War, disease, fire, floods: What next, the apocalypse?
Russian tanks race over a European border. Deadly wildfires engulf Spanish and French homes and fields amid record temperatures. Sri
Lankan protesters take a dip in their ousted president’s private swimming pool. A gunman shoots dead 19 American children in their classroom. A former Japanese prime minister is assassinated on a street corner. People queue for days for food and fuel across the world and a global pandemic still lingers.
Just midway through 2022, we seem to have hit a new level of turmoil, even compared with all the upsets of recent years.
The news cycle of gloom seems relentless. To many, it looks as if the world is falling apart and they are living in the opening scenes of a postapocalyptic movie. But is this cascade of calamity really unprecedented, or does it just feel that way?
Before 2022 began, the world had been buffeted by the pandemic and politics in various countries had become venomous and polarised.
Then Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February added unprecedented headwinds for nations to struggle through. Tens of thousands have now been killed as the horrors of conventional international warfare have been unleashed on Europe again.
Putin’s weaponisation of grain supplies threw supply chains into disarray and further pushed up food prices — which have increased by 50 per cent in the past two years.
The war and the aftermath of pandemic lockdowns have sent inflation soaring along with petrol prices. In the horn of Africa price rises are pushing millions toward famine.
Turmoil in countries such as Syria, Democratic Republic of Congo, Colombia, Afghanistan and Yemen mean almost 60 million people have fled their homes. “The world is falling apart, too many countries are falling apart,” said Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council earlier this year.
Democracy has also seemed to be in retreat after decades in which it seemed unstoppable. According to the V-dem Institute, there has been an increase in the proportion of the world living under autocratic regimes. In 1952, some two-thirds of the world lived in autocracies, a figure which declined in the post-cold War period. By 2001, the figure was 46 per cent.
But there has been a steady creep up in recent years as India became an “electoral autocracy” with increased pressure on journalists and attacks on Muslims under the Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi. Now, the
In some ways it appears that things are going down,
there’s a lot of conflict, a lot of war,
a great deal of discrimination and
exploitation. Dr Indrajit Roy, lecturer in global
development
biggest proportion of people is living under autocratic regimes since the 1970s.
On the health front, Covid refuses to go away and other diseases threaten. Polio has appeared in the UK and America and monkeypox has flared.
Dr Indrajit Roy, lecturer in global development at York University, said: “Human beings are very presentist. We like to feel like we are living in very unique moments.
“In some ways it appears that things are going down, there’s a lot of conflict, a lot of war, a great deal of discrimination and exploitation.
“All of that is true, but to say that it’s worse than it’s been in the past, I think I would really qualify that.”
Development metrics like life expectancies, literacy and living standards have all risen to highs in recent decades and hunger, child mortality and extreme poverty have fallen.
“The world has become a better place than it was 50 years ago or certainly 100 or 200 years ago, in many ways,” said Roy.
Perhaps the sense of unease over today’s problems is not because they are unique, but because politicians and states do not feel up to the task, said Andrew Potter, of the Max Bell School of Public Policy in Montreal.
In his recent book, On Decline ,he argues the problems we face are essentially political.
“Our coming decline will manifest itself in many ways, including uncontrolled pandemics, environmental degradation, collapsing birth rates, and economic stagnation. It might even result in World War III,” he said. “But it is, at its heart, a political problem caused by our increasing inability to confront and resolve the myriad collectiveaction problems that bedevil our species at our current stage of development.”
While wars and economic turmoil were commonplace in history, climate change is a new and pressing issue.
Earlier this year, the United
Nations said three quarters of the world’s population could be exposed to “deadly heat stress” by the end of the century. The world has missed its chance to entirely avoid the effects of a warming planet, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned.
Given such bleak messages, it is easy to sink into despair. But Roy believes fatalism must be avoided.
“It’s an armchair luxury to just talk about how everything is declining without actually doing the hard work of seeing what people are doing to resist that,” he said.
— Telegraph Group Ltd