The Munk Debates Podcast - Ian Morris on the past and future of human civilization

Episode Date: December 23, 2020

Ian Morris, archaeologist, historian, bestselling author and big thinker, joins us to discuss the past and future of human civilization in an era of rapid social and technological change.  The host of the Munk Debates is Rudyard Griffiths - @rudyardg.   For detailed show notes on the episode, head to https://munkdebates.com/podcast. Tweet your comments about this episode to @munkdebate or comment on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/munkdebates/ To sign up for a weekly email reminder for this podcast, send an email to [e-mail].   To support civil and substantive debate on the big questions of the day, consider becoming a Munk Member at https://munkdebates.com/membership Members receive access to our 10+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, newsletter and ticketing privileges at our live events. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue - https://munkdebates.com/ The Munk Debates podcast is produced by Antica, Canada's largest private audio production company - https://www.anticaproductions.com/   Executive Producer: Stuart Coxe, CEO Antica Productions Senior Producer: Christina Campbell Editor: Kieran Lynch Associate Producer: Abhi RahejaBecome a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I think it's time for this toxic binary zero-sum madness to stop. We're not an imperial power. We're a revolutionary power. We are no longer in a world where you can plot out moves statesmen to statesmen like a chessboard. You don't know anything about my background to where I came from. It doesn't matter to you because fundamentally I'm a mean white man. We can't do this to the next generation because America will cease to exist. Thanks for listening to the Monk debates. For the holiday period, we are changing up the format for this program. Instead of a debate, we're doing in-depth interviews with some of the world's smartest thinkers

on the big issues of our time, from the future of liberal democracy to America's growing rivalry with China, to the next shock or revolution which could define the 21st century. This mini-series is called The Monk Dialogues. On this installment of the Monk Dialogs, we feature Ian Morris, archaeologist, historian, and best-selling author on the past and future of human civilization in an era of rapid social and technological change. Here is his dialogue with Monk Debates Chair, Rudyard Griffiths.

Hi, I'm Redyard Griffiths, the host and moderator of the Monk Dialogues. Thank you for joining us for yet another dialogue on the big issues and ideas of our day post the U.S. election. We've been focusing on some broader themes around this extraordinary moment we find ourselves in. We've been looking at the political and economic effects of this pandemic, the changes that it's bringing to our lives to the world. Today we're going to step back a bit. We're going to take a longer view. We're going to kind of look at what human history has to say about where we're at now.

effects of this pandemic in the months and years to come, but also how can history help us look forward, potentially decades, to understand the effects of this moment and the other big trends that could come in the decades to come that will change our way of life fundamentally. To do this, we are exceedingly fortunate to have what I consider one of the world's biggest minds and sharpest thinkers in Stanford historian Ian Morris. He's an archaeologist. He's a historian, and he's the Willard Professor of Classics at Stanford University. He's the founder of Stanford's Archaeology Center, where he's served as its director. And he's the author of a series of internationally best-selling books. They're all on my bookshelf, and I expect on many of yours, too. Ian Morris, thank you for joining us on the Monk Dialogues.

Well, thanks very much for having me here. Well, here's what I want to do, Ian. You know, it's one thing for, you know, somebody like me to make big prognostications about the future. Frankly, what do I know? But for someone such as yourself who spent an incredible amount of time thinking deeply about the past, about the last 15,000 years of human history, both as a historian, as a classicist, but also as an archaeologist, going to those cultures, to those places to kind of literally unearths human history. I want to start with a quote that's been featured in two of your recent books, a simple one,

but I think an important one coming from someone like you. The next 40 years will be the most important in history. In why, I want to know, it's the big W. Why are the next 40 years, despite the 15,000 that have gone before, why are they likely to be the most important in the human experience? Yeah, well, I got interested in thinking about what history might be able to tell us about the future. About 15 years ago, the big debates were going on among historians about why it was that Western part of the world, the countries around the shores of the North Atlantic, had come to

dominate the clans in the 19th and 20th centuries in a way that no one had ever really done before. There were all these arguments going on. And I suspected that if you could see the kind of long-term shape of history, you would be able to get a much better understanding of what had already happened and maybe also even project things forward and think about what was likely to come next. So I came up with this thing you mentioned, the social development index, which was an attempt to measure how Eastern and Western societies had mastered mastering their environments and getting what they wanted in the world,

going all the way back to the last Ice Age, throughout 14,000 BC. So I did this because I wanted to understand at what point did the West really pull ahead of the East. Is this a recent thing? development or a deep-seated one going far back into the past, is it likely to persist for centuries to come or is it likely to go away? So I drew this graph and I wrote this whole book, Why the West Rules about it and what it told us about previous history. Then at the end of the book, I asked myself, well, so what will it look like if we project the trend lines on this graph of Eastern and Western social development, just projecting forward across

the next century or so? And at the moment, by the way, I calculated things, Western development is way ahead of Eastern, but Eastern developments has been rising faster in the last 50 or 60 years than Western. This is beginning to converge. And so if we make this linear projection, just push the lines forward, I was able to come up with the number for the exact year when the lines will cross, which is the year 2103. That is where the East catches up with the West. So almost certainly something is going to happen so that this outcome doesn't actually

match up with reality. But I think that what it does do, the good thing about the prediction, is it kind of sets the bar and it gives you this sense of other things being equal. This is what is likely to happen. The trends are going to converge. East is going to catch up with the West about 80 years or so from now. And then you can start asking, well, what might happen to speed that up, slow that down, bend the lines in different directions so it doesn't happen before, to me, two big conclusions seem to jump out of it. And one was that if the trends increase as rapidly as they have been doing across the 20th century, then the 21st century, we're likely to see more change in the coming

hundred years, more change in the human condition in the coming hundred years than we've seen in the previous 100,000 years. We're looking at a transformation of almost everything about what it is to be a human being. And so in my books, I have speculated a little bit about the kinds of things that might be involved in this. But, again, other things being equal, we're looking at the greatest transformation of the human race that there's ever been. And a hundred years from now, the human experience will feel as alien to us today as our own experience would have felt to the Neanderthals. So this is absolutely mind-boggling kind of transformation we're looking at. One reason why I say the next 40 years, the point at which the curves really begin to influence.

You see the knee of the curve. Next 40 years are likely to be the most important in history. However, there's always a but. And in this case, the butt is that when you look back at previous episodes in history where there's been similar sort of accelerations in the rate of change of development and also convergence between different regions, a new region starts to pull ahead and assert itself on the stage, every single time that there's been amazing.

to change like that, it's been accompanied by enormous amounts of violence. This is one of the ways people have evolved to be able to deal with new and challenging things. We use force against each other. If we use force against each other in the 21st century, on the sort of scale we've seen in previous centuries, we're probably looking at a thermonuclear war. And a thermonuclear war is very obviously one of the things that might change the shape of these curves. And leaders are not racing up to this technological transformation of what it means to be a human, but instead of crashing back down, Albert Einstein famously said, somebody asked him, how will they fight World War III? And he said, I have no idea how the Third World War was brought. But I can tell you how they'll

fight the fourth with rocks. If we have this sort of outcome of the trend lines, then we can expect either the annihilation of humanity altogether or a complete collapse of civilization. So let's unpack some of this, because this is fascinating stuff. In your kind of score, your social development score, you assign 900 points of social development from the Ice Age, the end of the last Ice Age 15,000 years ago through to the start of this century, the 21st century. If you predict based on the acceleration of social development

over the last number of centuries into the coming hundred years, according to that graph and how it steepens upwards, we're going to add another 5,000 points of social development in 100 years, or five times what we did in the last 15,000. I mean, that would, as you say, suggest something is coming, something that we can't understand now, which would be just an immense earth-shattering transformation of the human experience. What do you think that something is?

Yeah, I think we can at least make some informed guests. about what might be happening next. People get very badly wrong about a lot of things. But if you read the science fiction from 100 years ago, some of the basic things, they could see reasonably clearly, that there will be travel beyond this planet, new means of communication, they would like to talk to people on the other side of the world,

a lot of stuff that they did sort of foresee. And I think we're maybe in a similar kind of position. So one of the things that people are particularly focused on, the futurists, I work down in Silicon Valley at Stanford University, so I'm surrounded by these rather strange techno-futurist people all the time. So what some of the techno guys are thinking about now is the ways in which we've already begun to augment the power of the brain with communication technology, and particularly the digitization of thought. I mean, they already experiments have been done at a sort of very basic kind of telepathy by sending, of course, brainwaves or electrical signals flashing between the neurons.

in your brain, detecting these, sending them over the internet. There was a great one a few years ago where a rat in North Carolina was made to move the feet on a rat in Brazil. And a very simple experiment. An experiment at mapping human brains, producing digital versions of them, one of the very early stages so far. However, it turns out, we are on the verge of a transformation of the human mind. So, Ian, this is a good segue.

to talk about, in a sense, the other side of the coin. So you've painted a picture for us of the potential here for an explosion in social development, a kind of revolution in the human brain, a somewhat utopian view of the world, because surely a lot of good things would come from, you know, a 5x increase in your social development score. But here's another quote from your recent book, War,

which talks about the other side of the coin. You write, When the Roman and Song dynasties failed to find solutions, they had the relative luxury of several centuries of slow decline. But we will not be so lucky. There are many possible paths that our future might follow, but however much they wind around, most seem to lead ultimately to the same place, nightfall.

What is nightfall, Ian? Nightfall is a term I borrowed from Isaac Asimov, the science fiction writer. And he had this great story, I think it was like 1943, so somewhere around there that he wrote this. There's a great story about a planet that orbits around multiple suns so that it's almost always light everywhere on the planet. But once every 10,000 years, they get to this little spot where their suns, their stars are all lined up, and it actually goes dark on one side of the planet. And when it goes dark, no one's ever seen this before, of course, they all go nuts and they burn everything down. Civilization crashes completely and starts again from the ground level up.

And so I just thought this is a great image. But when you look back across history, you see that things like Nightfall don't actually happen. I mean, when you get the collapse of the Roman Empire or any kind of other great setbacks we've seen in the past, the clock never resets to zero. You always lose all kinds of advanced skills, population crashes, people's lives are shorter and poorer, and all kinds of terrible things. But you don't go all the way back to zero. You don't start again as Stone Age hunter-gatherers. What's different now, I think, from any previous time? Well, actually, two big things are different.

One is that in the past, globalization has always been very partial up till now. And the different parts of the world are disconnected from each other. So you can have a great collapse in one place, but another place, not all that far away. might be relatively unaffected by this. And so you've got all these regions sort of in interaction, but not completely linked together. You can have partial nightfalls. And of course, now we are moving into a world where everything is linked together.

And the kind of threats that we've created for ourselves by this, like say, you know, climate change, pandemics, and these are obvious ones, the entire planet is linked together. I mean, I know part of the planet pretty much has escaped COVID-19. If climate change goes as badly as some of the predictions, as most of the predictions, every part of the planet is going to be affected, even if some more than others. But the one big thing, I think, that sort of moves us beyond even that level of scariness, is that if the record of the past that these great transformations are always accompanied by mass violence, if that continues to dominate the future, well, we now live in a world with nuclear weapons.

And that, I think that absolutely changes everything. And the good news is that, you know, for every, what was it, there were like 70,000 nuclear warheads in the world in the 1980s. And now, depending on how you count, there's many ways to count. But there's considerably less than 10,000 knocking around now. So, you know, pretty much for every 10 nuclear warheads in the world in the 1980s, we've now got, say, one available. We probably cannot kill everybody in the world.

in one day, the way we could have done around 1986, the peak of the arsenals. But we probably can kill as many people in one day as we killed in the whole of World War II. And nobody knows what the consequences are going to be of that sort of catastrophe. And of course, we're perfectly capable of building more nuclear weapons as well. So that, I would say that is the big game changer. If we go down the path of all-out violence, then we still have the potential there to destroy humanity together. Well, let's talk in about the big potential risk of where that violence could spring from because it's a big part of your writing and research, these kind of clashes of empires, these ebbs and

flows of geopolitical power from one region to another. So here we have a situation of, you know, an America that kind of bestrored the world as a colossus after World War II. You could even say before World War II, now being challenged economically first, but also increasingly technologically, and one has to wonder militarily in the future by arising China. As you've written and others have talked about, these are precarious situations when that large, comfortable power who's used to being in power finds itself challenged by a rival, a real rival. Tell us a little bit about why you think there are some analogies to the period prior to the First World War. You may want to go back to Thucydides and the contest between Athens and Sparta,

but give us a sense of what you see as an important historical dynamic that has played out at various times in human history with profound effects. Yeah, yeah. I think this is something that the kind of international tensions we see now are something that in different forms have played out over and over again in the past. And then, well, you mentioned Cucydides, he has this famous line about the Peloponnesian war between Athens and Sparta. It starts in 431 BC. And it's gotten recycled recently by the political scientist, Graham Allison, to talk about Sino-American relations.

And the Cucydides says, what made war inevitable in 431 BC was the growth of Athenian power and Spartan fear of that growth. So the Spartans felt trapped that they had to do something to stop the Athenians getting more and more powerful. It seemed like a preemptive declaration of war. It's a way to do that and head off Athenian growth, which led, of course, to this disastrous war. The Sparta ultimately wins, but it kind of breaks Sparta at the same time. And so Allison makes these rather gloomy predictions. He called this book, What's the Cicidities Trap? Yeah, destined for war or something like this.

gloomy prediction. Now, I guess I'm a bit less gloomy than that. I mean, I think that nuclear weapons have completely changed the way great power relations and playouts in the world. But they're not the only thing that's changed in the late 20th century. I think we've gotten a lot better now at mediating conflicts. And I say, you look back even as far as the 18th or 19th, through the early 20th century, using force often seem to be one of the first options states been considered. Now, it's, I mean, there's a lot of potentially very tense places around the world, but it is actually a little bit difficult to imagine anybody being so reckless as to think

that a quick recourse to violence is going to give the solution to their problems. I say something like Taiwan is one of the places, of course, people look at all the time. The People's Republic of China has always considered Taiwan just a bit of. breakaway province, there's always been talk of military solutions to the problem, just invade Taiwan, get it over with. They've never done anything like that. And at one time, watched a video of this great speech that Bob Gates had given, a secretary of defense here in the US.

And somebody asked, I think it was a West Point. Somebody had asked him, you know, why does the US have this terrible record at predicting where the next conflict is going to be? He says, oh, no, no, we don't have a terrible record. We have a perfect record. We have a 100% network. We have been wrong 100% of the time. And then he goes on the plane.

He says, see, that's actually sort of inevitable. Because if you see a place like Taiwan where there seems to be so much potential of the conflict, well, you do something about it. You put things in place to deter other people, make conflict less likely. And so the more likely a place looks to become the center of the conflict, In fact, maybe the less likely it actually is. It's the places you're not looking that you always get newer. Say a World War I doesn't break out over some colonial spat in North Africa,

the way all of the clever academics were saying in the early 19th, breaks out into Balkans. And that's what I think we have to plan for. It's the things that we kind of can't plan for. It's not a very optimistic conclusion to reach. Okay, Ian, we've got a ton of questions for you. I'm going to go first to a question. It's from Robert Kaufman. Robert's asking, two value systems seem to be competing for primacy today, communal goals versus personal interests and freedom.

In your opinion, which value system is most likely to allow humanity to thrive without exposing itself to existential risk? Great question, Robert. What's your thought, Ian? Yeah, yeah, that is a good question. This is one that I've been very interesting. Of course, a lot of people who tried to use history to think about what might come will tend to focus on these value systems. They play a big part in the story. The most recent book that I wrote that came out in 2015 was called Foragers, Farmers and Fossil Fuels, How Human Values Evolve. And I try to do the same sort of thing of looking at long-term history to understand why, you say particularly values about equality. Why is it that through most of human history in the hunter-gatherer societies, the value of equality was one of the most highly-priced values out there?

And if you're selfish in hunter-gatherer groups, on the whole, you're not going to do very well at all. People will gang up to drag you down. And yet then through most of the recorded part of history, when societies were based on agriculture, hierarchy came to be respected as an absolutely core value. It's like you go from a sense that people are all the same and no one. should be better than anyone else, to a sense that nobody is the same. Everybody is different, and we should recognize these differences. So that in a place like ancient Egypt, it seems perfectly legitimate to a lot of people to say, our kings are so much better than the rest of us that they can't be human at all.

They must actually be gods. And then since the Industrial Revolution, we've swung back, not all the way to kind of hunter-gatherer ideas of egalitarianism and fairness, but a considerable distance in that way. And so I got very interested in, well, what's likely to happen in the 21st century is everything else changes so rapidly. Can we assume that values and the value that we put on different kinds of behavior is likely to remain the same? And a lot of people in the 1990s, early 2000s, when there was most enthusiasm about opening up bringing China into the World Trade Organization, globalization, bringing everybody together, a lot of people were saying, well, when China starts to get richer, And when China gets more involved in more complex international trade systems, China is going to become more Western. They're going to be forced to become more democratic because clearly this is what works. I think up to a point they're right in the 19th and 20th centuries, the more a society

moved down the path toward democratization, getting rid of gender hierarchies, opening up the citizen body to people of all religions. The more they move down this path, the better they did. So, you know, the U.S., Canada, Western Europe, tended to do better than countries that were much more conservative. And so looked at from that perspective, it does seem like, yeah, yeah, sure, China is going to have to move toward the more individualized Western model. Yet now, I think, as we're moving further into the 21st century,

more and more people starting to say, oh, well, maybe that's actually not the case. And again, looking at history, in the past, you know, when the U.S. started becoming more successful on the global stage at the end of the 19th century, the US didn't get more Europeanized. Europeans started to worry about becoming Americanized. That sort of lesson the past suggests maybe rather than China becoming westernized, the rest of the world is going to become more easternized. If China is able to develop an alternative model of success in a very digital, super interlinked

global marketplace, that's just different from the marketplaces in 19th and 20th centuries. And I think on this one, we just don't know how it's going to turn out. Early optimism that China was going to become more democratic, that seems to be fading very quickly over the last 10 years. And maybe 50 years from now, we will all be talking about Confucius rather than Thucydides, talking about Chinese explorers like Zheng He rather than people like Columbus. Maybe that's the direction things are starting to go. Hi there, Rudi Griffiths, the moderator of the monk debates.

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Let's go to another question here. It's from Gary. It came in by email. Gary's asking, why is modern democratic capitalism failing so miserably at taking care of seniors, the children, the poor, the very people that carry the load? The failure is so glaring across this nation. I could be referring to the United States, I guess. China appears to grow in leaps and bounds all the while raising its poor into the middle class.

And maybe that's a wait for us to talk a little bit in about your views. What are they on the kind of inevitability of social democratic, democratic capitalism as a way of organizing society that confers advantages that allows it to out-compete other systems of human organization and therefore through social evolution, it becomes the preferential system. And eventually we're all going to move in that direction. You've talked a little bit about that, but I'd like to hear some more. One of the problems we've got now is that we've just got so many old people and people like me, I just turned 60 this year.

There's always been people who live to be 60. but hardly any of them. One of the great achievements of the 19th and 20th centuries, led by the capitalist economies, was creating conditions where people could just live to be a lot older than they'd ever been before. So now we have these huge numbers of elderly people, which we didn't have in the past.

And this is a fundamental social problem for successful economies of how do you care for people. Some of them are going to be too unwell to work and earn their own livings anymore. So you've got to generate the wealth to support them. Others are not, and we see plenty of people working on into their 70s, 80s even. What is that going to mean for young people, trying to move up? So I think in some ways, we've got unprecedented problems. In other ways, I guess I mean, I would actually disagree

with Gary a little bit on some of this. I think you're compared to most earlier societies, we do a really good job in the modern capitalist societies of caring for the poor, the downtrodden and the outcast, it's just that we're not doing as good a job of it as we were 30, 40, 50 years ago. And this, I think, raises this larger question of when we look back on the welfare states in the West, say in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, where it seemed to be one steady, so continuing expansion of care and expansion of rights for more and more people, was that the shape of a long-term story that we should expect to keep going through the 21st century in an ever more inclusive societies,

was this just some sort of weird blip that the West had been enormously successful, pulled way ahead of the rest of the world, suddenly had all these resources that never been available before, economic systems that thrived by including more and more people. So it's like, you know, the more you brought people in, the better you did, and the better you did,

the more people you could bring in, and everything else on this upward spiral. And maybe that we've reached the end, of that upward spiral, it's hard to know where things are going to take us, whether the 21st century transformations, the digitalization of everything, whether they are going to produce societies that are more and more inclusive and needs to have more of their citizens involved in what's going on, or whether we're going to see a tiny elite just pulling away from everybody else and leaving the rest to make shift as they can, or whether, in fact, we're just going to see some computers

pulling ahead of the rest of us. And all of humanity is going to be in the same boat. Fascinating. To build on that, Douglas has just emailed in a question that says, let me paraphrase here, many studies project the world's population will plateau over the coming 30 years or so

and then commence a significant and Douglas claims irreversible decline. Does he insubscribe to this forecast? And if so, how does it impact his thinking on the future of human civilization. There's that quip by Demestra that demographics is destiny. Do you subscribe? Sort of yes. I guess I would say I think demographics has been destiny through most of this. And they think people have kind of understood this for quite a long time now. And again, I would also more or less agree with the predictions that say that the population, global population,

is going to level off and start declining during the 21st century. But, I mean, yeah, all the trends do seem to indicate that's what's going to happen. In particular, it's one that some people will say is that kind of a sociological law, that as your society gets richer, people will tend to have fewer children, but invest more in this smaller number of children, because there's now more, your children are less likely to die, so you don't have to have spare kids as insurance. And as that happens, obviously, it's already happened in East Asia.

In China, birth rates had already started crawling before they put the one-child policy in place and turn out to be rather a very cruel and kind of unnecessary policy. Africa is going to be the big question of this. At what point do African populations level often and start to come? Again, all the signs are we should expect this to happen in the next 30, 40, 50 years. Thanks, Ian. We've got a question here from Ralph. He's going to use a term from one of your books, so you're going to have to explain it to us. If the point of global cops, your term, and again, and we'll let you describe it, is to raise the cost of violence to prohibitive levels. How do we explain the effectively constant warfare throughout the periods of Pax Americana and Pax Britannica?

Great question, Ralph. So unpack that for us, Ian. Yeah, one of the things I've been looking at was the way in earlier history, every time you've got a great shift in wealth and power from one region of the globe to another. It was always accompanied by massive violence. And because we now have nuclear weapons, this is a truly alarming prospect. This idea is one that was kind of obvious already to Thomas Hobbes back in the 17th century. And Hobbes was writing during the English Civil War, all these people were being slaughtered all around him.

And he says, well, what the heck is going on here? And he came to the conclusion that left to their own devices, people will just go around killing each other all the time, which actually seems not to be the case. they will use quite a lot of violence. We've evolved to be able to use violence to settle our problems. In the absence of constraints to make us choose not to use violence, we use kind of a lot of violence. And Hobbes says, well, what is it that persuades people not to be violent? And he said it's Leviathan, a Navy took from the Bible, a really scary monster in the book of Job. And he says, what prevents people being violent is when you get governments that are as terrifying as the biblical Leviathan. The government has a monopoly over the legitimacy. The government has a

monopoly over the legitimate use of force, it has way more force at its disposal than you do. The state creates this environment that exerts pressure on the subjects within the kingdom not to use violence over time. So it's this weird paradox. As the states get bigger and more sophisticated, more able to use violence themselves, they actually drive down the overall level of violence by dissuading everybody else from I think when we look at the long run of history, we see these states, these Leviathans getting bigger and bigger, more and more reach and power, driving down rates of violent death around the

world, while simultaneously raising the risk because the states get bigger. So if they do go to war, they can kill way more people than they ever used to do. And so by the 19th century, we've gotten to a point where the British Empire is able to function as a kind of global economy. Britain doesn't rule the world or even dominate the whole world. But it's got sufficient military and financial muscle that it can dissuade other governments, really all around the world, dissuade them from using force against each other, or at least can limit what they do with our force.

So like doing the American Civil War, Abraham Lincoln's biggest nightmare was not that he's going to lose the Battle of Gettysburg or something like that. But the British are not even going to come into the war. The British will just recognize the Confederacy as a legitimate government, which will then allow it to access all the bond market. It'll become much more difficult to blockade the Confederacy. And at that point, he's terrified that if that happens, the civil war will actually be stopped by the British political economic intervention and the Confederacy will become independent.

So you start getting these states with the capacity to act on a global scale, driving down rates of that even further by discouraging wars elsewhere. But if it goes wrong, as it does in 1914, of course, the results are absolutely horrendous. And I would say hardly the first historian to suggest this. There are all sorts of analogies between the situation the US has been in since 1989, arguably since 1945, and what the British were in in the middle part of the 19th century. And all sorts of similarities between what's happening with US power now and what happened with British power at the very end of the 19th century.

When you start getting these challenges, it becomes less and less clear that the global Robocop really is the sheriff able to enforce its will on the beat. You get more and more people kind of trying their luck, plodding Globocop, saying, well, will you go to war or will you, will you threaten me severely if I do this? How about if I do this? And if history is any guide, we never get the calculations right to 100% of the time. And the problem here is that in the right circumstances, getting it long just once, just one miscalculation gives you a nuclear version in 1930. Yeah, that I think is the big danger. And I think

the more your global cop starts to slip, the more you're going to see wars bubbling up in different places, challenges mounting. So this is one of the reasons why I say the next 40 years are going to be so alarming, so dangerous. In China professes, though, you know, not to have global ambitions in the same way that a Pax-American or Pax-Britania did, or quite explicit about their desire to build global empire. Does that change your thinking about how the next 40 years could look? And in effect, if you have a declining hegemon, but the rival isn't Kaiser Wilhelm.

It isn't an insurgent rival who wants to usurp the dominant power. So how could that potentially play out? Or do you think that it's very difficult, ultimately, for the Chinese not to accept the role of global cop? Because somebody has to be the global cop either, then the whole system doesn't work if you don't have one. Yeah, fascinating question. Xi Jinping, as you say, does not have to be Kaiser-Villel. There's another really good model out there for Xi Jinping, which would be Teddy Roosevelt in the United States. At the time when Germany is increasingly challenging Britain around 1900, the U.S. is in,

the even better position to challenge Britain. Its economy is bigger than Britain's by this point. It has the potential to build enough warships to dominate, to push Britain completely at the top of the pile. But they don't. And of course, geography has a lot to do with that. The United States is in a very different place from Germany, very different threats and challenges.

But they find ways to work it out with the British. And of course, the British also are more willing, for all sorts of reasons, more willing to try to work it out with the Americans than they are with the Germans. So yes, there are multiple models out there. And if we look at recent Chinese behavior, my sense is there's two schools of thought

among the international relations people. And one says is, oh, my God, these Chinese are so scary. Look at how much their policies have changed since the 2008, 2009 financial crisis. They're so much more asserted. Look at all the artificial islands in the South China Sea. They are definitely trying to push the U.S. out of the Pacific, out of the West Pacific.

And this is just the first step to replacing the US as the global dominant power. And it's hard to see how that can happen without there being a war. The other school of thought, though, says, well, yes, but you look at what China's currently doing, and it's sort of securing its near abroad, right? The way, say, the United States at the end of the 19th century, the US secures the Caribbean. They're not going to have any messing around with foreign powers in the Caribbean. Absolutely going to stamp that out. and they'll fight for that.

So they fight the Spaniards. They'll fight for that. But they're not building these great ocean-going fleets like the British, and they're not having military bases all over the Indian Ocean, I mean, obviously, the Philippines, not all over the Indian Ocean, not trying to challenge at a global scale. And some people will say, look at China.

China is sort of like the late 19th century U.S., not the late 19th century Germany. And China does have a base at Djibouti and East Africa, but they've been very, very restrained. about any kind of actions at a global level and building a high seas fleet, basically, the challenge the United States out on the open oceans.

So again, I think, I mean, I tend to think when you use history to think about the future, almost always what it does is lay out the parameters for the debate and say, these are the trends that we can see. This is where they might be going. We can maybe form some sense

of what is the most likely outcome. But a lot of this is dependent on the actions of individuals at the small scale. Nobody was guessing 15 years ago that China would now have a lead like Xi Jinping or the U.S. would have had one like Donald Trump. A lot does depend on the actions of the individuals. That, I think, is much harder to predict it. Thank you so much. Ian, it's such a pleasure to spend a bit of time stepping outside of the 140 characters

of a tweet or the news cycle of the next four hours to really really. reflect on the breadth, the depth, the scope of history, and try to use that in an interesting and engaging way to think about our collective future. And you've certainly done that for us and for our audience tonight. So on behalf of the Monk debate community, thank you for being part of this dialogue. Well, thank you very much. It's a great thing on the show. Thanks for listening to The Monk Dialogues with Ian Morris. We hope you enjoy the opportunity to listen to smart, civil conversation about the past and future of human. human civilization in an era of rapid social and technological change.

For more information on the Monk Dialogs, visit our website, monkdebates.com slash dialogues. We appreciate your feedback on this podcast. Please give us a rating and write a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you download your audio. Thank you for helping us bring back the art of public dialogue. one conversation at a time.