GLOBAL TIDES THAT SHAPED THE NOUGHTIES / THE FINANCIAL TIMES COMMENTARY & ANALYSIS ( RECOMMENDED READING )

Global tides that shaped the Noughties

By Simon Schama

Published: December 28 2009 20:19

Historians can be a smug lot. They will never tire of telling you that decade-upsumming is just a retro-convenience; that any generalisations about its defining characteristics can be instantly undone by equally valid counter-generalisations. The 1950s? Tory complacency but also angry young men. The 1960s? Harold SuperMac and Harold GannexMac; mini and maxi; Quant and Biba. But the habit of imprinting a shape on the memory of a decade goes back in British historical writing at least to chronicles of the “Hungry Forties” of the 19th century: the years of Irish famine and Chartist riots. Bad times, especially, may have come in decimal blocks. No one called the next, more serene, decade (give or take a Crimean war or two) the “Fair Fifties”.

But this last 10-year span must have been the first to generate disagreement about what it should be called. Britain has opted for the “Noughties” but the US term is “Aughties” or “Oughties” as in “Christ, I oughta ’ve seen THIS coming!”

But no one did: not at the beginning or the end; and it is the book-ending of the decade by two immense calamities – mayhem and meltdown; mass murder (for such we should call it, now that “9/11” has become a shorthand to bleach away the bloodstains) and mass unemployment – that makes it irresistible copy for decadal scribes. Tacitus himself could not have refrained from this particular morality play. Long ago, we were told by the French historians of the Annales School that spectacular events – the storming of the Bastille, the assassination at Sarajevo, and the decisions of individuals, be they Roosevelt or Hitler – were but spume on the crest of history’s waves; that what really shaped the shoreline was the invisible pull of deep tides and currents far beneath the surface. Long-term influences are what change the world.

It does not take analytical genius to see historical forces of this kind engaged in their relentless impoverishment over the past 10 years. The usual metaphor for this is “glacial”, which is apt since the retreat of the glaciers (and polar ice caps) tells us the primary datum of the decade has been physical degradation of the planet. Give me a sceptic and I will take him to Shanghai or São Paulo on a day of ripe smog and see how sceptical he remains while coughing his guts into a mask and peering at brown sunlight as if through a dome of begrimed glass. Lake Baikal is a saline puddle and the Sahara is heading for Timbuktu. If the earth is not yet in its terminal death rattle, it sure ain’t looking good. Population pressure on shrinking and degraded resources in the poorest parts of the world is unrelenting and no mega-city – Lagos, Caracas, Rio, Mumbai – is without its mountain range of trash on which humans can be seen like skeletal goats picking over the black plastic for something to eat. Along with drought and famine, pandemics have returned: in which, like some as yet unwritten scripture, the animal kingdom – avian, porcine, bovine – is a bellwether of human perishability.

All of which seems to put the nail in the coffin of a collective optimism born 200 years ago, when the Enlightenment envisioned a world illuminated by reason, banishing the afflictions of ignorance, poverty, war and disease. That the arch-prophet of this smiley-faced secularism, the Marquis de Condorcet, perished while imprisoned by French revolutionary authorities should have told us something. But his own endearing naivety was replaced by waves of chin-up teleological certainty – capitalist, Marxist, Fordian – all beckoning us to the sunlit uplands of a sweeter future. Whatever doubts they may have had about the triumph of their respective models, none of those prophets could have anticipated that the main obstacle to their respective programmes for social felicity in the third millennium AD would be a war to restore a theocratic caliphate and extend Sharia over the face of the earth. Nor that the most formidable weapon of this campaign would be the ecstatic embrace of mass death, bestowed as a blessing upon its supporters as much as a curse on its opponents. Now what do you do about that particular teaser? Force the militants to live? Get the mullahs to lighten up? Wheel out Monty Python’s torture by comfy chair?

That to value life over death should be seen in some parts of the world as a tall order is a measure of what the “Party of Life” (not to mention liberty and the pursuit of happiness) is up against. It is not a cheery thought that the demand for apocalypse may be a whole lot easier to satisfy than the demand for peace or plenty. But then the “Party of Martyrdom” might not feel it needs to bring down any more towers of capitalism since those ostensibly in charge have done such a cracking demolition job themselves.

Almost as unanticipated as theocracy on the march has been the summons, from the tomb, of financial governance – that quaint old thing abandoned in the junkyard of the outmoded as the 1990s expired. The debate over the return of regulators – or their rearmament with powers that might prevent us sliding over a cliff the next time a cool financial product turns into trash – will only get livelier next year once President Barack Obama finally squeezes some sort of dwarfed down healthcare reform out of US Congress, thus liberating it to consider the rest of the scenery of economic devastation, and once a Conservative government comes to power in Britain.

If all else fails, the recent past has revealed one formidable sentinel against both theocratic delirium and capitalist fecklessness: the oligarchic command and control cadre of Chinese bondholders who know the downfall of the western economy would be, for them, a Pyrrhic victory.

So our latter-day Tacitus may be tempted into supposing that the Oughty-Noughties traversed a route from orgiastic financial licence towards a corrective worldwide craving for firm leadership; hence the nearly messianic hopes invested in the 44th president (who has been, for many of his admirers, bafflingly shy about grasping it). But the most paradoxical polarity to have opened up in the past 10 years may not be between anarchy and authority so much as between solipsism and community; between the iPod with its headphoned sovereignty of Me Alone and its apparent opposite: hunger for networking; the need for faces that are not just Facebook friends. A half century ago the US sociologist David Riesman wrote a powerful treatise on modern alienation called The Loneliness of Crowds. Robert Putnam, one of his successors at Harvard University, came to an even gloomier diagnosis about the collapse of community in Bowling Alone.

But the history of the pioneering age of cyberspace has also been marked by a desperation to hook up, across the digital ether but also in physical spaces. Wherever you look – from theatres, concerts and festivals (not made redundant by podcasting) to live political rallies, football grounds and markets thronged with shoppers, the necessity of each other’s company has not quite vanished from the earth. The prospect of “The Cloud” ordaining what kind of person we are from our cyberchoices and marketing that profile to anyone who ponies up may – if we are lucky – spur a whole new generation of cyber-Thoreaus and Orwells who find a way to “Get Off Their Cloud”.

Certainly, some spontaneous digital collaborations can be dangerously unguarded. Quis custodiet Wikipedia? If the liberation of the archive into democratic user-space has been a true Gutenberg moment, it is also a promiscuous and indiscriminate opening. The evil of falsehood can claim as much purchase on the credulous as the good of truth. But if I wanted to point to a brighter future (and I do) I would invoke the solidarity of the very brave – in the streets of Tehran for example, taking to the rooftops to signal their resolution when repression shuts down their cell phones and thuggery beats their bodies. The survival of the unauthorised community may yet be the first tolling of the bell for the ayatollahs.

That is the good news. Over which, dear revellers, I hesitate to cast a long shadow. But – you heard it here first – if we end up calling the next decade “the Teenies”, then, I must regretfully announce There Truly Is No Hope.

The writer is an FT contributing editor

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009.