that mix nationalist attachment with religious
traditions underpin regimes in India, Poland, Turkey and numerous other
countries. Nowhere are these fantasies more extreme than in the Middle East,
where Islamists want to copy the system established by the Prophet
Muhammad in the city of Medina 1,400 years ago, while fundamentalist Jews
in Israel outdo even the Islamists, and dream of going back 2,500 years to
biblical times. Members of Israel’s ruling coalition government talk openly
about their hope of expanding modern Israel’s borders to match more closely
those of biblical Israel, of reinstating biblical law, and even of rebuilding the
ancient Temple of Yahweh in Jerusalem in place of the Al-Aqsa mosque

Liberal elites look in horror at these developments, and hope that humanity
will return to the liberal path in time to avert disaster. In his final speech to the
United Nations in September 2016, President Obama warned his listeners
against retreating ‘into a world sharply divided, and ultimately in conflict,
along age-old lines of nation and tribe and race and religion’. Instead, he said,
‘the principles of open markets and accountable governance, of democracy
and human rights and international law … remain the firmest foundation for
human progress in this century’.

Obama has rightly pointed out that despite the numerous shortcomings of
the liberal package, it has a much better record than any of its alternatives.
Most humans never enjoyed greater peace or prosperity than they did under
the aegis of the liberal order of the early twenty-first century. For the first
time in history, infectious diseases kill fewer people than old age, famine kills
fewer people than obesity, and violence kills fewer people than accidents

But liberalism has no obvious answers to the biggest problems we face:
ecological collapse and technological disruption. Liberalism traditionally
relied on economic growth to magically solve difficult social and political
conflicts. Liberalism reconciled the proletariat with the bourgeoisie, the
faithful with the atheists, the natives with the immigrants, and the Europeans
with the Asians by promising everybody a larger slice of the pie. With a
constantly growing pie, that was possible. However, economic growth will
not save the global ecosystem – just the opposite, it is the cause of the
ecological crisis. And economic growth will not solve technological
disruption – it is predicated on the invention of more and more disruptive
technologies.

The liberal story and the logic of free-market capitalism encourage people
to have grand expectations. During the latter part of the twentieth century,
each generation – whether in Houston, Shanghai, Istanbul or São Paulo –
enjoyed better education, superior healthcare and larger incomes than the one
that came before it. In coming decades, however, owing to a combination of
technological disruption and ecological meltdown, the younger generation
might be lucky to just stay in place.

We are consequently left with the task of creating an updated story for the
world. Just as the upheavals of the Industrial Revolution gave birth to the
novel ideologies of the twentieth century, so the coming revolutions in
biotechnology and information technology are likely to require fresh visions.
The next decades might therefore be characterised by intense soul-searching
and by formulating new social and political models. Could liberalism reinvent
itself yet again, just as it did in the wake of the 1930s and 1960s crises,
emerging as more attractive than ever before? Could traditional religion and
nationalism provide the answers that escape the liberals, and could they use
ancient wisdom to fashion an up-to-date world view? Or perhaps the time has
come to make a clean break with the past, and craft a completely new story
that goes beyond not just the old gods and nations, but even the core modern
values of liberty and equality?

At present, humankind is far from reaching any consensus on these
questions. We are still in the nihilist moment of disillusionment and anger,
after people have lost faith in the old stories but before they have embraced a
new one. So what next? The first step is to tone down the prophecies of doom,
and switch from panic mode to bewilderment. Panic is a form of hubris. It
comes from the smug feeling that I know exactly where the world is heading
– down. Bewilderment is more humble, and therefore more clear-sighted. If
you feel like running down the street crying ‘The apocalypse is upon us!’, try
telling yourself ‘No, it’s not that. Truth is, I just don’t understand what’s
going on in the world.’

The following chapters will try to clarify some of the bewildering new
possibilities we face, and how we might proceed from here. But before
exploring potential solutions to humanity’s predicaments we need a better
grasp of the challenge technology poses. The revolutions in information
technology and biotechnology are still in their infancy, and it is debatable to
what extent they are really responsible for the current crisis of liberalism.
Most people in Birmingham, Istanbul, St Petersburg and Mumbai are only
dimly aware, if at all, of the rise of artificial intelligence and its potential
impact on their lives. It is undoubtable, however, that the technological
revolutions will gather momentum in the next few decades, and will confront
humankind with the hardest trials we have ever encountered. Any story that
seeks to gain humanity’s allegiance will be tested above all in its ability to
deal with the twin revolutions in infotech and biotech. If liberalism,
nationalism, Islam or some novel creed wishes to shape the world of the year
2050, it will need not only to make sense of artificial intelligence, Big Data
algorithms and bioengineering – it will also need to incorporate them into a
new meaningful narrative.

To understand the nature of this technological challenge, perhaps it would
be best to start with the job market. Since 2015 I have been travelling around
the world talking with government officials, business people, social activists
and schoolkids about the human predicament. Whenever they become
impatient or bored by all the talk of artificial intelligence, Big Data algorithms
and bioengineering, I usually need to mention just one magic word to snap
them back to attention: jobs. The technological revolution might soon push
billions of humans out of the job market, and create a massive new useless
class, leading to social and political upheavals that no existing ideology
knows how to handle. All the talk about technology and ideology might sound
abstract and remote, but the very real prospect of mass unemployment – or
personal unemployment – leaves nobody indifferent.

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