Understanding the extinction panic of the 1920s is useful to understanding our tumultuous 2020s and the gloomy mood that pervades the decade.
Hearing that historical echo doesn’t mean that today’s fears have no basis. Rather, it is crucial to helping us blow away the smoke of age-old alarmism from the very real fires that threaten our civilization. It also helps us see how apocalyptic fears feed off the idea that people are inherently violent, self-interested and hierarchical and that survival is a zero-sum war over resources. That suite of ideas is traditionally associated with political conservatism, though it can apply as easily to left-wing climate doom as to right-wing survivalist ideology. Either way, it’s a cynical view that encourages us to take our demise as a foregone conclusion.
What makes an extinction panic a panic is the conviction that humanity is flawed and beyond redemption, destined to die at its own hand, the tragic hero of a terrestrial pageant for whom only one final act is possible. The irony, of course, is that this cynicism — and the unfettered individualism that is its handmaiden — greases the skids to calamity. After all, why bother fighting for change or survival if you believe that self-destruction is hard-wired into humanity? What the history of prior extinction panics has to teach us is that this pessimism is both politically questionable and questionably productive. Our survival will depend on our ability to recognize and reject the nihilistic appraisals of humanity that inflect our fears for the future, both left and right. (...)
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Contrary to the folk wisdom that insists the years immediately after World War I were a period of good times and exuberance, dark clouds often hung over the 1920s. The dread of impending disaster — from another world war, the supposed corruption of racial purity and the prospect of automated labor — saturated the period just as much as the bacchanals and black market booze for which it is infamous. The ’20s were indeed roaring, but they were also reeling. And the figures articulating the doom were far from fringe. On Oct. 30, 1924 — top hat in hand, sporting the dour, bulldog grimace for which he was well known — Winston Churchill stood on a spartan stage, peering over the shoulder of a man holding a newspaper that announced Churchill’s return to Parliament. He won the Epping seat the day before, after two years out of Parliament. The dapper clothes of the assembled politicians and his wife in heels and furs were almost comically incongruous with their setting: a drab building with dirty windows and stained corrugated siding. It was a fitting metaphor for both the decade and for the future prime minister’s mood. Churchill was feeling pessimistic.
The previous year saw the publication of the first of several installments of what many would come to consider his finest literary achievement, “The World Crisis,” a grim retrospective of World War I that laid out, as Churchill put it, the “milestones to Armageddon.” In September of the following year, one month before his Epping election, two other notable events in Churchill’s intellectual life — one major, one minor — offered signs of his growing gloominess. The major event was his decision to run for Parliament as a constitutionalist with Conservative Party support, marking the end of his long affiliation with the Liberal Party and the beginning of a further rightward drift. The minor event was the publication of a bleak essay that argued new war machines may soon wipe out our species.
Bluntly titled “Shall We All Commit Suicide?,” the essay offered a dismal appraisal of humanity’s prospects. “Certain somber facts emerge solid, inexorable, like the shapes of mountains from drifting mist,” Churchill wrote. “Mankind has never been in this position before. Without having improved appreciably in virtue or enjoying wiser guidance, it has got into its hands for the first time the tools by which it can unfailingly accomplish its own extermination.” (...)
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One way to understand extinction panics is as elite panics: fears created and curated by social, political and economic movers and shakers during times of uncertainty and social transition. Extinction panics are, in both the literal and the vernacular senses, reactionary, animated by the elite’s anxiety about maintaining its privilege in the midst of societal change. Today it’s politicians, executives and technologists. A century ago it was eugenicists and right-leaning politicians like Churchill and socialist scientists like Haldane. That ideologically varied constellation of prominent figures shared a basic diagnosis of humanity and its prospects: that our species is fundamentally vicious and selfish and our destiny therefore bends inexorably toward self-destruction.To whatever extent, then, that the diagnosis proved prophetic, it’s worth asking if it might have been at least partly self-fulfilling.
Despite the similarities between the current moment and the previous roaring and risky ’20s, today’s problems are fundamentally new. So, too, must be our solutions. It is a tired observation that those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it. We live in a peculiar moment in which this wisdom is precisely inverted. Making it to the next century may well depend on learning from and repeating the tightrope walk — between technological progress and self-annihilation — that we have been doing for the past 100 years. It will depend, too, on rejecting the conservative doommongering that defines our present: the entangled convictions that we are too selfish to forestall climate change, too violent to prevent war with China, too greedy to develop A.I. slowly and safely.
Extinction panics are often fomented by elites, but that doesn’t mean we have to defer to elites for our solutions. We have gotten into the dangerous habit of outsourcing big issues — space exploration, clean energy, A.I. and the like — to private businesses and billionaires. Our survival may well depend on reversing this trend. We need ambitious, well-resourced government initiatives and international cooperation that takes A.I. and other existential risks seriously. It’s time we started treating these issues as urgent public priorities and funding them accordingly.
The first step is refusing to indulge in certainty, the fiction that the future is foretold. There is a perverse comfort to dystopian thinking. The conviction that catastrophe is baked in relieves us of the moral obligation to act. But as the extinction panic of the 1920s shows us, action is possible, and these panics can recede.
Less than a year after Churchill’s warning about the future of modern combat — “As for poison gas and chemical warfare,” he wrote, “only the first chapter has been written of a terrible book” — the 1925 Geneva Protocol was signed, an international agreement banning the use of chemical or biological weapons in combat. Despite the many horrors of World War II, chemical weapons were not deployed on European battlefields.
As for machine-age angst, there’s a lesson to learn there, too: Our panics are often puffed up, our predictions simply wrong. Human life and labor were not superseded by machines, as some in the 1920s predicted. Or in the 1960s or in the 1980s, two other flash-in-the-pan periods of A.I. hype. The takeaway is not that we shouldn’t be worried but that we shouldn’t panic. Foretelling doom is an ancient human hobby, but we don’t appear to be very good at it.
In 1928, H.G. Wells published a book titled “The Way the World Is Going,” with the modest subtitle “Guesses and Forecasts of the Years Ahead.” In the opening pages, he offered a summary of his age that could just as easily have been written about our turbulent 2020s. “Human life,” he wrote, “is different from what it has ever been before, and it is rapidly becoming more different.” He continued, “Perhaps never in the whole history of life before the present time, has there been a living species subjected to so fiercely urgent, many-sided and comprehensive a process of change as ours today. None at least that has survived. Transformation or extinction have been nature’s invariable alternatives. Ours is a species in an intense phase of transition.” Much turns, as the novelist well knew, on that ambiguous final word. Both transformation and extinction are transitions, after all.
by Tyler Austin Harper, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Cari Vander Yacht
