BACKLASH: a global crisis of emergence (a serialised essay - Part 2)
Finding order in the chaos
Three steps forward, two steps back
When I let myself peek at the news these days, a wince is my baseline expression. It must be a trauma response: my hopes have been smashed so many times I’m ready to quit. The prospect of one more cycle of self-serving, petty political ugliness is more than I can bear. It all looks so bleak - I think I’ve developed a serious screen-allergy.
What the hell’s been happening to us? Over the last few years, the world appears to have taken a turn for the worse, with new spikes in war, dictatorship, environmental degradation and a vitriolic polarization of discourse fracturing families, communities and nations.
Our information eco-system is a hothouse for despair. News media, you tubers and home-baked podcasters that shape today’s opinion storm will usually emphasize whatever shenanigans in the halls of influence that can be captured on a camera. This can only give us a weighted feel for how the world is going. But what if the world does not always march in step with the battling plutocrats? All along, large social currents flowing beneath the surface drama go un-noticed, or are downplayed. This distorts our sense of the world, it depresses and embitters us. Worse: it’s a gut-punch to our sense of agency. Many of us disengage in disgust. But I think we can – and should - look at current global crises very differently. Sanity demands it.
Deep beneath the muck of current affairs and the playground politics typical of today’s powerful, there are currents of change that give meaning to the chaos, explaining this inflamed moment of history, and suggesting that perhaps the turmoil and disorder tearing through our politics might not be entirely disastrous.
I realize my proposal might seem disingenuous, counterintuitive perhaps – but studying and charting global social evolution is my life's gig. And I believe social progress is actually alive and well. In this series of articles I’ll be proposing that our increasingly interconnected global society is in the throes of a backlash process; an anti-evolutionary reaction. Sociologists have long understood that societal progress is often followed by a reactionary period of backlash in which traditionalists revolt.
Let’s drill a little deeper into backlash as a sociological term. When a society takes steps towards a deeper, more inclusive democracy, sectors of that society that have grown up accustomed to familiar and predictable authoritarian structures in organizations and politics will feel increasingly affronted by the changes. This is especially true – but by no means limited to - the power-brokers. The reaction is hostile. Great leaps forward have often been followed by periods of recidivism, and sometimes the see-saw between progress and regression alternates many times before new freedoms become normal. Quite famously the French Revolution, so often cited as a pivotal turning point in the birth of state-based democracy, was followed by decades of bloodshed and reversion to totalitarianism. Many of the revolutionaries themselves betrayed their own lofty ideals, proving unable to govern without the very violence they had abhorred in the ancien régime.
So what about the growing appetite for hardline leadership that seems to be sweeping our world today? After more than half a century of democratic and human rights reforms of a scale not seen since records began, might we have been overdue for some seismic tremors along the fault-lines of change? Can this moment in history be understood in terms of backlash? And if so: what exactly is the backlash against?
I believe a number of momentous social-evolutionary changes are underway. These changes are ripening at a societal rather than political level; unplumbed, irrevocable, with a momentum of their own. In fact, the scale and intensity of the current backlash may be itself a measure of the enormous impact these social-evolutionary strides have already made.
Sometimes, a raging fever can be the crisis that indicates an immune system marshalling its forces for a remarkable campaign of healing and regeneration. And this life-affirming metamorphic process is too often concealed inside the noise of a disintegrating world order. So far, I have found no commentary tying all these elemental changes together with a singular thread of meaning – let alone any examination of the portents these socio-cultural transformations hold for our future. That’s what I hope to do here.
Further on in this series I’ll be detailing a number of unprecedented social-evolutionary trends that are unfolding with staggering speed, to which our news media with its habit-narrowed lens gives only superficial and sensationalist attention. While reports on these positive trends do occur, each is treated as if it’s a separate phenomenon, disconnected from the rest, of secondary interest. It’s the underlying pattern that has escaped almost everyone’s notice – little wonder there is so much despondency. To miss the underlying significance that all current cultural shifts have in common, is to be robbed of solid grounds for optimism. We need a unifying narrative that makes sense of it all. Furthermore; when you pause to appreciate the grand scope of societal transformations underway, you might also say: ‘Ah, no wonder there's such a backlash!’
The societal metamorphosis unfolding is indeed foundational, volcanic – it’s fair to call it a fundamental paradigm-shift. A new civilizational impulse of era-ending proportion is taking root and if we only focus on vulgar political squabbles we are sure to miss it. Modern civilization is in the middle of a radical U-turn. It’s core operating system is being dismantled and overhauled – mostly quietly, away from the limelight. To recognize this is to feel empowered, reinvigorated and most importantly: to understand real possibilities for our personal involvement.
At this point, I wonder if you’re thinking my projections have a whiff of idealism? Should I concede that humanity is trapped inside a doomsday pendulum, destined forever to swing back to tyranny after every flirtation with freedom? That dreary, myopic pendulum theory - I hear it everywhere! Some people adhere to this pendulum theory and the fact that I don’t like it doesn’t make it wrong. This popular credo presents an eternally two-dimensional, back-and-forth arc of history. Simply and bleakly put: sooner or later we revert to totalitarianism. Others talk about a ‘Spiral Dynamic’. This three-dimensional model acknowledges that societies periodically appear to regress to earlier, more unjust times. But as with every spiral staircase, though we return to the same point, we have climbed a little higher. The latter view makes more sense to me, and seems to align better with all I have learned so far. Though filled with hiccups and dead-ends, overall: evolution tends to keep moving forward. If you hear of a disenchanted ape who yells: ‘blow this!’, and goes full dinosaur on us, please write and let me know. In the meantime, I’m with Mark Twain: who supposedly said: History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes.
What drives that backwards swing along the spiral? I think it is backlash – and in this series I aim to unpack what the current backlash is revolting against. This means looking at the astounding leaps forward that are seen as the most threatening by an older world. The shadow tells you where the light is coming from. Backlash is the reason why every Great Paradigm Shift feels like three steps forward, two steps back.
Stay tuned for Part 3 of this series, where we’ll view our social-evolution map; from dominator-mode to partnership-mode civilization.