'The Unravelling of America,' Rolling Stone. Even Great Empires Have Their Day
Last edited Fri Sep 4, 2020, 02:14 PM - Edit history (5)
'The Unraveling of America.' Anthropologist Wade Davis on how COVID-19 signals the end of the American era. By Wade Davis, Rolling Stone, Aug. 6, 2020.
[Davis holds the Leadership Chair in Cultures & Ecosystems at Risk at the Univ. of British Columbia. His award-winning books include “Into the Silence” & “The Wayfinders.” His new book is “Magdalena: River of Dreams.”]
Never in our lives have we experienced such a global phenomenon. For the first time in the history of the world, all of humanity, informed by the unprecedented reach of digital technology, has come together, focused on the same existential threat, consumed by the same fears and uncertainties, eagerly anticipating the same, as yet unrealized, promises of medical science. In a single season, civilization has been brought low by a microscopic parasite 10,000 times smaller than a grain of salt. COVID-19 attacks our physical bodies, but also the cultural foundations of our lives, the toolbox of community and connectivity that is for the human what claws and teeth represent to the tiger.
Our interventions to date have largely focused on mitigating the rate of spread, flattening the curve of morbidity. There is no treatment at hand, and no certainty of a vaccine on the near horizon. The fastest vaccine ever developed was for mumps. It took four years. COVID-19 killed 100,000 Americans in four months. There is some evidence that natural infection may not imply immunity, leaving some to question how effective a vaccine will be, even assuming one can be found. And it must be safe. If the global population is to be immunized, lethal complications in just one person in a thousand would imply the death of millions.
Pandemics and plagues have a way of shifting the course of history, and not always in a manner immediately evident to the survivors. In the 14th Century, the Black Death killed close to half of Europe’s population. A scarcity of labor led to increased wages. Rising expectations culminated in the Peasants Revolt of 1381, an inflection point that marked the beginning of the end of the feudal order that had dominated medieval Europe for a thousand years.
'No empire long endures, even if few anticipate their demise. Every kingdom is born to die. The 15th century belonged to the Portuguese, the 16th to Spain, 17th to the Dutch. France dominated the 18th & Britain the 19th.'
The COVID pandemic will be remembered as such a moment in history, a seminal event whose significance will unfold only in the wake of the crisis. It will mark this era much as the 1914 assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, the stock market crash of 1929, and the 1933 ascent of Adolf Hitler became fundamental benchmarks of the last century, all harbingers of greater and more consequential outcomes. COVID’s historic significance lies not in what it implies for our daily lives. Change, after all, is the one constant when it comes to culture. All peoples in all places at all times are always dancing with new possibilities for life...
More, https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/covid-19-end-of-american-era-wade-davis-1038206/
Dr. Wade Davis, National Geographic, https://www.nationalgeographic.org/article/real-world-geography-dr-wade-davis
(~ Interesting essay from a Canadian neighbor & scientist. I hope the demise doesn't come to pass, naturally).
- Aug. 17, 2020. Interview with Canadian author Wade Davis, Prof. of Anthropology at British Columbia University.
Amid a global pandemic, with a polarized political electorate, and with protesters crowding the streets, one wonders if the American Era might be coming to an end. Wade Davis certainly would argue that it is. In a recent article for 'Rolling Stone,' he wrote about COVID-19 as a factor in “the unraveling of America." Davis shares his thoughts with Hari Sreenivasan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wade_Davis_(anthropology).
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No empire long endures, even if few anticipate their demise. Every kingdom is born to die. The 15th century belonged to the Portuguese, the 16th to Spain, 17th to the Dutch. France dominated the 18th & Britain the 19th. Bled white & left bankrupt by the Great War, the British maintained a pretense of domination as late as 1935, when the empire reached its greatest geographical extent. By then the torch had long passed into the hands of America. In 1940, with Europe already ablaze, the U.S. had a smaller army than either Portugal or Bulgaria. In 4 years, 18 million men & women served in uniform, millions more worked double shifts in mines & factories making the U.S. the arsenal of democracy. Post war, with Europe & Japan in ashes, the U.S. accounted for half of the global economy, incl. production of 93% of all automobiles. This birthed a vibrant middle class, a trade union movement that allowed a single breadwinner with limited education to own a home & a car, support a family, & send his kids to good schools. Not by any means a perfect world but affluence allowed for a truce between capital & labor, a time of opportunity with rapid growth & declining income inequality, marked by high tax rates for the wealthy, by no means the only beneficiaries of a golden age of American capitalism. But freedom & affluence came with a price. To this day, American troops are deployed in 150 countries..
The U.S. in the post-war era lionized the individual at the expense of community & family. Gains in terms of mobility & personal freedom came at the expense of common purpose. In many American areas, the family lost its grounding. By the 1960s, 40% of marriages were ending in divorce. Only 6% of American homes had grandparents living beneath the same roof as grandchildren; elders were abandoned to retirement homes. With slogans like “24/7” celebrating complete dedication to the workplace, men & women exhausted themselves in jobs that only reinforced their isolation from their families. By the time a youth reaches 18, he or she will have spent fully 2 years watching TV or staring at a laptop screen, contributing to an obesity epidemic. The U.S. consumes 2/3rds of the world’s antidepressant drugs. The collapse of the working-class family has been responsible in part for an opioid crisis that has displaced car accidents as the leading cause of death for Americans under 50. At the root of this transformation & decline lies an ever-widening chasm between Americans who have & those who have little or nothing. Economic disparities exist in all nations, creating a tension that can be as disruptive as the inequities are unjust.
Negative forces tearing society apart are mitigated or muted if there are other elements of social solidarity- religious faith, strength & comfort of family, pride of tradition, fidelity to the land, a spirit of place. But when the working family is shattered as factories close & corporate leaders, growing wealthier by the day, ship jobs abroad, the social contract is irrevocably broken. For 2 generations, the U.S. has celebrated globalization with intensity, in reality capital on the prowl in search of ever cheaper labor. On the right there's been fear of change, bitter resentments & contempt for the 1960s social movements, progress for women, gays, & people of color. In economic terms, the 1950s U.S. resembled Denmark today. Marginal tax rates for the wealthy were 90%. Average CEO salaries were just 20 times that of their mid-mgmt. employees. Today, base pay of those at the top is commonly 400 times that of their salaried staff, with many earning more in stock options & perks. The elite 1% control $30 trillion of assets, while the bottom half have more debt than assets. The 3 richest have more money than the poorest 160 million. Fully 1/5th of U.S. households have zero or negative net worth, 37% for black families. The vast majority of Americans are 2 paychecks removed from bankruptcy. The wealthiest country in history where most people live on a high wire, with no safety net to brace a fall.
The political process enabled rise of a national disgrace, a demagogue morally & ethically compromised who lives to cultivate resentments, demonize opponents, validate hatred. Odious, but Trump is less the cause of decline than a product of its descent. Few Americans are seeing what has actually happened, a nation where the free flow of information vital to democracy now ranks 45th in press freedom. Once welcoming huddled masses of the world, many people favor building a wall along the southern border. Rather than the collective good, U.S. laws define freedom as an individual’s inalienable right to own a personal arsenal of weaponry. And no one owes anything to anyone. Basic functions must be fought for--education, shelter, food, medical care. Democratic fundamental rights- universal health care, equal access to quality public education, a social safety net for the weak, elderly, & infirmed- are dismissed as socialist indulgences, signs of weakness.
How can the world expect America to lead on global threats- climate change, the extinction crisis, pandemics- when the country no longer has a sense of benign purpose, or collective well-being, even within its own national community?...
(*More at the article Link above).
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SELECT COMMENTS:
Lars
8 August, 2020
As a European who has lived in the US for 10 years - I agree with every word. It is important to confront these issues for a better future for the US. In the flashy fun world of the latest smart phone and the coolest movies - America often seems like the cutting edge, but in most fields it is like traveling to the past. When I was a kid, over 30 years ago my mom wrote her last check. When I asked her to teach me, she said: "These things are a thing of the past". My dad's hip replacement, with rehab for months in an excellent hospital and first class rehab facility did not bankrupt him, it was below $1000. Every single American I know who has spent any time in Germany, Denmark, Sweden, ... is full of respect for how these countries look and feel. I am married to an American & I have many great American friends. Living here I echo what most Europeans assume about America: Most Americans are generous & kind, the American system is an inhumane hate machine & unlike Canada or most of Europe - unsustainable.
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Gezzer
Lars
16 August, 2020
"It is important to confront these issues for a better future for the US." Why? At one time I would of agreed with your statement, but do you really think that confronting any of the States current issues will actually turn things around? Or will it simply prolong the end and all the current suffering? As it stands there are just too many vested interests that would lose out with a change in the status quo to expect any meaningful incremental change. Personally I feel that the only thing that will work at this point is a "clean slate" approach. IMHO the US needs to crash and burn so it can come out the other side like a raising phoenix. Of course like any fallen empire it will see it's influence wane as it falls. But again will that really be all that bad? As I see it the US hasn't always been the "force for good" it always bills itself as. At best they've batted .500 in that regard.
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Lulu
Lars
12 August, 2020
I’m opposite of you @Lars—an American now living in a poor EU country reliant on tourism due to our vast coastline & thousands of islands. We also have a class of kleptocrats, nationalists, & people in positions out of nepotism over merit, but thankfully health care and education are available to all paid through taxes or employers in the case of healthcare. Even as foreigners my husband and I are able to purchase the same healthcare as citizens & have the option to obtain private services if desired. It’s been sad to watch the decline of the blue collar American middle class in favor of the investor class, as those blue collar jobs enabled my father & my maternal grandfather to take part in the promise of America. Sadly, this article was an unfortunate look in our collective mirror.
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Zipzap
12 August, 2020
I live in Canada, and this article proves to me one salient thing. Despite being superficially Americanized on the surface, Canada is far closer to Europe & the UK in terms of outlook & approach to things & it shows in how we've handled the pandemic..The massive poverty sparked by the pandemic in the US hasn't happened here in Canada because the federal government was smart enough to loosen unemployment restrictions and give everyone who has been thrown out of work or can't work, $2000 per month. This is likely to be extended under an expanded unemployment insurance programme.
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- Not mentioned in the article, is the fact that the US is a broken democracy. Few Americans would agree, but from other western democracies’ viewpoint there are some truly staggering things about the democratic process that demonstrate the US is not as democratic as it thinks it is. A bigger problem is that most people feel they can't make a difference because views, states, colleges you name it, are so entrenched. It has got to the stage where the incumbent wants to represent as few people as possible. The US has become polarised to a crippling stage where there is little or no middle ground, & there seems to be very little space to argue a point. From Down Under, some of the truly staggering elements of US democratic system I have observed are: no compulsory voting, no independent electoral commission, voting booths determined by political parties, voting on a work day & the jerrymander system of the electoral college system presents for ethnic minorities, rural, & marginalised people.
Added to this is the fact that you can elect a person that has never held a public position in his life & he can recruit family members to his administration (most of which too are unelected) is absolutely mind boggling. Closer to third world dictatorships than a modern western democracy. Sure, there have been good presidents & administrations in the past but Trump has basically demonstrated that the US constitution is broken, out of date & now seemingly unchangeable.
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CPH_Mike
Oz Voice
5 hours ago
The US is officially classed as a failed democracy. Accurate.
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- I really appreciated reading this. It encapsulates, much more coherently than I have been able to do, the unease I have felt since my teen years in the 60's, especially after the Nixon debacle & Reagan's "revolution". In many ways, that "revolution" represents an old guard ignoring the warning of the 1929 market crash ( that was finally ignored because the formula for using war to feed the economy was hit upon), & getting grandiose after an amazing performance during WWII. Instead of building from that, apparently the old strains of elitism & oligarchy won out. This article is very sad..
- I think that the author of the above article has made a number of sweeping generalizations that completely dismiss the efforts of liberals & moderates attempts to improve the country, which give the piece a doomsday quality, I cannot argue with many of the facts presented because I recognized them long ago. American culture is sick & I would not be surprised if things devolved into a civil war at some point, although not until enough citizens have nothing more to lose. I would like to leave the states because I no longer want to contribute my taxes to a failed & broken culture, and am tired of all of the hate & sad ignorance that I've seen in the US for decades. Getting the timing right will be my biggest remaining challenge.
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..Put another way, in Canada they treat cancer as a disease. We treat it as a profit center.
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..It's been painful to live & watch what happened in this country.
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JAKSBAK
8 August, 2020
The article is brilliant & incisive and puts into words the observations - that as observer from afar - I have made/been making about the USA over recent decades. Trump didn't kill the American Dream but he certainly is the bookend. America has been tearing itself apart for a long time. It is impossible to see anything positive in the future. The fortunes of the tech billionaires contrasted with the inequity meted out to the vast majority of your nation is an obscenity. This article really really nails it.
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AAAA
JAKSBAK
9 August, 2020
We have pockets of peace & sanity, we are far from a united nation, you don't know that much, just realize, the future might be America split into smaller nations.You can imagine us however you like just realize you personally cannot see positivity. Maybe some young americans can....
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Tex Killerson
9 August, 2020
This is a very valuable article, but I wish the author had reminded us that the governing paradigm of the USA is the major cause of this degeneracy. Trump is merely a natural result of accepting the paradigm imposed by ronald reagan & its reaganRevolution. Since January 1989, all follow-up governments have followed the reagan paradigm AKA neoliberalism. Its basis is the simple idea that governments' main domestic role is to nurture business & break the unions, remove regulations, privatize whatever public good or service that can be profitable, & eliminate taxes on the businessman. Thus, the employee & the consumer are cheated, the natural environment is raped, & the few have the one mechanism for solving problems available in this country, i.e., money. Until the people of this country stop being such chumps & vote for candidates who will destroy the reaganRevolution AKA neoliberalism, productivity & the incomes of the few will continue to rise exponentially, & the incomes of the employees will be the straight lines that graphs of productivity & incomes always show. Employees --- Your impoverishment has occurred because the bosses have taken the money that you have honestly earned, suckers!
