International Studies Newsletter – Word of the Chair
It is a terrible cliché, at the start of a new year, to come up with a statement about the uncertain times we live in. Every generation has a tendency to think that their time is marked by humanity’s largest challenges. It gives us pause for thought to realize that we are not the first, and will certainly not be the last, to think along these lines. Recently, two thought-provoking reflections appeared, which offer hope, especially when you feel troubled by bleak thoughts about conflicts and the future of humanity.
The New York Times recently ran an article with the title ‘The 100-year Extinction Panic is Back, Right on Schedule’.* It argued that, exactly one hundred years ago, a large panic gripped the world, about the extinction of the human race, informed by scares, such as a world war and the Spanish Flu pandemic. There is some evidence that these panics originated among the elite, in a period of uncertainty, and while confronted with challenges to power and privilege. An example of the cultural production, such as H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, illustrates this morose atmosphere. At the same time, however, major efforts were made to curb warfare, such as via the Geneva Protocol outlawing the use of chemical weapons, which had made the battlefield of the First World War such a horror. Also, the 1928 Briand-Kellogg Pact was a notable attempt to outlaw war as a practice in international affairs. Of course, it was highly, perhaps overly, ambitious but over the long run also highly influential. **
Going back yet another hundred years, there was another epoch marked by gloom and doom. Industrialization and the age of machines, which would overtake humans, as well as the outbreak of revolutions in the late seventeenth century also informed doomsday thinking. The dominance of rationalism, the ubiquity of machines and their productive as well as destructive powers marked this period. In my World History lectures, I raise the example of the Luddites, who agitated against his new mode of life by smashing the machines they were forced to work with.*** It is at this time that Mary Shelley wrote her famous Frankenstein novel about a grotesque scientific experiment. The Atlantic Revolutions upset the existing political orders, and a lot beyond those orders as well. Again, at the same time counter-forces emerged that brought us deeper reflection on the effects of industrial society leading to the period we now call Romanticism focused on emotion, imagination, spirituality and nature. Moreover, after the revolutions, the idea of democracy came to fruition and the idea that democracy could form a warranty against violence.
History does not repeat itself. Still, it might provide us with important echoes. As the New York Times piece concludes ‘Foretelling doom is an ancient human hobby, but we don’t appear to be very good at it’. If you embrace a dialectical view of history that everything seeks its opposite, we should already be able to perceive some counter-balancing against the new age of AI and the techno-optimism of the past two decades. Indeed, times of upheaval can be very formative for new ideas and new departures to emerge. In case you seek some inspiration for the authentic, for creativity and going back to nature, here are some suggestions for ‘new Romantics’. ****
* https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/26/opinion/polycrisis-doom-extinction-humanity.html
** Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro, The Internationalists; How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World (New York: Simon & Schuster 2017). I thank Jessica Elias for sharing with me the inspiration she derived from this book.
*** https://www.lup.nl/publications/history/global-history/world-history-international-studies/
**** https://enchantedlivingmagazine.com/how-to-be-a-modern-romantic/
For a deeper reflection on the merits of AI: George Dyson, Analogia; The Entangled Destinies of Nature, Human Beings and Machines (London: Allen Lane 2020)