Family power is also resurgent for it too is characteristic of our species. Dynastic reversion seems both natural and pragmatic when weak states are not trusted to deliver justice or protection and loyalties remain to kin not to institutions. Leaders who can trust no one usually trust family. In a growing number of Asian, Latin American and African states, from Kenya to Pakistan and the Philippines, demo-dynasties deliver some of the magical reassurance of family power; others from Nicaragua to Azerbaijan, Uganda to Cambodia, are becoming absolutist republican monarchies. It is certainly a bad way to run a country – even worse than democracy.
But today’s dictators and dynasties are not a return to earlier centuries. Even in iPhone and dagger states, they are part of a new world where events move at unprecedented speed, where contenders and markets are interconnected and where the jeopardy of nuclear catastrophe is ever present.
This, coupled with Covid and global warming, foster fears of apocalypse. A sense of impending eschaton seems to be part of human character, perhaps a recognition of the miraculous but fragile conquest of earth by one species. But the stakes today make the End of Days ever more possible.
Yet in some senses Homo sapiens has never been so healthy, and is living longer and better than ever before; society may, in places, be more peaceful than it ever was. While our forefathers were likely to die of infections, violence or famine, today humans are dying of diseases – coronaries, cancer and neurodegeneration – because we live so long and often eat so much. Many of these diseases will soon be cured by new technologies of genetic modification. These improvements are so striking that even the poorest countries today have higher life expectancies than the richest empires of a century ago. Sierra Leone now has a life expectancy of 50.1 years, which is the same as France in 1910. In 1945, Indians lived until thirty-five; now their life expectancy is seventy. Naturally this has changed the shape of families: parents have many children when they expect most to die; now low child mortality, along with female education and contraception, encourages later marriage and smaller families.
In the next eighty years, the population of Europe and east Asia will plummet, that of Nigeria will quadruple to 800 million, making it larger than the entire EU, the second biggest country after India; Congo will triple to 250 million, Egypt will double, Russia will shrink and its Muslims will form a majority. China will halve, its power and economy possibly challenged by the drawbacks of its own autocracy; the US will remain much the same, its ingenious power, however flawed and fragile, likely to endure longer than doomsayers predict. The African giants, Nigeria, Egypt and Congo, could thrive, but it seems more likely that their rulers will be unable to manage or feed their peoples. It is not so much ‘winter is coming’, more like the interminable broiling of a world furnace: climate change – heat and flooding – will make it harder to produce enough food. Already many countries are iPhone and dagger dispolities, realms that barely protect or feed their populations; many states will subside, borders, drawn by imperial powers, will blur into exsurgent warlands – as is already happening in Sahel in perpetual wars for water and resources – or they will succumb to the protection of empire nations, keen to secure their rare earth elements – and old fashioned diamonds, gold and oil. Their peoples will migrate to northern comfort states on a scale unseen since the nomadic invasions. A book of this span has many themes but a key one is that all nations are formed by families in movement: the challenge for the open states is to absorb the migrants they need while being rich enough to sustain the comfort that makes them attractive.
Scale matters in the World Game, but one thing is certain: whoever wins will not win for long. If this history proves anything, it is that the human ability to self-mutilate is almost limitless. ‘In individuals, insanity is rare,’ wrote Nietzsche, ‘but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.’ It is easy to criticize politicians but this interconnected world makes it ever harder to govern: ‘You philosophers … you write on paper,’ Catherine the Great warned. ‘Unfortunate Empress that I am, I write on the susceptible skins of living beings.’
One of the mysteries of such times of crisis is the absence of great leaders, but they are made by their opportunities: ‘We’re little men serving a great cause,’ said Nehru, ‘but because the cause is great something of the greatness falls on us also.’ Kissinger mocked the very idea of greatness: ‘In retrospect, all successful policies seem preordained. Leaders like to claim prescience for what has worked, ascribing planning to what usually starts as a series of improvisations.’ History is driven as much by clowns as by visionaries. ‘History likes to joke,’ said Stalin; ‘sometimes it chooses a fool to drive historical progress.’
‘I’ve seen the future,’ sang Leonard Cohen. ‘It is murder.’ Today’s problems are deep and colossal. Globalization was part of the progressive development that raised living standards, ended most diseases and most famines, but its conveniences have a cost: some are left out of its bounty and some of its bounty requires perilous compromises with enemies. Covid pandemic and Ukrainian war show how fast its food and energy supply lines can fray. Even the miraculous health improvements could be corroding: US life expectancy fell in the three years up to 2020 – for the first time since the Spanish Flu. Microbial resistance to antibiotics could make routine operations much more risky. Covid is probably a dress rehearsal for a graver influenza pandemic.
Even though no empire nations have fought each other since 1945, the time will come when they do and they are developing new killing machines – intergalactic and thermobaric – as well as improving their traditional heavy metal. ‘Never place a loaded rifle on the stage,’ wrote Chekhov, ‘if it isn’t going to go off.’ He was talking about theatre, but this is true in warfare too: ultimately all those weapons will be used. Thousands of tanks can still clash like steel cavalry as they did in the last century, but in this new world cheap gadgets – tank- and plane-smashing drones and portable missiles – mean that smaller countries can destroy the expensive toys of larger ones. This is wonderful if they are being used against an evil empire, less so if used against us. Before nuclear weapons, the west would have gone to war against Russia for invading Ukraine – as it did in the Crimean War – and the US–Chinese rivalry would most likely have led to war too. There are only nine nuclear powers – not a bad record – but actually around forty states could adapt their peaceful nuclear facilities to get nuclear weaponry in a few years. The use of tactical atomic weapons would perhaps be equivalent to the Chernobyl accident; the use of hydrogen bombs could destroy the world. Nuclear war on some scale is not just plausible but likely – and it is worth reflecting that, at the time of writing, no nuclear power has ever lost a war.
The number of autocracies is surging, that of democracies ebbing. It is impossible to define exactly what causes one state to fall and another to rise, but Ibn Khaldun, a character in this story and its presiding spirit, identified asabiyya, the cohesion essential for a society to thrive: ‘Many nations suffered a physical defeat, but that’s never marked their end. Yet when a nation becomes the victim of psychological defeat, that marks the end.’