#Civilization revolution leaders free#

Aside from among the Taliban and a few pockets of upscale communities in the United States, the virtues of vaccines are accepted by all, part of a general consensus on the virtues of Western science and technology.Īnd reason is replacing superstition more generally. According to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, as recently as 1988, polio was rampant in 125 countries today that number is down to two. Infant and maternal mortality have dropped sharply, thanks in part to the spread of clear hygiene standards and the construction of modern hospitals. Today, life expectancy has increased by leaps and bounds virtually everywhere. Most people used to experience lives that were nasty, brutish, and short. The spread of science and technology, meanwhile, has also improved human dignity and well-being. Around half of the adults in the world own a smartphone, and there are now more connected mobile devices in total than there are people on the planet. The vast majority of humanity is literate, is at least somewhat mobile, and has access to the world’s store of existing knowledge. Societies now accept the simple fact that workers need material incentives to be productive, which has led to increased dignity and self-worth. The market economy has made Chinese and Indian workers today far more productive than they were under Mao Zedong or Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister.

#Civilization revolution leaders free#

Nikita Khrushchev, the former leader of the Soviet Union, could claim that the state was better at delivering basic goods to citizens than free markets were, but today such a view would be laughed at. Yet the ultimate result was the diffusion of a modern outlook that relies on science and rationality to solve problems, much to the ultimate benefit of the planet’s population.Īs recently as half a century ago, for example, there was a global clash of economic ideologies. This was not done with some benign intent to uplift humanity in general there were many problems along the way, and the explosion of Western power across the globe had some terrible consequences for other cultures and regions. No other civilization can take credit for giving birth to modernity. The origins of the contemporary era lie in the West’s transformation during the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution. The greatest danger of the current pessimism, therefore, is that it might become a self-fulfilling prophecy, leading to fear and withdrawal rather than attempts to reinvigorate the existing global system. There is every reason to believe, moreover, that the next few decades can be even better for humanity than the last few-so long as the West does not lose confidence in its core values and retreat from global engagement. The march of reason, triggered in the West by the Enlightenment, is spreading globally, leading to the emergence of pragmatic problem-solving cultures in every region and making it possible to envisage the emergence of a stable and sustainable rules-based order. The world is actually coming together, not falling apart. Instead of feeling depressed, the West should be celebrating its phenomenal success at injecting the key elements of its worldview into other great civilizations. Most people around the world now have the same aspirations as the Western middle classes: they want their children to get good educations, land good jobs, and live happy, productive lives as members of stable, peaceful communities. To put it simply, the great world civilizations, which used to have detached and separate identities, now have increasingly overlapping areas of commonality. Nor is this an accident-because despite Samuel Huntington’s foreboding, what has occurred over recent generations is not a clash of civilizations but a fusion of civilizations. More and more people in more and more places are enjoying better lives than ever before. By most objective measures of human well-being, the past three decades have been the best in history. Historians looking back on this age from the vantage point of later generations, however, are likely to be puzzled by the widespread contemporary feelings of gloom and doom. Turmoil in the Middle East, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions of refugees random terrorist attacks across the globe geopolitical tensions in eastern Europe and Asia the end of the commodity supercycle slowing growth in China and economic stagnation in many countries-all have combined to feed a deep pessimism about the present and, worse, the future. The mood of much of the world is grim these days.