Dawn of a New Dark Age

 Our Civilization is Beginning to Collapse Before Our Eyes. But Do We See It?

by Umair Haque

When I look at the world these days, I see the dawn of a new Dark Age. I wondered for a while, and now I’m more or less certain. The turning point of that new Dark Age will be…well, let me explain.

You might have heard by now that the G7 failed “unforgivably” — in the words of former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown — on vaccines. The G7 — the group of the world’s richest countries — is currently having its annual swish summit of Presidents and Prime Ministers and so on — and they’ve failed on Covid in such a way that, if anything, Brown is understating the issue — so catastrophically that it will go down in history.

Now, people — we, in the rich West — respond to the fact in one of two ways. One, the thoughtless and selfish — which is most of us — simply don’t care. That indifference is of course inimical to civilization. Two, the thoughtful and sane feel a chill run down their spine when they hear “we’re not vaccinating the world.” Why, though? And what does that have to do with the dawn of a new Dark Age? Everything.

This essay isn’t about vaccinating the world. I know that — sadly, stupidly — our zombie societies, selfish, ignorant, clueless to the bone, don’t care much. It’s about how not vaccinating the world is the turning point of a new Dark Age.

Let me explain.

The G7 needed to invest about $17 billion to vaccinate the world. $17 billion. How small is it, though, really? The seven countries that make up the G7 control about half the world’s income, or around $40 trillion. The amount needed to finish vaccinating the world — $16 billion — isn’t even half of one percent of that.

They couldn’t do it.

Let me make all that clear, in vulgar economic terms. Investing $17 billion: because of course eliminating Covid benefits us all. In lasting ways. The alternative is that we suffer a decade or more of a new plague, which is going to have astronomical costs, in new lockdowns, variants, deaths, and so on.

Now, on the global scale, $17 billion is nothing. Amazon earns more in a month. It’s less than the tenth of the cost of a new stealth fighter. We could have a Covid-free planet for less than the cost of a death machine. But we have the death machines, not the better world. $17 billion is chump change for the richest countries in the world, put together. It’s an amount so small that Zuck or Bezos or Gates could single-handedly pay it, without ever feeling the tiniest pinch. You know and I know what happens if Covid goes on flourishing in poor countries: new variants arise that are vaccine resistant, which wreak havoc even in rich ones. That’s what’s happening right now in Britain, where the “Delta” — or Indian — variant — is plunging the nation into crisis yet again.

Let me sum all that up. The richest countries in the world can’t get their act together to raise less than half of one percent of their GDP to solve the biggest short-term problem in the world. Which is going to affect them severely, too.

So what about the rest of the problems we face as a world?

You should feel a shudder running down your spine right about now. Because these political economics are fatal. Your gut is right. The rich world’s megafailure on Covid is a very, very big deal — because it is about much more than just Covid. It’s about all the problems we are confronting — none of which are going to be solved with this level of chaos, indifference, stupidity, greed, and ugliness. Let me put the economics revealed by the G7’s megafailure more formally.

Our survival as a civilization, as societies, and as people now depends crucially on public goods. What is Covid, really? A lack of a crucial public good: clean air. That becomes the lack of another public good: public health. We need to get air, water, food, education, and medicine right, as public goods. That means offering them as expansively as possible.

Why? That’s how we solve the Existential Threats now confronting us as a civilization. The rise of fascism: every child needs an education and every family a decent income — that’s how to defuse and prevent fascism. “Climate change” — better called global warming: we need to clean the carbon from skies. Mass extinction: we need to give the animals in the oceans and rivers and forests places to exist without being hunted and poisoned to exinction, too. Ecological collapse: we need to provide sustenance to the world’s great ecosystems, from the Amazon to the Antarctic, or else.

Or else what? Or else our civilisation goes down the tubes. Fast and hard. So fast and hard I can sketch it out for you in a paragraph: in a series of megafailures.

Covid haunts us the rest of this decade — the 20s — thanks to our first mega failure as a civilization. Having not inoculated the world, variants arise, vaccines stop working, and Covid becomes a new flu. That, by the way, is what Big Pharma is betting on.

By the end of this plague-wracked decade, climate change goes nuclear — and the 30s are the decade of serious climate catastrophe. Megafire, megaflood, megatyphoon, all these become the new normal. The seasons as we knew them cease to exist. The world is now a Fire Belt and a Flood Belt and a Drought Belt. Mass migrations destabilize entire continents. Fascisms erupt and societies collapse.

But that’s the warm up. The 40s are the decade of the Great Annihilation. The fish and insects and many other species have been pushed to extinction. And food chains begin to collapse, tip over, their bottoms ripped out, the most vulnerable species gone. What happens then? Famine does. Drought does. Breakdown does. Our civilisation’s systems depend on living things, and without them, they cease functioning. The fish clean the water in the rivers. The worms turn the soil we plant our harvests in. Mass extinction includes us.

And yet even that’s not the grand finale. By the 50s, all this will culminate in the Long Goodbye. The earth’s long-suffering great ecosystems will finally die off for good. No more lungs of the earth — Goodbye, Amazon. Acidified oceans will house monocultural ecosystems which can’t feed us. Rivers will run dry and there will be nowhere much left to plant harvests on a burning planet turned to desert. Bang. That’s it. Game over.

Now let me put the fatal economics the G7 summit reveals to you again. We can’t raise — as a planet — less than half a percent of our collective GDP to fight the greatest crisis since the last World War.

Why not? Because rich countries, who have the most to give, don’t care. They don’t care in two ways. Their leaders don’t care, because they know they can get away with it, because the average person in them doesn’t care. All is well in the fake happy-land of the American suburbs. Who cares about the millions who are going to die of Covid?

But you can extend that fatal, stupid, ugly, pathetic indifference in a straight line, upwards, to the bigger problems confronting us as a world.

Who cares about the millions that are going to die from global warming? The mass migrations economic depressions? Who cares that the animals and ecosystems are dying off — but they sustain our civilisations basic systems? Who cares that mass extinction includes us, at the end of an era of collapse?

Nobody does. Sure, maybe I do, and you do. But the truth is that we’re a minority, in societies of greedy, selfish, stupid fools. People who don’t care that spending less than half of one percent of GDP could keep the whole planet — including them — safe from a new plague. Instead, they’d rather have it go on and define the next decade.

Maybe now you see what I mean by “this is the dawn of a new Dark Age.” Our failure to vaccinate the world troubles sane and sensible people for a very, very good reason — a better reason than maybe even they know. It illuminates how badly and fatally broken the political economy of our age and world really is.

We can’t raise less than half of one percent of our GDP to fight Covid, so we’re going to be crushed by it — even in rich countries — over the next decade. But what does that say about climate change, mass extinction, ecological collapse, the fascisms and depressions and upheavals and turmoil they’ll unleash? This megafailure is a small one.

Investing less than one half of one percent of GDP is nothing — and we can’t even do that as a civilisation now. Our politicians are malign and corrupt, our greedy and malicious billionaires control them, and the average person doesn’t care at all. But fighting global warming seriously is going to take much, much more than investing one half of one percent of GDP. It’s going to take maybe 20%. Undoing mass extinction — which means preventing mass famine and drought and disease and starvation — is going to take maybe another 20% to 25% of GDP. Reversing ecological collapse? More than that still. Do you know how to “build” a rainforest or a reef? Resurrect a dead species? I didn’t think so — these are challenges far beyond our civilization’s limited capabilities.

A civilisation that can’t even invest half of one percent to solve its existential threats is screwed. It cannot survive, just like a person who can’t invest even a tiny amount. It’s going to end in ruin, despair, poverty, and collapse. All that is where we are now.

We can’t invest a miniscule, vainshing, tiny amount — to stave off a decade of plague. Good luck, then, investing ten times that much, twenty, thirty, to prevent any of the series of larger catastrophes headed our way.

Our politics are completely dysfunctional, and our economics are totally broken. As a world. As a civilization. And before you tell me “it was always this way”…it wasn’t. We successfully came together as a world to eradicate smallpox, and before that, polio. We reduced poverty massively, for a time, and democracy grew.

But those trends are all now reversing. I told you this wouldn’t just be about Covid vaccines — and it isn’t. It’s about the megatrends of our age. Democracy isn’t growing — it’s withering, and fascism’s rising in its place. Poverty isn’t falling — it’s growing again, even in the richest countries, like America and Britain. Global cooperation is a thing of the past now, as the rich world can’t even cooperate to end Covid for the price of a jet fighter or some dumb missile or death machine.

That is what “the dawn of a new dark age” means. In an economic sense, Dark Ages are always when megafailures happen. Megafailure to provide public goods. In classical Dark Ages, people were uneducated, so they turned to superstition, filth and malnourishment were the norm, so disease broke out, people turned against one another over anything, this god, that god, this flag, that one, because they were desperate, broken, and terrified. The average person was made to become a zombie, a fool, an ugly and thoughtless instrument of violence, greed, and ruin.

Darkness ruled, and blood spilled down the steps of the great monuments.

Tell me all that doesn’t send a chill of recognition shivering through you. I don’t want to tell you a new Dark Age is dawning — but I think that this much can’t be denied. The world’s first great megafailure of the 21st century is not being able to invest a tiny amount in preventing a decade and more of a new plague. But it won’t be the last. Because much bigger problems are heading our way — and if we can’t get the littlest one right, then what hope do we have for the bigger ones? If we can’t invest less than half of one percent now, in this problem — what hope is there of investing much more in the next, even more catastrophic ones?

Not much.

And that, my friends, tells me something that I don’t want to tell you, but I have to. By now, you know what it is. I guess that only leaves one question. What do you do when a Dark Age is dawning, in stupidity, rage, indifference, glee, brutality, all around you?