The surface of the ocean is covered with waves, sometimes in storms even spectacular waves. It is the waves that draw and hold our attention when by the ocean. Yet in fact waves are nothing more than water molecules moving up and down, and hardly going anywhere. Mostly nothing really significant is happening. Deep within the ocean, on the other hand, are massive currents that transfer heat from one part of the planet to another and make a very significant difference, keeping England warm for example.
This is a good metaphor for the political world. On the surface are endless fads, crises, and one-day emotional issues. People get outraged about this or that, the media goes wild over it, and a month or two later it is forgotten in the rush to be outraged over some new issue. Like the waves, this is essentially meaningless, even if it captures our attention and emotions for the moment. But underneath this there are deep and powerful currents that will shape the world of the future. The trick is to try to ignore the waves and focus on trying to discern the deep currents.
The partisan battles over Trump’s policies and behavior, and now over Biden’s policies and behavior, are in the long run just waves, even if some media pundits try hard to convince us that there are existential issues at stake. The daily press attacks on one side or the other, and the endless largely childish attempts to spin the political narrative toward one side or the other, are equally insignificant in the long run, as are the inevitable scandals. It is easy to get emotionally drawn into these battles and issues and scandals and movements, but mostly it is a waste of time and energy. Who even remembers most of the issues that so outraged and exercised us a year ago, let alone ten years ago?
And for all the vitriol between the US political parties these days, in truth both are fundamentally almost the same, equally right or wrong on (or, perhaps more likely, oblivious of) most of the truly consequential issues, equally beholden to wealthy individual and corporate patrons. And both are largely staffed and funded by the wealthy elites, and therefore remarkably disconnected from the lives and issues of the majority of the voters they claim to represent, so although watching the Washington political street fights may be entertaining and emotionally engrossing, I would argue it too is largely a waste of our time and energy.
The deep political, cultural, and social currents are what ought to really warrant our attention. It is of course much harder to see the deep currents than the surface waves, and some of them won’t be obvious until years after the fact, if then. But it is worth trying to discern them.
So what deep currents might one identify at the moment, currents that are worth paying attention to? Let me suggest some possibilities that I see:
Among the first tier, those likely to have the most profound effects worldwide, two stand out:
1) The precipitous drop in the birthrate worldwide. As the UN’s demographic charts demonstrate, many nations, including major states like China, Russia, Japan, Germany, and France, are in the process of rapidly depopulating themselves, almost or already past the point where their birthrate can recover because too large a proportion of their population is past the childbearing age. This will have major effects over the coming decades in all sorts of places, including at least trade patterns, international balances of power, and the internal political and economic stability of many nations.
2) The ongoing climate change. Change is occurring, and for a number of reasons it seems to me highly unlikely that governments and populations worldwide will be able to make the very expensive, painful, and culturally difficult changes in time to actually halt this process, let alone reverse it. The eventual climate changes may in fact turn out not be as profound as some alarmists claim, but they are already enough to begin to shift weather and rainfall patterns, and hence to disrupt agriculture around the world. Since much of the world has a precarious food supply anyway, this will have a large effect, potentially producing widespread famines and massive migrations.
Among the second tier, perhaps somewhat less profound and/or more localized than those in the first tier, but nevertheless highly significant, two more stand out:
1) Universal connectivity. Although the roots of this go back at least to the invention of radio, and perhaps even to the invention of the telegraph, it has accelerated greatly with the invention of the internet and the widespread availability of cell phones. The fact that humans everywhere on the planet can now be connected almost instantaneously with each other and with vast quantities of information and misinformation has produced a mass of new uses and abuses. This is in the process of substantially changing the nature of commerce, warfare, education, crime, government and politics, among other things, and it is still really in its infancy. In the long run this will probably be seen as a step function in civilization as significant as the invention of the printing press in 1450.
2) The biotech revolution. The “green revolution” of the 1960s which so vastly increased the world’s food supply, especially in third-world nations, is perhaps the leading edge of this current. But recent advances in manipulating the chemistry of the basic life processes opens up an immense potential for new uses and abuses. Not only may it eventually produce substantial changes in the world’s food and energy supply, it may also eventually extend the productive life of humans, which would have profound demographic effects, and perhaps produce profound new ethical dilemmas.
One might identify a third tier, of even more local currents that might perhaps have a significant shorter-term effect over, say, the next few decades or the next century. In that tier I would suggest:
1) The withdrawal of the Pax Americana. In process since at least the Clinton administration, and driven by the demise of the unifying Soviet threat and the turning inward of the American voter, the slow withdrawal of America from the role of the world’s policeman (despite political rhetoric to the contrary) has the potential to revert the world to its much more normal state of endless local conflicts, and bring to an end the (relatively) peaceful world in place since the end of World War II.
2) The dissolution of the Russian and/or Chinese empires. One or both of these nations may not in the end dissolve, but demographics alone suggest it is highly probably they will over the next decade or so, and both face other existential threats as well. The disappearance of either or both as potential rivals to US dominance would change not only the US political calculus, but the attitudes and alliances and trade patterns of many other nations as well.
Three more possibilities, which in time may or may not turn out to be significant in the long run are:
1) The move to space. The burgeoning business of using earth orbiting satellites is really just an extension of existing technology, though certainly a useful one. But the move to extend the human species to other planets would be another substantial step function in human civilization, much more significant even than the expansion of European civilization into the new world in 1492. But this is an extremely difficult step involving among other things mind-bending distances, and while we have landed humans on the moon and we may eventually be able to put a token human presence on other nearby planets for a few weeks, it is not yet clear we can really plant a self-sustaining colony on other worlds or in deep-space habitats. But if we can, this would certainly be a very significant deep current.
2) Artificial intelligence. This too is a field still in its infancy, so it is still far too soon to tell how significant it will be in the long run. But it has the potential to produce something like intelligence – at least in limited domains – that far exceed that of humans. If this proves to be so, it could have profound effects on civilization.
3) Fusion energy. Commercially viable fusion energy is said by some to be at least 40 years away, and has been 40 years away for the last 50 years. But there are promising advances, and if in the end it proves commercially feasible to produce energy by fusion, that would make a profound difference in a number of areas, not least in perhaps slowing the rate of climate change.
I would argue that it is a far better use of our time, attention and energy to focus on areas such as these, the “deep currents” of civilization, than to waste those resources on the “waves”, the daily noise spewed every day by the media, emotionally engrossing as that noise may be.
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