The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Members-Only Pod: End of Abundance – Antisemitism

Episode Date: August 26, 2022

Munk Members Podcast provides listeners with a focused, half-hour masterclass on the big issues, events and trends driving the news and current events. The show features Janice Gross Stein, the founding director of the Munk School of Global Affairs and bestselling author, in conversation with Rudyard Griffiths, Chair and moderator of the Munk Debates. This week’s Munk Members’ podcast focuses on two stories in the news this week. First, President Emmanuel Macron gave a fascinating speech this week warning of the end of an era of ecological, technological and economic abundance. What would this actually mean? Is it a plausible description of future-facing France and other post-industrial nations? Second, the last few weeks have seen a slew of media reporting on antisemitic and white supremacy in Canadian politics, from the campaign trail of the Conservative Party leadership to the department of Canadian Heritage in Ottawa. Are Canadian norms changing? Why are we seeing more hate in our culture?   Rudyard’s Hub article on World Economic Forum and antisemitic conspiracies https://thehub.ca/2022-08-25/rudyard-griffiths-wef-conspiracies-are-antisemitic-and-a-moral-stain-on-conservative-politics/   Macron speech on the end of abundance (French) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AyYQRneG_I&feature=emb_imp_woyt   Joseph Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Civilizations https://www.amazon.ca/Collapse-Complex-Societies-Joseph-Tainter/dp/052138673X   This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue. More information at www.munkdebates.com.Become 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.

Hi, Monk podcast listeners. The following is a sample of the Monk members-only podcast. To access the full-length edition of this episode and all of our regular Monk members-only podcasts, go to our website, www.W.munkdebates.com and register for membership. Membership is free, and it's available for you right now at www.munkdebates.com. Hope you enjoy the program. Hello, Monk members. Rudyard Griffiths here. the host and moderator of the monk members only podcast. Welcome to this, our regular Friday edition with Janice Gross Stein, the founding director

of the Monk School of Global Affairs, an internationally renowned scholar and author. Janice, we're counting down the days to a new name for this podcast. Thank you, Monk members, I guess we're over 100 suggestions now. I'm not going to prejudice the pool quite yet. We're going to let this run for one more week. and then come out in September with the new name. So keep your suggestions coming in to podcast at monkdebates.com. One more week to rename the monk members podcast.

If we pick your name, we'll have you on the show. And you can explain to us what your rationale was. Janice, what do you want in a name for the monk members podcast? Well, I love names that start with the same. consonant right at the beginning. So best buy. You know, that kind of stays in my mind. So I'm looking, you know, and we've had some great suggestions come in, but something captures what we do, but two words, short with the same initials. So you kind of just roll it off your tongue. That would be great. I agree. Short is key. And it's part of the tyranny of podcasting. There's lots of tyranny.

podcast thing, but one of them is you've got these tiles, right, these show tiles. And they're like so small. They're the size of like, I don't know, my pinky fingernail on at least my aging eyes on my iPhone. And you've got to kind of stick the name in there. So people have to be able to read it in this super condensed space. So monk members, over to you. The challenge is a big one. We want a new name. Send us your ideas and suggestions to podcast at monkdebates.com. You know, Roger, just before we get serious, uh, Someone sent me a great one last night called Monk members Mashup. But I love that, but it won't fit on that tile in the way you just described. So acrony, MMM.

It's punchy. I like it. Yeah, so keep them coming. We really appreciate it. We're all having a lot of fun with this during August. We'll get the new name up and a new look for the show in September. Well, Janice, let's dive into our two topics this week. I want to go to France to the Lise Palace to kick off this episode.

You know, the French always historically have had just an amazing ability to kind of, I don't know, reach for the grand narrative. And their politicians, to their credit, are exceedingly well educated, have a beautiful way with language. And I think you and I really want to urge monk listeners this week to read a gutsy speech by Emmanuel Macron that set out, I'll let you summarize it because you're so good at that, Janice, set out a kind of clarion call of warning for Europe about what's about not only to happen potentially this winter, but something we've been talking on this podcast, really all. summer, this idea of regime change, that there is some bigger global pivot going on right now that we're all living through. Macron has taken an attempt to stab courageously to summarize what that pivot, that regime change looks like. Janice, what were the key parts of his thesis? You know, Macron is fearless in a way that politicians on this side of the Atlantic ocean or not. And he issued this call, as you said, Roger, for an end to the age of abundance.

The age of abundance that we've all grown up with is over. That's a tough message to listeners, frankly. And how did he illustrate that? The end of abundant resources that we can just exploit and consume the end of financial resources of ever-growing budgets, where we have this optimistic view that we're going to continue to grow, and we're all going to have more and more to spend. The end of the abundance of security, which Europe certainly had, the sense that they were never going to war again. Remember that skating speech by Donald Rumsfeld were Mars, there Venus?

Well, Macron was saying, Venus no more. All those things that made our life so rich and frankly, so easy are over. And we are in for a major reset of our politics. Now, I think he's absolutely right. it's also predictable. There was a firestorm of fury in France from people who said, abundance, what is he talking about?

We are unemployed. We don't have savings. We are living on the edge. One more example of a rich politician isolated from the experience of the people that he represents and the pages of the French dailies are just on fire in reaction to the speech, but he's getting at something very important. If you think back, Roger, really the environmental movement told us that.

A long time ago, that resources were not inexhaustible. And we have to become stewards as well as spenders, but it has taken a long time for that to reach the point where we all understand what they're talking about. Yeah, and what's interesting, Janice, is it kind of extended this argument beyond the environment where I think people can understand, and they're used to, as you say,

environmentalists have been beating on that drum for a while to the economy and to technology. And that, you know, third leg of the stool, I know is something you've spent a lot of time thinking about. It's kind of, I don't know, I want to wrap my mind around that, because you kind of think of technology as just endless zeros and ones, like what's the abundance problem? can just create more of it. But I took away from it. And there is a well-developed body of literature

on this, a kind of the diminishing returns on complexity. Yeah. And basically, you know, Nassim Talib, Joseph Tainter, the collapse of complex civilizations, if you want an obscure book to read that's like really, really interesting. Check it out. All these theorists for a while have been saying, you know what, be careful Western civilization. You are constantly investing in just-in-time delivery, in instantaneous communication, in this amazing profusion of technologies that seemingly makes life more abundant, easier, but be aware of the fragilities in that system and the extent to which, yes, networks can have redundancy, but they also can have fragility. Do you think that's what he was kind of getting at, a kind of the diminishing

returns of complexity, budding up against our own sense of entitlement and what we think it means to be prosperous and successful and secure in this second decade of the 21st century. No, I think that is a big part of it, Roger. The vulnerabilities that grow out of technologically sophisticated society. And I think, you know, all of us understand now in a different way what he's talking about. We did not anticipate the kind of monitoring of everything we do that technology now makes possible. Literally no one is anonymous anymore. And you're five clicks away from having people read about your family or know what you're doing.

And there's that piece about the second piece you just talked about. And we saw it in the Rogers outage. There was a problem inside the core network, a piece of code from everything we understand. But that literally brought half the country to a standstill as people were not able to access the technology, which is foundational to their life in ways that we don't realize. And there's the third piece, because you asked me for an example of Richard, which we're just starting to talk about now, but boy, when we get there, which is this explosive growth of AI, artificial intelligence,

which is not on the front pages, but astonishing things are happening. Here's one. Coters were able to create a language called Lambda, which has grown to the point where Rudyard, if we put you in front of a Lambda-empowered machine, you could have a conversation with Lambda, not with me, and Lambda would not be scripted. Lambda would listen to what you're saying, reorganize,

and drawn this vast trove of data, and give you a response that sounds a lot like a human being. that you probably would not know the difference. If you think about that at the very far end of the frontier, humans may not have the abundance at the end of the century that we've had for the first 2000. So it's an astonishing age. She's right to talk about. And technology is never neutral. We all can see the good in the sense that it makes life easy for us, but we don't see the negative consequences that can really change the fabric of our life. So I, you know, I don't think abundance was the right word for president to use politically in the middle of a recession

and rising unemployment and shrinking energy in a long cold winter ahead for Europe. from everything we know. But he is right to say we are in a great reset. And those last- Oh, don't use those words, Janice. The Weft conspiracy theorists will come in the World Economic Forum. I know. Boiled hat wearing haters will come out of the woods.

And they hear the great reset. By the way, I did Roger, let me just say this to our members in Rudyard, write a great column this week on the hub about about what and about the people who think it's a source of all evil and conspiracy. So if you missed it, go check out the hub and read Rudger's column. But we are in a reset. And why use that word, Roger, because it cannot be for most of us, business as usual. But Janice, you know the counter argument.

It's going to be, hey, there was this thing called the Club of Rome in the 60s that did the exact same thing that said the Age of abundance is over. Western society, you know, must, you know, do X, Y, and Z. And guess what? We got another half century of a lot of abundance. The Club of Rome was wrong. Like, why aren't we wrong again this time? That is a really great question because, you know, let's go back to Malthus, who said that population was going to explode and deplete the whole world and we would never be able to feed. And we're over 8.5 billion people now. And yes, we have terrible hunger. But we've used technology to figure out, frankly, how do we increase our crop yield? So it's a great question.

And we should never underestimate human ingenuity. But what we've got here, Roger, is we have convergent crises. And that's always the moment. It's multiple streams flowing into the river, not one. So it's not just environmental destruction, which we can all see and feel, frankly. We can see the change in the climate around us. We can see what's happening in our order to. So it's no longer a debate, frankly.

We know that our own activity creates this. Secondly, security. We cannot take it for granted. We really believed that we, We had put war behind us in Europe. Yeah, Manuel Kant's perpetual peace. Yeah, and we thought that had arrived. Figured it out, right, in Europe.

And the rest of the world was going to catch up to us. But we had figured it out. Wrong. Security is not abundant. You have to invest in it and invest in it and invest it. And it takes resources away from other things. And then finally, think back a decade, Rudyard, in finance and economics, The lingo was, we've figured out the capitalist cycle.

We are not going to have these booms and busts anymore. Remember that? Well, wrong too. So when you get these convergent crises, and that's what Macron really was talking about, something big and foundational is happening underneath. It's convexity to use a fancy term. It's just all these things are amplifying.

each other in this moment. I do hope and I do think we can get out the other side. Just one amazing story that I heard in the last week, just a moment of some optimism to share with people. Scientists in the UK have figured out that plants, you know, when they're exposed to a lot of sunlight like soybeans or you name your major food crop wheat, they stop photosynthesis to protect themselves from too much sunlight.

So they flood. their cells with a chemical that allows them to photosynthesize less because there's too much sun they can't process it. And then it takes a number of hours or time for them once the sun levels change to go back to lowering that chemical and restarting photosynthesis. Well, these scientists using gene editing have been able to significantly shrink the time it takes for the plants to lower their protective barrier and resume photosynthesis, increasing crop yields according to their initial tests of these new strains by 20 to 30 percent

across soybean, wheat, pulses, many of the major sources of caloric intake for the world. So I just mentioned that one data point because I always find in my mind I struggle and people who listen to the podcast know that I'm often the glass half empty person, but I struggle about this race we seem to be in with ourselves as a species, a race where at one moment we're creating these immense existential dangers, environment, nuclear, you can go on and on. And at the other moment, we're creating these amazing technologies that seem to just be keeping up with the existential

threats, keeping us forward of the potential type of collaboration. that I think the Macron's speech is so controversial because it doesn't say that's going to happen, but it for the first time has a major public leader putting into the public's imagination, the idea that everything isn't going to be okay. Yeah. Yeah. And you're right to race us, Richard, because in a deep sense, humans adapt just like plants, right?

that's all of evolutionary history is frankly we evolve, we adapt, we change in response to stresses in the environment. And there is really, you can't help but be impressed by human ingenuity and creativity over and over and over again. But that doesn't take away from Macron's point that we are entering into a period where we're going to have to adapt, where the practices we follow for the last 40 years are not going to be great guides to what we're likely to be doing 40 years from now. And that's why I said abundance was not exactly the right word for him to use, but he is getting at a point that we're just on the edge of some big changes that we're all going to have to make good and back. Great. I encourage listeners, Google that speech. We'll see if we can

find a genesis stick of the English language translation. But if your French is good enough, mine isn't to last. Wow, does it sound great in French? It always sounds better. Always better. Always better. Even these big weighty terms, it is kind of cutting that gutterle pronunciation going at really, wow, I love it. Okay, when we come back from this quick break, we're going to talk about what's kind of become a summer of, yeah, I'm just going to use the H word, a summer of hate in Canada in August, some kind of alarming stories across the political spectrum where hate in a variety of forms seems to be rearing its ugly head. Why is this happening? Is it presaging something about our politics, about our culture? We're going to get into that right after this break.

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