Confronted with such a question, the critical reader will think of several counter-questions. Who is meant by „we“? From “what” are we meant to be saved? And “who” dares to ask such a curious question?
Let’s start with the end. In any case, the author of this challenge can no longer be saved. If we take the average life expectancy of a male German as basis, then statistically speaking he has already been in his grave for four years. Even the pleasing fact that he is in a spring-like mood, both mentally and physically, will hardly convince the critical reader. Yes, he will say, old people try to deceive themselves and others about their true state with old-age cheerfulness. But they turn honest when asking questions like above. Then they project their own impending doom onto the rest of the world. In other words, pessimism is a typical symptom of old age. Aches and pains here, aches and pains there – an old person effortlessly turns his personal shortcomings into an all-round mood of crisis. His terrible rheumatism then becomes undistinguishable from surrounding air pollution; he confounds his asthma with toxic pesticide residues in our food; his unbearable back pain he associates with insurmountable climate change. In this way, this own impending decay gradually becomes a portent of the impending end of the world.
In contrast, look at the young person who is neither suffering from joint pain, nor from shortness of breath or herniated disc. Instead of suspecting crises wherever he looks, he is simply enjoying life. This is precisely why we like to surround ourselves with young people and avoid the old whiners.
These self-critical considerations must precede the question of whether we can still be saved. The suspicion remains that our current whining about multiple crises may be nothing more than a symptom of old age – a disease of the West in particular, because in Europe and North America white women no longer want to give birth to children. The young are dying out, the old are in charge.
Gerontocracies
The suspicion makes sense but does not stand up to closer scrutiny. History proves with cross-cultural evidence that old, indeed very old people tend to occupy the highest positions (just think of Biden, Trump, Putin, etc.). Over the past ten thousand years, the predominant form of government has been neither democracy nor aristocracy or tyranny, but the rule of the elderly – gerontocracy. Not young people were and are called to power, that is people who tend to reach their greatest intellectual achievements between the ages of fifteen and thirty. Instead citizens prefer people who could as well be candidates for nursing homes.
Years ago, a German party revealed then reason for this curious predilection when adopting „No experiments“ as its election slogan. Daring experiments, which can of course always turn wrong, are the preserve of the young; old people stick to the familiar, the reliable, the established. This is why gerontocracies – rule by the elderly – were and still are the preferred model worldwide.
Healthy optimism
But this is only half the truth, because there is one advantage the old undoubtedly have over the young: far greater life experience. They will not only see the bright front of a medal but also its darker back. Young people tend to overlook the latter, they don’t want to, nor should they see it. We know that every normal mother consciously shields her child from the experience of horror, hatred and cruelty. The fact that not only joy but perhaps terrible sufferings may await the newborn citizen is warded off for as long as possible. We love the naivety of young people precisely because they not yet have such age-related knowledge. In fact, we admire them when they believe, with a storm of invincible optimism, that it merely takes the right attitude, the right faith or the right type of rational action to master all the problems of this world.
Anyone who retains this youthful optimism will therefore reject the question posed in the title as unacceptable. His answer will come like a shot from a pistol. Yes, when we abolish capitalism; when we eradicate fascism; when we get rid of dictatorial communism; when we have overcome the inequality between men and women and between rich and poor; when corruption is a thing of the past; when we finally put an end to the exploitation of the countries of the global South and the oppression of minorities; yes, when we have eliminated all these evils, then of course the world can be saved, then we will turn it into paradise!
Let us turn to capitalism
As long as there are young people and the optimism that keeps them alive and working, they will proclaim one or other of the aforementioned or similar salvation recipes and believe with unshakeable certainty in the salvation they hope for. The underlying psychological mechanism seems to be universal. First, we name and explain the evil, then we prescribe the medicine that supposedly helps against it. Finally, we apply it. Human history consists primarily of these three successive steps: an evil is recognized; a medicine prescribed and its application put into practice.
Unfortunately, it is one of the less pleasant insights into the Conditio humana that none of these three steps is really reliable, let alone promises a cure. Take capitalism, for example, which many consider to be the devil’s invention and want to eliminate. Capitalism refers to an economy that allows individuals – in theory all individuals – to generate their own profit (capital) and then reinvest it to create further profit (capital). The more individuals follow this pattern, the greater the resulting economic growth predicted by theory – a prediction that up to now has largely been confirmed in actual practice.
From a historical perspective, there are two main features of capitalism that lead to a break with the whole of mankind’s previous history. Firstly, it is the individual, in principle every individual, who is allowed to decide their own fate, at least on an economic (and later, on a political) level; secondly, individuals are allowed to use their own knowledge and skills to increase their material wealth. From a historical perspective, this is nothing less than a revolutionary innovation. Until the industrial revolution, between eighty and ninety percent of the world’s population was condemned to produce food for the leading top ten to twenty percent. Any surplus profit was siphoned off by the ruling class. Apart from exceptional cases (for example via the church), the rural population had no chance to break out of this lifelong bondage. Those who did so nevertheless added to the army of beggars that existed en masse throughout Europe.
Protest against capitalism
It was sparked early on by the infirmities of early capitalism, which initially only fulfilled these promises for a few factory owners, while the working class had to endure even greater misery than the peasantry of earlier centuries. However, the protest did not subside even when, towards the end of the 19th century, workers in the leading industrialized nations had already achieved a standard of living that the miserable ninety percent of earlier times could only dream of. Nor did it abate to this day in the rich countries of the West – a fact essentially linked to the freedom created by capitalism. Today, every individual is allowed to protest and feels called upon to do so because people never and nowhere had the feeling that their own situation is even close to perfect.
One result of such protest against capitalism was to push individuals back into immaturity, that is, to prescribe happiness from above. Stalinist communism had taken this path. Thoughts and acts were decreed from above by the Politburo. This led a minority of incorrigibles to the gulag, while a majority may have felt fairly comfortable because real equality existed (below of course the upper ten percent of the privileged nomenklatura!). All were equally poor, and all counted as much (or rather as little) – regardless of personal abilities. What really counts in dictatorships is loyalty, ability being a secondary consideration. In such regimes, the two most powerful factors of capitalism – the role of the individual and personal gain – no longer come into play. Individuals are to be absorbed by the collective – and some people just want that to happen. Economically, this situation tends to result in stagnation combined with coercive measures, to which millions of people in Russia and China have fallen victim.
Ideologically fixed planned economies value loyalty more than personal ability and merit. It must be admitted that the prescribed equality in life and attitude does not necessarily meet with resistance. In the new German states, quite a few people still think back to DDR days with nostalgia. It does, however, remain an indisputable fact that centrally planned economies are failures compared to capitalist countries, where, on the contrary, the knowledge and skills of individuals determine their path in life. Indeed, the superiority of Western economies did not escape the leading politicians in Russia and China. In China, the planned economy was vigorously called into question by Deng Xiao Ping, in Russia by Gorbachev and his successors. At least in the economic sphere, the freedom of the individual was also significantly expanded in all former communist centrally planned economies.
Light and shadow of capitalism
I am dwelling on capitalism because it is so well suited to answering the question posed in the title: „Can we still be saved?“
The liberation of the individual was a salvation for many, even if it only affected a few in the turmoil of early capitalism, while it initially meant even greater misery for the working class. But even later, this liberation was a medal with a bright front and a dark back. The new capitalistic world was based on competition, with the most capable getting more – sometimes even everything (the winner takes all) – while the less capable had little chance. The equality of the masses, which was the rule throughout the world before the industrial revolution and continued into GDR communism, no longer existed in the new economic regime. Now, the individual was not only the architect of his own fortune but also of his own personal misfortune. Since then, there has been a class that we now refer to as the „precariat“. The world looks colder and tougher.
The greater efficiency of the capitalist economic system in generating collective wealth is a historical fact. Whether capitalism is socially acceptable is a different question. It seems pretty obvious that the two extremes of neoliberalism, that is total economic freedom, on the one hand, and its opposite, the radical restriction of personal freedom in centrally planned economies, will never lead to permanently stable societies. Total freedom undermines all commonality as it tends to deify the individual. In contrast, the radical disempowerment of the individual in a centrally planned economies very quickly turns states into prison. Stalinism took this path a century ago, Putin is taking it today. Modern China under Xi Jin Ping is heading in the same direction. Somewhere between the two extremes we will find a tolerable life though never paradise.
Protests will always be raised – even in the tolerable middle between the extremes. During the three post-war years, there was a higher degree of social justice in both Italy and Germany than there is today. Nevertheless, the Red Army faction and the Red Brigades were formed at the end of these „three golden decades“. However, it should be noted that the terror directed against capitalism back then „merely“ created social unrest; at no time did the question arise as to whether society could still be saved.
A fever that is gripping the whole world
This question only arises in our present time. It arises precisely because capitalism has proved to be so extraordinarily successful. Its recipe of leaving to individuals the economic initiative in the increase of material wealth has led to a worldwide unleashing of knowledge and skills. Companies, universities, private laboratories, NGOs, associations have set all available talents in motion to conquer nature by means of science and subjugate it to man. This seizure of power by man over nature has caused the global social product to explode more than a hundred-fold in just three centuries. At the same time it created adequate conditions for the population to skyrocket from one to eight billion people. This world-historical fever began in Europe and from there jumped to North America. Until half a century ago, the exponential exploitation of natural resources for the purposes of consumption was largely confined to the West. But in the meantime, capitalist accumulation has spread to China, where communism now only serves as a fig leaf. Capitalism is rising like phenix in India, where billionaires are mushrooming and inequality is unprecedented. However, helped by China, the countries of Africa are now catching up as well. The run on resources, the destruction of the environment and the annihilation of species have only just begun, as everyone, not just the West with less than ten percent of the entire world population, is striving for the greatest possible amount of material prosperity.
The real danger of capitalism lies in its breathtaking success
This sheds light on an aspect of capitalism that until recently was almost never the subject of criticism. In his seminal book “Das Kapital”, Karl Marx focused on inequality. His doctrine was aimed at giving workers an equal share of the cake. The cake itself, was according to Marx not a curse but a biblical promise. Take the following passage from the Communist Manifesto: Capitalism (in the original: the bourgeoisie), in its barely one hundred years of class rule, has created more massive and colossal forces of production than all past generations put together… – what previous century suspected that such forces of production lay dormant in the womb of social labor?
But the now obvious threat of capitalism is not its unleashing of personal initiative, nor even the inequality that usually accompanies it; the real threat consists in its unleashing of “massive and colossal” forces of production, i.e. the theoretically unlimited increase in material wealth through the exploitation of nature – all of which was still a great achievement for Marx. It is this uncanny but quite real success that conjures up questions about the future of man: Can we still be saved?
Do human expections have a limit?
Everything depends on the right answer, because it determines whether and how a rescue from the multiple crises besetting us today is still possible.
At this point, I do not want to talk about the development of weapons, nor about the fact that, apart from the major nuclear powers, ambitious regional powers such as Iran and North Korea are striving for the end-time bomb or are on the verge of possessing it. After all, it can be assumed that the instinct for self-preservation will be stronger than hatred of one’s respective opponents. On the other hand, the exponential increase in material consumption does not at first sight contradict reason. On the contrary! Until the 1970s, the most advanced part of humanity saw this as the most effective instrument for establishing global peace. As if the end of history could be achieved if everyone in the world had a washing machine, their own car and the prospect of a flight to some vacation paradise.
The fact is that wishes and expectations have no natural boundaries. Whether children, adults, citizens or nations – everyone looks to their neighbor. If the latter has gained more for himself, he sets a goal for all others, who will strive for the same. In line with such expectations, big business is constantly tempting people with new products – they are enjoying global success with this strategy. However, the prospect of more and evermore is not only goaded by professional seducers but with insistence or even violence it is even more called for by the world’s disadvantaged. This applies to all the „massive and colossal“ achievements that human ingenuity has created over the past three hundred years. It applies to the „best“ (i.e. the „deadliest“) weapons as well as to the best food, the latest cell phone models and the most beautiful trips to the vacation paradises still available.
If you want to be at the top of this global race, or even if you just want to preserve your own status quo, you must have no inhibitions when it comes to dealing with nature. In this respect, China is a model pupil of the Western countries. The East Asian giant is securing access to resources all over the world – especially in Africa and South America – and is doing so with good reason. Although no other country pollutes the atmosphere so heavily with CO2, per capita greenhouse gas emissions are still far below Western levels – a license to make the accelerated consumption of resources, consumption and thus the increase in GDP the main goal of Chinese politics.
Voluntary renunciation?
Western countries have – we might think – already achieved the goals of development. Can they and will they curb their needs? Would it be possible for them to put an end to the exploitation of nature? Will their future slogan be „This far and no further!“ May we assume that the catching-up states, guided by their example, would take certain limits to heart so that the globe would finally come to rest after three hundred years of this deadly race of nations?
If we stick to the good intentions of the European Commission regarding green policy, then we might believe that this goal is indeed realistic. Unfortunately, the truth is quite different. Under prevailing conditions these intentions must remain nice, but completely unrealistic illusions!
The race between nations makes renunciation impossible
The United States will not reduce its production of weapons and economic goods if it fears it will fall behind China. Conversely, China is already crying foul because the US government is denying it access to the high technology of its leading companies. To catch up with Western living standards, China must continue to play the role of the world’s workbench. However, this can only succeed if the country continues to dispose of cheap energy. The use of fossil and nuclear resources will therefore continue to increase, even though the country is expanding green energy at the same time. As this happens in a similar way all over the globe, the race between nations is bound to constantly drive up the consumption of energy and all other resources.
Europe seemed to be an exception to this deplorable rule. The EU proclaimed an endearingly pacifist and green ideology to the world. To present a role model to the rest of the globe – that was the noble vision of the EU and most of its member states. It was up to Vladimir Putin to put a stop to this beautiful vision. Europe could only afford its saintly halo of pacifism and green transformation because and as long as it believed itself to be unassailable – protected by the nuclear umbrella of the United States. European pacifists even believed that it was enough to strive for peace, then all others would come along. As a result, the continent has fallen further and further behind the two superpowers in military terms. Today, Europe is so weak that its only choice is to be a vassal of either the Americans or the Russians. In a historical perspective we should admit that the first of the two alternatives brought to the countries of Europa an astonishing prosperity after World War II – despite widespread anti-Americanism. But under Trump, the US is no longer prepared to continue providing this protection free of cost for European free riders.
So Europe could be left entirely to itself. If it chooses to arm itself, it will contribute to increasing the mutual threat – adding to the madness of a world that is already sitting astride a powder keg. If, on the other hand, it continues to neglect its own defenses, then it will show Vladimir Putin that it is prepared to offer him no resistance if he wants to reverse the supposedly greatest disaster of modern times – the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In other words, it is now that the race for greater military and economic power really begins. I am afraid, that there will soon be no more talk of sustainability, nor of peace for that matter. We have reached a point where everything we do is tantamount to madness: both rearmament to make us less vulnerable and pacifism in the face of a man like Putin (as it was in the face of Hitler).
Can we still be saved?
Yes, would be thew answer of Thomas Hobbes. This great thinker of the 17. century could have had today’s situation in mind. Back then, the nations of Europe were tearing themselves apart in devastating civil wars. If the individual does not recognize any binding authority over himself, then a society is in a “state of nature”, Hobbes declared, and that means chaos where everybody fights against everyone. Peace can only arise if all individuals agree to surrender part of their sovereignty to a higher authority. Hobbes gave this authority the name „Leviathan“, a monster against whom all resistance becomes futile. Calling the supreme power a monster has discredited the teachings of the great state theorist, but humanity’s present-day cold war against itself may turn into a hot one at any time. Chaos must therefore be tamed. Today, we can imagine a democratic authority as the binding authority that puts an end to mankind’s civil war. Peace as a contrast to the threat of a nuclear holocaust is something that all citizens of the world strive for.
How realistic is a world government?
In the race for greater economic and military power and access to the resources still available, nations are so close to each other that a third and most terrible war could break out between has become a constant threat. The world has fallen into a Hobbesian state of nature, from which only Leviathan – in the worst case a cartel of villains, in the best case a democratic world government – is able to deliver it. This was also Immanuel Kant’s view in his famous treatise “On Perpetual Peace”. Such a central authority would be able to abolish the military and replace it with a global police force. In our time, it can also curb the depletion of resources and prescribe sustainability. Under this condition, we can certainly be saved.
Unfortunately, a world government is still highly unlikely for the time being. The UN is currently being stripped of its reputation and authority as a mediating body. It is much more likely that the assumption of one of the greatest British historians could come true. Arnold Toynbee assumed that a humanity that through technical progress had long since been forced into global unity, would only be prepared to overcome chaos after a catastrophe – which would hopefully be not too disastrous.