Staying human in a time of monsters
War is crowding out our imagination. We must not let it steal our future
2026 arrived like an ambush. Almost unbelievably, the audacious grab of Venezuelan President Maduro by the United States military was quickly eclipsed in news cycles by President Trump’s renewed threats to seize Greenland by any means necessary, and his withdrawal of the US from 66 international organisations. NATO may now exist in name only, and it is not fanciful to imagine the whole UN edifice collapsing.
New world order? Back to an old one? Or just honesty about the one that has already come into being? With the US invocation of the Monroe Doctrine, some analysts have framed all this as a return to spheres of influence — although of course things might well turn out messier still.
Whatever it all portends, the raw power of missiles is clearly now the currency. Gramsci’s monsters are rumbling, loudly.
As they do so, the old multilateralism splinters. It may be that little survives in its current forms. And the doing-good sector that has built itself on the hopes of international law and international cooperation is in a state of panic, with good reason. Leverage is diminishing, money is retreating, the power dynamics and institutional realities on which it has depended (for better and worse) are evaporating before our eyes. A whole infrastructure starts to fade away.
Meanwhile, inexorably, conflict is becoming the organising principle of global politics once again. We need to be honest about this. It may not have taken over our imaginations just yet, but it looms nonetheless. As one war-like episode follows another, it becomes increasingly apparent that we are all living in a liminal space between war and peace. Hard security, rearmament, deterrence are the menu du jour.
The beginning of the last century reverberates in our era. But this time there is far more complexity, the compounding pressure of a climate crisis, vastly advanced technological capabilities, the foreseeable possibility of entrusting robots with battlefield tactics, the weaponisation of space, and the ability resting in the hands of numerous states to annihilate much of the life on Earth.
The sheer, mind-boggling danger of it seems to be our best hedge against the worst. That’s hardly reassuring.
Is there anything else to hang onto? Most of us don’t have time to fret for long — we are preoccupied simply with the pressures of existing, inside systems that have not been designed for our collective thriving, and distracting ourselves instead of facing up to unbearable realities.
Yet we should not have to orient our lives to survival and fear.
We should not have to orient our lives to survival and fear.
“Can I, a tired author, from an intellectually tired generation, now find the energy to look at this unfamiliar place?” — Kazuo Ishiguro
This is a time when we need to stand way back, zoom out, discern.
As things collapse, the sense of permanent instability erodes our sense of agency and possibility. It is a poisonous cocktail indeed. The threat of violence is a sign of system failure, a catastrophic failure of imagination written in the script of domination and control. A world organising itself around war can neither save itself, nor see what it needs saving from.
All is not lost from the old order, of course. Less powerful states are still looking to get things done through multilateral action, not least the recent pandemic treaty process from which the US was absent. Just as a newly-independent Jamaica used its maiden speech to the UN General Assembly in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis to call for a worldwide human rights campaign (credit to Stephen Jensen for this nugget), apocalyptic threat has a way of impelling cooperation among those without power.
But this has to be a time for a rethink of fundamentals, not simply trying to preserve as much as we can of the old order. We may not be able to stop that building from being destroyed, or at least badly damaged. But we can build new ones. And we might have to.
Here’s the thing: as conflict looms, we are in a kairos moment of sorts, with an opportunity to think about what is the opposite of war. Certainly it is not our continual state of proto-war, in which grievances and rivalries and zero-sum politics enable the slow escalation towards conflict. Nor coping within economic systems that oppress us, push Earth systems to breaking point, lock us into the meaningless void of endless productivity cycles in pursuit of endless growth for the endless enrichment of… well, whom? Nor, surely, the loneliness and fragmentation and frictionlessness into which tech invites us, a great withdrawal from community and perhaps even life itself. These things all need to be part of the same conversation.
We don’t just need an absence of war, as the tired phrase repeats itself. We need the kind of peace in which we embrace a richer vision of human flourishing.
War is downstream of other things. And yet downstream sounds wrong, for nothing is linear, history is not inevitable. We are living amid a swirl of possibilities, different futures each pushing to be born. We may hear these possibilities in the fragments of conversations, see them enacted in communities, read them in scrawls on walls.
Nothing we have built so far has the right to exist in perpetuity. History is replete with reinvention. Political ideas, political forms come and go. There is no sense in which anything is permanent or inevitable or essential. There is no guarantee of the solidity or furtherance of what we have called progress.
This is not a time to recoil. We have to do the work of reimagining and remaking, not to hide or deny. Our task now is not so much one of defending what we have inherited, but of re-diagnosis and remaking.
At the level of international politics, some sketches: We should do the work of reimagining what a successor to the UN could look like, perhaps a looser set of arrangements centred around tackling a defined set of crises, and experiment with actual forms. We should ask if we need a new vocabulary of human flourishing to supersede human rights, perhaps something that locates humans in a wider ecology of nature and machine — and then start to generate this.
And we do have to start turning around the relentless flow of wealth to the wealthier (yes, there are ideas on how), and to revolutionise the relationship between (certain types of) work and time and money in an age when none of our kids know what jobs are still going to exist for them. And this is just the beginning.
“Could it be that by regarding the softest aspects of humanity, by caressing the irrefutable warmth that resides there, we can go on living after all in this brief, violent world?” — Han Kang
It is possible that we could do these things. It is possible not only because we humans are extraordinarily resourceful, but because we are capable of wanting good for ourselves and each other, and capable of solidarity and cooperation. Perhaps above all, because we are capable of love.
But we’ve also become deeply stuck, and seemingly unwilling to believe that other futures may be possible.
In the first instance, those without raw power may turn out to be the ones who can hold open the space for a future that is not war. Powerlessness is the best possible incentive for cooperation, and cooperation in the domains that build a future is our best protection against war.
But a broader reimagining is only going to happen if we are willing to give ourselves permission for it, to invest in it, to unleash a new generation of re-imaginers who can open our collective minds to the possibility that the future does not have to be war or destruction. For one thing, we surely need a new philanthropy oriented to the right brain, a massive investment in imagination and purpose and story and culture.
It may seem ludicrous to suggest that storytelling is going to save us from catastrophe. I hesitate even to write it. But while pragmatism and deterrence are the first order of business of course, they do not offer a future. And what does the macho realism of most IR theory offer us?
More than anything, our response to this moment must be a quiet rebellion of solidarity and love. That is overwhelmingly our most precious resource in an age of monsters. And whatever we do in our rebellious reimagining, we will do imperfectly, against the odds, in the cracks, around the edges.
It will be in the hidden strength of fragility; or as Han Kang wrote, perhaps in answer to her own question,
“Like a blooming heart. Like a pulsing flower bud. Like the wingbeat of an immeasurably small bird.”
“Nor coping within economic systems that oppress us, push Earth systems to breaking point, lock us into the meaningless void of endless productivity cycles in pursuit of endless growth for the endless enrichment of… well, whom?” Well said!