Situating the Story: To the Twenties and Beyond

(The following was published on January 3, 2020)

Ten years ago as I entered law school with the somewhat cynical objective of leveraging a corporate law background to create career opportunities in policy and development, I wasn’t expecting a decade of global progress. I wouldn’t have been surprised by tribalist backlashes like Brexit, a right-wing resurgence from Manilla to Brasilia or even a cartoonish American president. I hope below to encapsulate my thoughts on the years gone by and posit ideas for the road ahead.

A Decade Past and a Decade Wasted

To those who feared technology and demography could fuel radical transformation in the 2010’s, it should come as strange comfort that humanity’s aptitude to lurch from one crisis to another while failing to heed the lessons of the past remains unchanged. We went from decrying Darfur to being exhausted by the news coming out of Yemen and the bodies finding their way to the bottom of the Mediterranean. Extreme climatic phenomena simultaneously threaten mass water shortages, dramatic flooding and unpredictable forest fires, but the unimaginative popular consensus that fossil fuels are critical for industry remains unchanged. The Middle East see-saw swings amidst an inexperienced prince in the Kingdom against an intransigent Persian regime. A resurgent power source from the Bosphorus Strait and over-adventurous Western powers have added tantalizing drama to this combustible mix. In fact, the last two sentences have remained the same for over a millenia.

All the ebb and flow of the last decade isn’t that remarkable then. Neither has it been all doom and gloom nor the harbinger of great things ahead. Certain personalities have stuck around and made their mark felt. Putin and Merkel are a couple of names that stand out as being in power at the beginning and still at the helm at the end, but the most sustained power player certainly is Xi Jinping. His ambition stands likely to be critical to how the next decade takes shape as well. Will China’s presence play a constructive role in solving our collective problems? Or will the absurd contradictions of state capitalism coupled with draconian authoritarianism ask questions too hard even for the world’s most advanced technocracy. As in the previous three decades, Chinese growth over this last one has continued to make extreme poverty seem like a distant memory. This dream, however, comes at a high cost to minorities like the Uighurs suffering in nightmarish circumstances in what may be the largest incarceration of innocents since the Second World War. The Chinese Communist Party still has many critical decisions to make in their nation’s reemergence, but one system of glittering success and another of despairing tyranny was not the example they wished to send to the surfeit of countries seeking a workable governance model to replicate.

Another key consideration in any analysis of what has come before and is to come is precipitous ecological collapse. It’s deleterious effects will finally start affecting the everyday lives of the global elite enough to actually spur action. Europeans seem to be leading the way on both this front and privacy protection in our new digital economy. However, their limited influence is reflected in how poorly their lead has been followed around the world. Americans remain beholden to a wild west approach on such regulatory protections, far too wedded to their anarchic notion of freedom to bother with stewardship of the future. Better seed control to algorithms designed by Zuckerberg, Google and Bezos, then concern ourselves with evidence-based policy making in the interest of the public good. A great New Yorker cartoon from November 2012 encapsulated this sentiment excellently. In it, a group of survivors in a dystopian future sit around a fire and the older man tells the young: “Yes the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.”.

A Discredited, Unpopular but Badly Needed Idea

So what next and more importantly what can we do to shape it. I return to the idea epitomized by the title of this website - To A Smaller World - of a cultural shift that can create a social solidarity beyond our traditional understanding of identity. Melinda Gates once noted: “Every society says its outsiders are the problem. But the outsiders are not the problem; the urge to create outsiders is the problem.” This is not a simple call to the oft-repeated notion of global citizenship, which has had a difficult decade. Citizens of nowhere are in fact increasingly branded as part of the out-of-touch elite responsible for runaway globalisation and its correlated inequities. For all its vilification, however, this broader social tier certainly has had a good decade. The Nasdaq crossing 9000 as we pivot into the new decade should be a very clear indication that the haves are doing just fine. Their predilection to feed the have-nots a fantasy that it is those on the outside of their imagined community that undermine their future is the dangerous narrative we must challenge.

We cannot continuously pull ourselves apart and together at the same time. Practically, we must prioritize the transition of power downwards to local bodies to enfranchise citizens on the economic periphery angered by neoliberal neglect. The importance of a tangible connection between the governed and the mundane issues that affect their everyday lives seems to have been quickly forgotten after the Cold War. Policymakers, besotted by efficiencies in the public sphere and monopolistic practices in the private, forgot the simple reality that communities are critical to shaping educational institutions, healthcare bodies and generally allocating the limited resources they are afforded. It is in developing democracies that this decentralizing theme has been most championed to encouraging results. At the same time we must push power upwards to international institutions to make them capable of achieving ambitious agendas like the Sustainable Development Goals by the end of the next decade. Missing that deadline would be calamitous for the United Nations system already battered reputation and spell a dangerous indictment on our ability to address the growing systemic risks we face as a civilization. The loser of the next decade, in essence, needs to be the two obvious winners of the last - the nation state and the capitalist forces that guide it. 

The nation-states reassertion in a multipolar global order was a strategic inevitability. After all, Japan cannot be asked to respect a pacifist constitution as China arms itself for imperial conquest. Hope for how it’s evolution can continue progressively can be seen out of the world’s forgotten giant - Africa. If regional ties and a critically important generational transitions for leaders across the continent move smoothly, the African Union could realize the once naive notion of truly resurgent and united continent. A decade ago though one may even have said the same for the Gulf Cooperation Council, before the vanity of princes tore it apart with disdain. As with all institutions, devolving or consolidating power legally is relatively simple, but the perceptions of men are not so fickle. As long as the soldier’s sleeve is adorned with a flag, it is there that men will perceive power to lie. The burgeoning post-nationalist African consciousness is born less out of a transformation of mindset, but a failure of capability. It was exasperation with the nation-state that has empowered regional consortiums like the Economic Community of West African States or the Southern Africa Development Community. It was a mix of corporate and civil society actors that strategically pushed decision-making to more effective forums and we need to see similar actions take place around the world in the coming years.

There are many limitations on any individual nation’s capabilities, whether that be in redirecting it’s unsustainable economy or in placing a human on Mars. The hurdles we need to cross to accomplish the next decade’s goals cannot be done by any one country alone (or for that matter by a megalomaniacal billionaire). It is for that reason that I enthusiastically support progress on projects that require multinational collaboration - spacefaring certainly included. In a more imaginative twist, could the tax collectors of an empowered global body designed to enforce a wealth tax be the impetus to unite the Albertan cattle farmer and the Egyptian mason against the three-passport-holding oligarch. A generation ago, the only emblem one could imagine on such officials would be a hammer and sickle. Thankfully, reasonable intellectual consensus has found the unfettered capitalism that gave us the 2008 disaster and it’s cheap-money-infused recovery unsatisfying for the vast majority and, critically, the ecosystem on which we depend. Making the world smaller as such, will also need it to be made fairer.

Urgent and cascading crises do not give us the luxury of time in waiting for the world to control the urge to other in the aim of shared prosperity. We must therefore seek a means to promote such a cultural identity in the decade to come. We cannot leave a vacuum for identity politics to be dominated by a right reasserting discarded language from the Clash of Civilizations hypothesis to a left preoccupied with obscure issues surrounding gender. How we take control of this dialogue as individuals is unclear. We only know that no simple answer will suffice. Hard-nosed pragmatism, open to compromise and eager to adapt to changing circumstances, is the only acceptable ideology of leaders today that intend to bend the arc of history towards something better. As the boomers finally make their way off the stage, the drama of the next decade will play out on the steps leading up to the front. However, if the current Democratic primary has shown us anything it is that a generation of asset accumulation will make convincing boomers to give up political power challenging. They are not a generation, however, averse to bold and ambitious agendas. They elected a charismatic upstart Senator and then his nemesis for good measure. Each fell short of their expectations, one tragically and the other thankfully (thus far). We hope on this next go they have the courage to match that openness with a sense of intergenerational responsibility. This is the first test among many we must pass in this next decade if we are to stand a chance of building a more resilient global system.

What can and might an individual do?

I entered the full-time workforce in 2013 and it’s been an unconventional ride since. Starting from a large Canadian law firm, I found my way through two fascinating roles in the development space before landing in London. Here I have been in the startup sector for three years now. The dance from the corporate to public interest and into the legaltech world has yielded a lifetime’s worth of the extraordinary. Placing a premium on building an adaptable set of skills, however, has limited my focus on mastering a narrow range of capabilities and clearly advancing a value-based professional arc. It is these two points I hope to focus on in guiding what is a nascent career over the coming decade into an established one {Inshallah}.

In the broader scheme of affairs, I feel exceptionally well-positioned to take on the challenges that lie ahead and, most importantly, grow and learn at every corner. Personally, I have been fortunate to have a loving and privileged upbringing and found a wonderful life partner to inspire me out of my comfort zone to a shared life worth celebrating. Residing in London has also provided a fascinating platform for endless opportunity and a vantage point on an effervescent city in the midst of decline. As with so much of the deterioration that marrs our view of the decade ahead, we can say times have been worse. Myopic public discourse and status quo thinking have been overcome before. The greatest resource to make the giant leaps needed are seemingly in abundance and recently they have not been afraid to show resilience to power both on the streets and in boardrooms. Our numbers had just crossed 5 billion when I was born in 1987, and will reach 8.5 billion by 2030. Let’s hope the collective capabilities of the most complex organism in the universe is enough to make this next decade worth remembering for all the right reasons.