We tend to think that the present must be better than the past.
We often believe that history carries us upwards so that we should always progress and have a more successful, safer and also more comfortable and interesting life than our ancestors and even ourselves a decade ago. Indeed, if we take particular markers such as violence levels, life expectancy or level of education, it would seem that we've progressed a lot and we must be happier than generations before us.
At the same time, when we look around, read the news about numerous conflicts happening in the world, about the way people are acting, or assess our current living standards, it feels that things are not as great.
"How is it possible in the 21st century?" is one of the most popular reactions to the news I've had and heard many times over the last few months and even years.
With the fast development of technologies, it was easy to fall for the progressive 21st century. We didn't have cars just some 120 years ago, mass electrification wasn't yet a thing in the early 1900s, passenger planes didn't become widespread until about 100 years ago, television became mass media only in the mid 20th century, computers entered every household just 40 years ago, the Internet wasn't invented until 1983, smartphones came into our lives just about 15 years ago, and now we are watching AI entering all sectors.
Besides, we know the history and tend to believe we don't repeat old mistakes. From this perspective, we assume that things like genocides should never happen again. But they do, over and over again.
Apparently, even though we want to believe in progression from point A to point B, history doesn't really work that way. Furthermore, western culture and politics came up with this progressive advance theory not that long ago. Our ancestors believed the future wouldn't be much different from their past and present, and if anything is to change, it's only for the worse.
But with technological progress and advance in education, European philosophers and then other public persons started to believe that from now on, people will decide their future, and will make tomorrow better than yesterday. People have lived with these ideas for quite a while. Canadian and American pioneers built countries with the hope of a better future for their descendants.
However, sociologists notice that people currently are rather pessimistic about where we are going to end up.
Old conflicts raised their heads all over the world with people trying to resolve them in an ancient manner but using contemporary weapons. The polarization and division into us versus them, which was one of our main survival mechanisms thousands of years ago, is back again.
Even the word pogrom, which I've never heard outside the historical context before, is back to news stories. (It's a violent riot incited to massacre or expel an ethnic or religious group, particularly Jews; the term entered the English language from Russian to describe 19th- and 20th-century attacks on Jews in the Russian Empire).
Even though the Israeli-Palestinian and Russian-Ukrainian wars are discussed the most in this part of the world, the bloodiest conflicts are happening in Africa. The civil Tigray War (2020-22) in Ethiopia claimed up to 600,000 lives. There are currently more than 45 armed conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa, as well as over 35 conflicts in Africa, in numbers, the most affected regions, according to the Geneva Academy.
And even though the dry numbers of conflicts are on par with the previous years, there are also more radical, far-right wing and populist governments winning more and more votes in developed democracies from Europe to South America.
Antisemitic moods are on the rise in many places. (Not that long ago I was in downtown Regina where a man was chanting for extermination of Jewish people. Similar words come from pro-Palestinian protests from all parts of the country and other regions – something, I thought we promised not to repeat about 80 years ago.)
Polar attitudes, often focused on anti-immigration and particular groups in different states, are spreading like chemical contamination in the water.
So, what went wrong and how is it possible that our progressing history took such a dramatic turn?
Well, it didn't. We have always been good at forgetting past mistakes, and progress has never been a given or constant.
Progress is not an axiom but rather one of the many theories trying to explain the world around us and one of the ideas we believe in. But regress is as possible in 21st century, if we collectively choose it.
