Have you noticed how we never seem to reflect on, discuss, even have, beautiful and great ideas anymore? Like, say, giving every human being on planet earth an education, retirement, income, savings? Like, say, nourishing every life on the planet — human, animal, or plant? How would we even do those things? Do you ever wonder?

Wait — aren’t those the very frontiers of the things we casually call “progress” and “civilization? So why is it, again, that we never discuss them, as societies — in the op-ed pages, on Twitter and Facebook, on the news? How come we’re too busy on war hysteria and the latest daily scandal? There’s something very wrong with all that.

The bad guys are winning across the globe because we gave up on the great, timeless, and most beautiful projects of civilization and progress. Yes, really. The result is that we’re trapped in a kind of pointless, self-destructive cycle. They frighten and scare us, with yet another provocation. We react. See what happens? We’re always the ones on the defensive. We’re always on the back foot. Then, maybe, we attack each other. Nobody has the courage, grace, wisdom or truth anymore left, really, to say something as outrageously, shockingly beautiful as: “We should have a world where every single life can prosper, even an insect or a meadow of flowers or a tiny baby tree.” What the? LOL — everyone would mock us and call us soft and stupid and naive. We’d be laughed at by a neo-fascist right…but also by a decadent left more obsessed by what to call what’s in whose pants than whether the planet’s burning down. See the problem?

Take the example of America’s latest war hysteria. Trump threatens Iran, Americans flip out. Rinse, repeat — the cycle’s gone on, with some imaginary enemy or other, for decades now. Meanwhile, leftists argue about…comic book superheroes. And you know what never happened in between? Americans never learned to care about those great projects of civilization and progress, like an education for every child on planet earth. Go ahead, ask the average American — they’ll probably chuckle and call you crazy. But you are not the crazy one. It is not crazy to support the great and timeless projects of civilization and progress. What’s really crazy — foolish, ignorant, immoral, and childish — is not to. Why?

Do you know what really scares a neo-fascist? The idea that every child on planet earth has healthcare and money and dignity and self-worth — all those people they think of as subhumans. Imagine if we made them debate that. That principle, idea, fact, logic. That they are not the most important ones. That everyone is. That is how progress and civilization are really made.

We don’t set an agenda for a better world anymore. There isn’t one, really. That is why we are losing, and the bad guys are winning. When we ourselves — the putative good guys — don’t really value or cherish or even remember or understand the great projects of civilization and progress…what do you expect but an age of barbarism and regress? Isn’t it obvious when I put it that way? Let me explain what I mean — precisely.

What are the great projects of civilization and progress — the most beautiful and wise and true endeavors of history? Are there any? Of course there are. I can put the theme this way: “every life should have the rights, resources, and freedom to realize itself to the limits of its possibilities. Every single one.”

There are three great projects of civilization and progress humanity’s embarked on, to be precise — great and grand endeavours, which have been going on for millennia now, weaving their ways through war, persisting past folly, enduring like beautiful and wise old trees.

The first one is expanding personhood — freedom. A millennia ago, a “person” was only someone of noble blood. Fast forward a few centuries, and a few revolutions, and now personhood included peasants. At least some of them. Then women become people, and now minorities are, too. But that project is hardly complete. Who isn’t a person? Trees, rivers, forests, animals. Refugees, migrants. Even women and minorities aren’t still full persons in many ways. Until every single life on planet earth — from you to a poor war orphan to a koala to a tree — is recognized as a person with inalienable rights, this great project is incomplete.

The second is expanding prosperity — justice, happiness, worth. Just like with personhood, the idea of prosperity a millennia ago was something that belonged only to the “noble.” The rest could eat, as the line famously goes, cake — if they had any. A century or five later, prosperity began to include former peasants, too. Today, who does it really include? The American middle class collapsed. Globally, labour’s share of income — the people who were once peasants — is falling. Until every single life on planet earth’s well-being is expanding and growing, this project is incomplete.

The third is realizing potential — dignity, grace, meaning. Let me give you an example. American pundits will say that the Chinese are better off today than five decades ago — but spending your life on an assembly line making iPhones versus being a poor rice farmer is still hardly making the most of yourself. Until every single human being on planet earth is free to realize their possibilities — to be that great artist, novelist, scientist, or even just that humble teacher, farmer, husband, wife — this project is incomplete. Until every tree reaches the sky, every human being makes the most of themselves without fear of want, every wild animal lives in their little nest— this project is incomplete.

(Here’s an even simpler way to think about all that. Every human being on earth should have an income, education, healthcare, retirement, housing, savings. Every wild animal should be free to live to a ripe old age. Every river and reef and tree should be free to live without violence. And so on.)

You can see, then, that we have a very long way to go, for the projects of civilization and progress to be anything like even half-way complete. Where would you say we are on the scale I’ve described above? I’d say: we are not nearly at a point where the idea “every life should have the rights, freedoms, and resources to realize its fullest possibilities” is even remotely true. Maybe we’re something like a quarter of the way there. It is far, far from true, right about now, isn’t it? Look at, for example Australia burning, or a billion people still starving, or another three billion working at crap jobs, instead of accomplishing their dreams, or think of every single tree cut down too young. We are far from a place we can call “the heights of civilization and progress” at all, yet, in the story of human history.

And yet our politics, culture, and society seems to have forgotten about the great projects of civilization and progress entirely — that they exist, that they ever existed, why they matter, what they mean, why we should care. You will never, ever hear them discussed, say, in the pages of the NYT, on CNN or MSNBC, in Time Magazine, and so on. They just don’t matter. If I sent the NYT an op-ed tomorrow…which said “every kid on planet earth should have an education (and every animal should be a person)”, they’d laugh at me. Who is this hippy-dippy joker? Doesn’t he know the answers to everything are war, violence, brutality, and greed? LOL!

But which one of us is the foolish one? The result of systemic ignorance is individual ignorance: that the average person grows up with something pretty close to zero awareness of history, time, or human endeavour at this scale, as a process of millennia, what “human civilization” and “progress” really mean, as projects. So why did we stop taking the great projects — the biggest and truest and wisest and most beautiful things in human history — seriously?

Well, the reason on the right is pretty simple: the right isn’t interested in the great projects of civilization and progress, and never has been. Why not? The right’s fundamental values are against them. Loyalty, hierarchy, purity of blood, tribalism, authority. It’s inherently against the idea of a freer, better, fairer world, in which every life is reaching its potential. To the right, the one outside the tribe or clan is the enemy, the subhuman, the parasite — only worth enslaving, abusing, or annihilating. Hence, now that the hard right is in power across the globe, that process is exactly what’s happening. Concentration camps are arising. Division and hate is surging. The planet is burning. Want to know what an extreme right wing world looks like? Like…now.

The reason on the left, though, is stranger and more baffling. The right never supported them — but the left simply forgot about the great projects of civilization and progress, wrapping itself in a security blanket of narcissism. The great projects of civilization and progress are barely a distant, hazy memory now for the left now.

If I say to the average American self-described centrist or leftist, something like: “Do you support gender pronouns?” They’ll say, heatedly, “of course!!” But if I say: “Do you support the idea that every life on planet earth — of any kind — should have all the resources, freedom, and rights it needs to realize itself? Or how about just a general strike across the world?”, they’ll probably look at me like I’m crazy, and laugh at me, and call me stupid and hopeless.

But who’s really the crazy one? They’ve been taught a narrow, shallow, and foolish strain of leftism, emanating from self-described campus “radicals”, whose sole concern and highest priority appears to be…sex and pleasure. This isn’t leftism at all, really — it’s just narcissism. It’s precisely what you might expect from student politics. But “having sex will save the world!” isn’t exactly a politics fit for global transformation. It’s hard to see how, for example, it would have stopped…Australia being incinerated. The hard part of being on the left, or in the center, is supporting ideas and causes far greater than yourself. And of those, the greatest are the enduring projects of civilization and progress.

But identity politics shattered the left in this way. It became a group of tribes, vying for power, on the basis of their self-descriptions. Jockeying for status and power and so forth, “I’m the most oppressed!”, cried one. “”No, I’m more oppressed!!”, cried another. My friends: none of these dunces were anything like as oppressed as an endangered koala or a poor orphaned kid or a half a billion animals being incinerated. That is the extremity of oppression. Recognizing yourself and only yourself and your own tribe as the most oppressed in the world isn’t remotely left. That is, more accurately, being on the right. The left became the right, in other words. It cares about its own narrow wants, needs, desires, first…which appear mostly to be sex and gender…which is what you might expect from Peter Pan style campus “radicals” who never grew up. And global poverty, the planet, democracy, and everything else…comes a distant, vague last…if they enter the picture at all.

(Please note, I’m not saying your gender and pronoun and identity and whatnot don’t matter. I’m saying more or less everything else seems to have stopped mattering very much to today’s left, at their expense. Are they a part of what I call great and timeless projects? Sure they are. But they’re not the only part. If the only thing that matters, or if the thing that matters most, are pronouns and ticking checkboxes for your very own special identity on Facebook…who is going to fight for the globe, the planet, the future, the animals, the trees? If all that matters is you, you, you, your pleasure…and those just like you…who is going to care about the great, timeless, and enduring project of giving every single life on planet earth the rights, resources, and freedom to realize itself? Nobody much, it turns out.)

The result of a childish left that dreamily forgot about the great and timeless projects of civilization and progress, and a right that was always bitterly against them, is…now. The fascists, authoritarians, kleptocrats, theocrats, demagogues, and other assorted lunatics are winning by the day. Because what defeats the bad guys in the end is a great and transformative idea: the idea that the world should be a better place. All of it. Not just my life or your life, but all life. Then we are all standing together. Then there is a thing called solidarity. Then there’s something bigger than all of us, any of us, and each of us. And that thing has real power, at last.

The bad guys are frightened most when suddenly, there is something much, much bigger than them. The fascist, authoritarian, mafia — they all stand for the tribe, clan, bloodline, territory, supremacy, hierarchy, loyalty, violence. To defeat them, you and I must stand for something even bigger than all those — something as big as possible. The planet, the world, life, history, the future, prosperity for all of it, peace across all of it, freedom for all of it. All of it. Then they are on the back foot. Then they are startled. (Imagine the conversation: “No, I don’t just think those kids shouldn’t be in camps. I think every life on planet earth should have rights and freedoms and income and healthcare and education. Even, maybe, a tree.” What can the fascist say now? No? You’re dumb? Now he’s the one on the back foot. Now he’s the one who’s on the defensive. Now he seems small and stupid and ignorant. He must defend the fools’ logic of the tribe, clan, bloodline — and face ridicule and losing power and status in the process. Do you the point a little bit?)

When we stand for the projects of civilization and progress for a whole world, all of it, not just ourselves, or people like ourselves — then we are really different from the bad guys. Until then, we are not. We are just the weak, feeble, self-absorbed people they want us to be: divided, at one another’s throats, frightened and intimidated into submission. When you and I say: “that child is no different from us. That tree is no different from us. That river is us, too. All of us deserve freedom, rights, resources…as much as it takes to realize ourselves”…then, my friends, the bad guys are terrified a little bit, or maybe a lot. Now they are fighting something bigger than them, finally. And they know that they are going to lose that battle. Because nobody can fight something that much bigger than them.

But right now, nobody is fighting for anything bigger than themselves. Not really. Not anymore. The right is fighting against civilization and progress, like it has always done. But the left and center are not really fighting for a better world — as in all of us, humanity, planet, globe — either. They consider the old great projects soomething like quaint old antiques — gathering dust on shelves. Hence, the left and center are wrapped up in their own petty, narrow, and mostly trivial concerns. You can tell me your special pronoun or your Facebook or Tinder identity matters more than continents on fire and a billion people starving…but like most sensible people, I’ll roll my eyes, walk away, and wonder when you’re going to grow up a little and get over yourself. We’ll huddle in our corners. We won’t fight for anything together — because there’s nothing big enough to fight for. The bad guys will win. History will repeat itself.

Those old and dusty, great and grand, timeless and beautiful, projects of civilization and progress have never stopped mattering. They’re not antiques. In this age, we’ve forgotten them. And we need to remember them if we want to win again. Us, the good guys. We have adopted the posture of self-defeat, having been battered and abused and intimidated and frightened for so long by the extreme right.

We are too frightened and scared to say something like: “I believe every single life on this planet — human, animal, ecological — should have the freedom, rights, resources, to realize itself.” Who’d take us seriously then? Everybody might mock us — from those nasty wannabe fascists, to even our own allies and friends on the so-called left, who might wonder why we’re not as interested in the burning issue of who gets what tickbox on which app for their very own special pronoun this week. Everybody might think we’ve gone soft, stupid, silly, romantic. And so we stay silent — or worse, ignorant.

It takes real courage, real wisdom, genuine empathy, abiding compassion, and fierce defiance to really stand up for a genuinely better world — all of it — in ways that are enduring and historic and beautiful. People will mock you, taunt you, hate you, oppose you. On both left and right. In the center, too. You will be called a romantic, a fool, a simpleton, a dreamer, by all sides and every side.

And so right about now, my friends, nobody much is passing the test of standing up for a better world — all of it, humanity, planet, globe. What happens when we forget the great projects of civilization and progress? Isn’t it obvious? Barbarism and regress. Hate and violence. Ignorance and fear. Stupidity and greed. The tribe re-asserts itself, the demagogues demand allegiance to the bloodline, and the frightened masses kneel in fear. All of which you can now see in India, China, America, Britain, and beyond.

And so the great projects of civilization and progress are something like Roman aqueducts now. Still functional, but barely. Buckling and crumbling. Left to time and dust. Because people, as they say, have moved on. But do you know what happens when a world gives up on itself? It collapses, one slow implosion at a time.

That, my friend, is your true challenge. Remembering those great and historic and timeless projects of civilization and progress. Standing up for them. They have always been the things of the greatest and truest beauty, defiance, grace, and wisdom. They are how we become better people — in the struggle to make a better world, in its pain, mistakes, futility, triumphs, and celebration.

Umair

January 2020