The other day I was looking through my bookcase and came upon a few old tattered Asterisk books. As a child of the 70s, Asterisk and Obelisk and their tales of Gallic pride and resistance to the Roman Empire of the time were a rite of passage. In particular I felt an affinity for the hapless Obelisk, a good nature but clumsy individual who took on superhuman strength after taking a magic potion brewed by village elder Geriatrix. Maybe it’s a function of middle age that makes the idea of magic potions restoring vitality and vigour so attractive.
Anyway, the thoughts of a small group of individuals resisting the strength of the entire Roman Empire got me thinking about our modern day empires and, in particular, the current confounding situation of our societal, governmental and diplomatic norms.
This cogitating was, of course, made all the more acute after watching the excruciating White House meeting between Ukraine’s President, Volodomyr Zelensky and the US numbers one and two, Donald Trump and JD Vance. In what seemed to me like a choreographed move, Vance goaded Zelensky who proceeded to take the bait. What ensued was a catastrophic case of ego-burnishing, one which there was no question that Trump would win.
As I write this, Zelensky is busy trying to garner European support (something in no way guaranteed given the conservative hard men in power in Hungary, Slovakia and Czech among others). Meanwhile Trump has decreed that, until Zelensky can show appreciation for all that the US does for Ukraine, there’s no point talks continuing. “Appreciation” of course means the signing of a deal to grant the US Ukraine’s not insignificant mineral deposits. Trump is, it would seem, making rare earths great again.
It is all something of a debacle and, beyond the popcorn-worthy entertainment value, it does raise questions around the start of World War III, the end of the dominant world order, the rise of a global neo-fascist movement and the like.
I have two perspectives on this – one in the macro, and one in the micro. On the macro level, if we zoom out and look at current times not on a decade-to-decade level but rather within the context of centuries or millennia, it becomes obvious that epochs have always risen and fallen over time.
There are countless epochs that have come before. Many we know about and can study at length – the Greeks, the Romans and the Seleucids, for example. Others are lost forever within the sands of time – all those hopes and dreams, powerful individuals and anonymous citizens, utterly irrelevant after they passed.
The only thing consistent about previous epochs is that individuals living within them could not conceive of their beginning or their end. It is not as if people woke up one morning and determined that the Roman Empire was ending, that particular change took hundreds of years, was a gradual process and a case of morphing from one epoch into another.
I’ve heard many people suggest that the second election of Trump was the flag that marked the end of the current epoch, one which some have termed the Networked Era. Typified by extreme interconnection in terms of politics, trade, security and thought, the Network Era extends roughly 500 years back into history and was marked by global expansion, information and technology-enabled colonialism and networked dependencies. And while that seems like a fairly good explanation for our current Epoch, to suggest that a single political event in one country signals its end is premature.
That’s not to say that we’re not sitting in the sunset of the Networked Era, it is merely to suggest that if we are, we’re highly unlike to realise it. And even less likely to be able to accurately predict what will come after. While it’s always tempting to prognosticate the rise of China, Russia or some other society, in the arc of time these prognostications are unwise.
So if it’s impossible to predict anything on the macro level, what should we think at a micro level. Living, as we do, in this time of volatility, how should we consider the future?
At the risk of being accused of having my head in the sand, a favourite saying springs to mind: It’s never as good, nor as bad, as we think it is. People suggesting that Trump is the new Hitler and that we will soon see the total fall of democracy and a global move to authoritarianism are likely misguided. The same way that those who celebrated the political success of Obama, Ardern, Macron and Trudeau believed that we would soon see a new era of positivity and peace. Those times weren’t as good as we believed they would be, and current times are similarly likely not as bad as we’re inclined to predict.
And what of those on the other end of the spectrum, who believe that the strong men on the right will somehow solve all of the issues and problems we face as global citizenry today and usher in some kind of euphoric new world order? Alas they too will be disappointed. It’s not nearly as good as they’d like to think.
Epochs rise and epochs fall. Strong men (and, sometimes, women) come to power and achieve far less than they’d like. Some things are immutable and enduring – the lap of the waves, the movement of the clouds and the coming and going of the tides. All else is just a point in time and we’d do well to remember both that, and our own insignificance.
