Geopolitics for the End Time

Bruno Macaes

• Publisher: Hurst Publishers
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781787385542
• eBook ISBN: 9781787385832
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Geopolitics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

As we approach catastrophe, everything changes. What are the lessons from the pandemic? How well have different cultures and societies responded, and could this become a turning point in the flow of history?

Before Covid, a new competition was already arising between alternative geopolitical models–but the context of this clash wasn’t yet clear. What if it takes place on neutral ground? In a state of nature, with few or no political rules, amid quickly evolving chaos? When the greatest threat to national security is no longer other states, but the environment itself, which countries might rise to the top?

This book explores how Covid-19 has already transformed the global system, and how it serves as a prelude to a planet afflicted by climate change. Bruno Maçães is one of the first to see the pandemic as the dawn of a new strategic era, heralding a profoundly changed world-political landscape.

Cover image: Ludwig Meidner, ‘Apocalyptic City’, 1913. © Ludwig Meidner-Archiv, Jüdisches Museum der Stadt Frankfurt am Main

1

SPACESHIP EARTH

There is something about life during the pandemic that cannot but remind me of space travel. You wake up, walk around the spaceship, connect the video messaging, go back to sleep, knowing it is still nine or twelve months to planet Trantor or planet Terminus, or the next galaxy system, where we expect to arrive…

This was how it felt: leaving the world behind, retreating to some protected sphere where the whole point was to let time pass until it was once again safe to go out into the world, albeit a new or changed one. The first tragedy is that many never made it to the safety of this time machine. They were left behind and their deaths were especially grim because of the complete loneliness surrounding them. The numbers kept growing, but the numbers alone fail to explain how the pandemic became, for an age used to life, the purest representation of death. It was the deadly struggle in the emergency or high dependency units where the machines helping you breathe by forcing air into the lungs at high pressure made patients feel they were suffocating. It was the moment when they had to be intubated, knowing there was a one in two chance of never waking up again. It was the fear of becoming death not only for ourselves but for others as well. The fear of becoming the vehicle of their deaths and the fear of being left alone in our dying moments so that others might not die with us. Even when hospitals started to allow relatives to be present at the moment of death, they had to do so from a distance and while wearing full protective equipment. As one doctor put it in a moving testimonial written this year, all the Covid patients who die do so alone: “There is nobody to hold their hand. Nobody to comfort them. Nobody to tell them they love them.”¹

Even survival became a form of death. It was soon apparent that the best way to survive was to sacrifice a portion of our lives, to give up on a few months or a few years of the life we knew and loved in order to get the remainder back. It was this bargain that reminded me of space travel and the inconvenient fact that space travel, in books and movies, tends to be paid in life years, the time to make the journey from planet to planet, through dead sidereal space.

It was a common experience, bringing together most people around the world over the last two years. Some sacrificed their globe-trotting habits. Others postponed weddings or were forced to close down their small businesses. Children lost a year of school. Older people stopped meeting their grandchildren; many became victims of the pandemic before that cruel exclusion could be lifted. We stopped seeing our friends, or did so with so many rules and with so much caution that nothing felt the same. Jobs were lost and personal plans abandoned. We were all looking through glass. The largest and busiest cities in the world seemed entirely empty for long periods. Those photographs will probably endure for a century or longer as the main symbol of the pandemic. I remember reading one post on social media where a young woman asked if she could postpone entering her thirties for a year, given how the last year had been lost. It was a way to capture the experience for those who survived it. Our sense of grief now extends to all the time we are never getting back.

The experience reflects something both novel and important about our historical moment. This retreat from the world into a protected technological abode would not have been possible in the past. As we shall see later in this book, it was not possible a century ago during the great influenza pandemic known as the Spanish flu, when the tools we had available to manage our economies and societies were relatively primitive. Imagine closing all schools before a transition to remote learning became possible. “Try to imagine what 2020 would have been like without Google, Amazon, Zoom, Slack or any of the other online services.” As Noah Smith shows, it is a nightmarish vision. Everyone would have to use physical stores. “Imagine the lines stretching around the block as impatient mask-wearing crowds stood six feet apart, waiting hours for the chance to buy some toilet paper or soap.” People would have to go into their offices or else firms would have to halt operations. This was the reality for many frontline workers, of course, but large parts of the economy found a much better solution and fared much better. Those economists who have argued that the value of digital technology has not shown up in economic growth figures were blinded by normal times. Sometimes technology works as an insurance policy and we have to measure its impact against the state of the world during an emergency.²

It is certainly possible that this great migration to remote life might not happen again in the future. Some have speculated that, assuming new breakthroughs in biomedicine take place in the near future, Covid could well turn out to be the last great pandemic. In 2020, caught by a dangerous environmental threat but capable of building an artificial environment protected from it, we simply retreated to our terrestrial spaceship.

For me the most vivid memories of the pandemic will probably remain those from the week in Istanbul during which the management of my hotel each day announced a new closure: first the pool and gym, then the restaurant, then the cafe. One morning my floor had become pitch dark. Soon the hotel itself announced it would close in two days, forcing us to move out. Then the shops closed and finally the parks. The airport stopped working.

As I write these lines, we are starting to arrive at the destination, the world after the virus. Videos from Israel show us what the new planet might look like at first, with the exhilaration of being at long last free giving way to the deep desire to enjoy life and make up for lost time. Nightclubs in Tel Aviv reopened in March 2021, one year after they were ordered to close. On May 9, Israel reported only eight new cases, a figure taking us back to when the disease was an exotic occurrence. In the United Arab Emirates, where I now live and, after Israel, the country with the second fastest vaccination campaign in the world, tourists and travelers arrive each day from the five continents searching for normality and a place to which all can travel with fewer restrictions. When I arrived at the beginning of the year and a friend walked me through the Dubai International Financial Centre, I nodded with genuine obeisance for the place. It was mostly the feeling of witnessing human life again, landing in an inhabited planet again. The shops and easy money quickly became as insufferable as they have always been.

I have started to think of Dubai as a kind of Casablanca, a free city where pandemic exiles can congregate. Other countries are catching up in their vaccination campaigns and will soon join us at the end of our space odyssey: “Oh what joy, in the open air freely to breathe again! Up here alone is life! The dungeon is a grave.”

In May, spirits brand Hennessy said it was expecting a liquor renaissance as consumers splashed out on pricier drinks in a quest for celebration. “Some call it the revenge of pleasure,” chief executive Philippe Schaus mused.³ Government data in the United States shows that millions of Americans aged 55 or older are contemplating retirement years earlier because of the pandemic. The vivid brush with disease and death seems to have helped them reconsider the commitment to climbing the corporate ladder.⁴ As Mike Bloomberg put it at the Johns Hopkins University Commencement in May 2021, “whatever you do tonight and tomorrow, and for the rest of your lives: Do it like the world may lock down again tomorrow.”

When the futurist architect and thinker R. Buckminster Fuller created the image of the Earth as a spaceship, he wanted to underline that we live in a welcoming planet where everything can be made to serve our interests. “Our little Spaceship Earth is only eight thousand miles in diameter, which is almost a negligible dimension in the great vastness of space.”⁵ As Fuller noted, the spaceship is so extraordinarily well designed that it took us until very recently to even notice we were on board a ship. So perfectly designed that it is able to keep life regenerating on board by accessing energy from another spaceship, the Sun, traveling at just the right distance from us.

We were lucky with our planet, although luck is not really the word. And obviously, the technological imperative cannot consist in using our planetary spaceship in such a way that we risk impairing or even destroying its operating systems. The technological imperative is to think of our own planet as a complex machine that must be kept in order if we are to survive the journey. The spaceship came without an instruction manual, so we had to use science, which is just a way to reverse engineer the planet, but for Fuller the basic work of science is one of preservation and regeneration.

The Biosphere 2, a project inspired by Fuller and built between 1987 and 1991, was originally meant to demonstrate the viability of closed ecological systems to support and maintain human life, a substitute for Biosphere 1, the Earth itself. A crew of eight humans lived inside the fully enclosed structure for two years, going gradually insane in the process. Oxygen levels decreased faster than anticipated, reaching a hazardous threshold. Extra food had to be smuggled in, against all the rules, and group morale collapsed.⁶ The experiment was supposed to announce a future world where humanity lived in harmony with nature. It turned out to make a very different point, one that now looks eerily prophetic. If humanity must take care of its common home because it is finite and resources limited, what lies beyond its walls? It must be a hostile environment of some kind to which the most reasonable response is the one tried by the “biospherians” and now so personal and familiar to all of us: a strict lockdown.

Singapore has taken the concept of the pandemic spaceship to its logical conclusion. Its bubble facility for business travelers allows guests to stay in hotel-like rooms, have meals delivered to a cubbyhole outside their door and to conduct business meetings with other travelers or even Singaporeans. Located in a convention center five minutes from Changi Airport, it plans to host 1,300 travelers by the end of the year. In the meeting rooms designed to host outside guests, the two groups are separated by an air-tight glass panel, and each side of the room has its own ventilation system. The boardroom includes a document transfer box equipped with ultraviolet lighting for disinfection so that the two groups can pass documents back and forth.⁷

I use the image of the spaceship in this sense. By imagining human life as taking place within a large spaceship, we learn that the best image for our natural environment is not the pleasant greenery of the countryside, or even the flooded plain, the creeping weed or the locusts of the desert, but empty space, a medium fundamentally indifferent to life. Perhaps one day we can make physical nature as safe and welcoming as our artificial spaceship, but that can only happen after it has been mastered or controlled by human technology. Remember how in the movie The Martian Matt Damon’s character is able to grow potatoes on Mars? Well, he does not grow them on Mars but in an artificial surface habitat, the Hab. The line between human technology and the external world remains valid. For the time being, the imperative is to remain vigilant.

As an image for the pandemic, the void or emptiness of the space age is illuminating for a second and more important reason. In some sense, the virus was a return to nature, opening up every political regime to the challenges posed by a hostile environment, a prelude to many other natural crises in our future. What it could not do was return us to the time lost in the past, when nature, under the guidance of a benevolent intelligence, could provide instruction for human life. A mimetic view regards the world as having a given order and a given meaning and sees human beings as required to discover their meaning and conform themselves to it.⁸ That is no longer the way we regard the world. We are builders, even when our buildings collapse or our cities are buried in sand and dust. The nature which has suddenly irrupted into normal life is pure negation, the danger of the void. Every country, every civilization was forced to recognize in the pandemic the sudden possibility of loss. Ways of living and achievements that we regarded as final and safe were exposed as fragile and perhaps temporary, in danger of being destroyed or engulfed by the emptiness. The work of civilization was revealed as never fully finished or even protected from the ravages of a hostile environment.

The obvious fragility of the global order placed us face to face with the void, the “eternal silence of these infinite spaces,” to use a famous sentence from Pascal. The second part of the great lesson is that we are not alone in empty, infinite space: we have the power of technology to help us survive and prosper. As I continued to think about what the pandemic means for the future of humanity, I became attracted to the image of life in the space age. This book tries to explain why it is much more than a metaphor.

The German legal theorist Carl Schmitt, who died in 1985 at the age of 96, has risen at times to take the role of interpreter of the current pandemic. What he saw—and what has been confirmed by events now very familiar to us all—is that a moment of great danger to the state or to public safety cannot conform to preexisting rules and procedures. The precise details of an emergency cannot be anticipated or spelled out. But Schmitt failed to realize that there is a response to this predicament. The way to prepare for the emergency is to develop our powers of reaction well in advance. The war against nature will last longer than was hoped. And if that is true, our approach to technology needs to change.

The pandemic was a test. Covid saw through what nations say about themselves and revealed what they truly are. Like individuals, governments and regimes can survive or persevere in ways that tell you very little about their capacities. Ability is only evident in action, and action is far from being a constant. In normal times, routine is king. Impersonal rules and procedures may be applied more or less automatically, with little need for decisive action, because nothing will happen in its absence. But when an emergency strikes—an event outside the realm of the ordinary—then rules are useless, and one must return to the original spring of action, understood as a test against the world, with a necessarily uncertain outcome.

In one of the most intriguing tales in Don Quixote, we read about a young man who, married to a beautiful woman of high birth, cannot help thinking that her virtue is not as real as her beauty. It has not been tested. The only true virtue is that which has been forced to prove itself. As he puts it to his best friend, “what thanks are due to a woman for being good if nobody is asking her to be bad?” He wants his wife to be put to the test, pursued by temptation and offered the opportunity to resist it. His friend tries to dissuade him, and his arguments are the very image of reason, but, when everything has been considered, not powerful enough. This earnest friend tells him that it is a symptom of a rash mind to put something dear at stake in the way he plans to do. If someone had a diamond which every expert agreed was true and perfect, would it be reasonable to place it between anvil and hammer, to deal it blow after blow in order to see if it was truly as excellent as we think? If the stone passes the test, it will not become any more excellent than it already is. And if it is destroyed, all is lost, and through our own fault. It is inappropriate, he says in a striking formulation, to perform “experiments on truth itself.” His friend listens in silence. He knows the danger, but he also knows that truth is not the same as assuming something to be true.

It was easy to think of this tale during the worst months of the pandemic. We had such perfect societies. But they had not been tested.

The tale, needless to say, has nothing to do with female modesty and all to do with the relation between reason and society. What Cervantes is raising is the possibility that our most sacred beliefs are accepted out of habit and convention rather than their intrinsic value. The Enlightenment in Europe was a questioning or a denial of dogmas or practices whose truth no one was allowed to doubt. Everywhere in politics, the individual found divine rights, established privileges, sanctified tyrannies armed with oppressive power. Against the rule of the existing religious and political order, the modern age stood as an experiment on truth itself. As Sri Aurobindo writes, every claim of authority and every sacred truth was put to the test:

But is it really so? How shall I know that this is the truth of things and not superstition and falsehood? When did God command it, or how do I know that this was the sense of His command and not your error or invention, or that the book on which you found yourself is His word at all, or that He has ever spoken His will to mankind? This immemorial order of which you speak, is it really immemorial, really a law of Nature or an imperfect result of Time and at present a most false convention? And of all you say, still I must ask, does it agree with the facts of the world, with my sense of right, with my judgment of truth, with my experience of reality?⁹

In the tales of adventure that so attracted Don Quixote, the hero actually sets out without a task or mission. He seeks adventures. What are these? At first glance, they are the sort of perilous encounters with other knights by which he may prove his courage. They are moments outside the ordinary, accidents—but accidents one actively pursues. Usually, they take place in a hidden forest or some other extraordinary landscape in order to stress their unusual and even supernatural essence. There is no social and political context for these adventures, no organized joust, no sacred realm to be defended against the infidels. Here the feudal ethos serves no political function; it serves no practical reality at all. It has become a game, a trial of triumph and loss. In one of these romances, we hear a knight in the court of King Arthur tell us about the time when he came across an ugly and hideous peasant who claimed to watch over the beasts of the woods. Asked what sort of man he is and what he does there, the knight answers that he seeks what he cannot find, “adventures, to test my courage and my strength.”

Very few people would willingly set out in search of dangerous and unexpected events, outside the realm of ordinary life, for the sole purpose of testing their prowess and ability. And yet these events do happe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1. Spaceship Earth
• 2. Star Wars
• 3. Escape Velocity
• 4. A New Planet
• Notes