“Is not the pastness of the past the more profound, the more legendary, the more immediately it falls before the present?” Thomas Mann’s memorable question in The Magic Mountain retains its force to this day. Instead of gazing into crystal balls at the start of each new year, we should perhaps spend more time reflecting on the surprises of recent events, and ask ourselves what they tell us about the world.
Last January who could have predicted the international community’s unconscionably slow response and hysterical overreactions (particularly in the countries least threatened) to Ebola? Or Russia’s land grab in the Crimea and its adventurism in Ukraine? Who could have foreseen the terrifying ascendance of the Islamic State, or the economic havoc of plummeting oil prices? Which pundit would have dared forecast President Obama’s surging year-end poll numbers, or imagined the US rapprochement with Cuba, or potential amnesties for millions of illegal immigrants?
This short list of surprises ought to remind us that most forecasts are little more than educated guesses, and political action remains fundamentally unguessable since national and regional interests continuously shift with changing circumstances. A setback for one country presents others with benefits or opportunities. Cheap oil upsets petrocrats in Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Venezuela (and it may bankrupt some of their North American competitors), but it stimulates the US economy and will likely prove a gift to Prime Minister Modi as he tries to get rid of India’s costly energy subsidies. Closer to home, normal relations with the US will probably transform Cuba’s economy, and produce a surge in tourism. Good for Havana, less so for other parts of the Caribbean that depend on American tourism.
The past year has shown how poorly we coordinate our efforts to tackle common problems like human trafficking, poverty, hunger and climate change. Each week brings another gadget that promises to make our lives more comfortable and “connected”, yet we largely ignore the plight of billions of the world’s poor, perhaps because they lack any meaningful presence within our informational systems. How else to explain the fact that in the same year that we achieved the minor miracle of landing a space probe on a meteorite we also conspicuously failed to contain a manageable epidemic in Africa?
Compassion International estimates that 19,000 children under the age of 5 die each day from preventable diseases like diarrhoea and pneumonia. Even more damning than this, especially given the developed world’s vast agricultural surpluses, are the facts that roughly one billion people go to bed hungry each night and that in the early twenty-first century hunger claims more lives that AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined.
The politics of climate change highlight many similar paradoxes. In This Changes Everything, Naomi Klein notes that in 2011 the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs published a survey that estimated the development costs needed to “overcome poverty, increase food production to eradicate hunger without degrading land and water resources, and avert the climate change catastrophe.” The figure they arrived at was a surprisingly affordable US$1.9 trillion a year for the 40 years.
Klein points out that this sum could easily be raised by relatively painless measures as a financial transaction tax, closing offshore tax havens, minor reductions to military budgets and the phasing out of fossil fuel subsidies. Sadly, few if any of these are likely to be adopted in the foreseeable future, not least because those with the power to enact the changes are often those who are most to blame for the status quo. Klein reports that according to the director of the Princeton Environmental Institute “the roughly 500 million richest of us on the planet are responsible for about half of all global emissions.”
The strangeness of the recent past confirms how little we really understand our present reality, despite our immersion in the seemingly endless streams of information that characterize modern life. What it does teach us, however, is that while only a few of us get the chance to sway the currents of history directly, collectively we can always do more to protect our shared environment, to press our political leaders for transparency and accountability, to consume less and contribute more to those less fortunate than ourselves.
