(Q&A) John Gray - Imagina el Mundo

[Music] yes [Music] a [Music] thank you very much for that question you've touched on a fundamental issue or rather maybe several fundamental issues i think my first comment would be that the um pandemic actually doesn't show any signs of subsiding yet and that if it's true that there are many people who've not really absorbed its lessons about what i called hypermobility then if we have another wave this winter uh which seems to be happening in europe uh and in uh britain for example and if that were replaced that were followed by yet another wave in other words if this was a success of series of of waves or pandemic outbreaks then i think that experience would constitute quite a strong lesson and the lesson would be you can't go back as you said uh uh the lesson is that we can't uh revive this um uh um system of uh uh continuous hypermobility all over the world because it was that system that helped to produce the pandemic but i think the other question you asked is also a very important one which is uh will people be ready to go back sorry it will be people uh not not uh want already to go back to the previous mobility and i don't think that's the case the evidence in many countries is that large numbers of people don't want to go back a large numbers of people found their life in the uh economic system that existed before uh frustrating they don't want a lot of mobility in their daily life uh they may want they may like would like to resume tourism perhaps but as far as their working life is concerned um they would want less mobility not more so you might say that this is a benefit though it sounds strange to put it this way it's a discovery a benefit a beneficial discovery of the pandemic that many people were more frustrated with their lives before the pandemic and they discovered during the pandemic that what they considered to be normalcy wasn't fulfilling wasn't satisfying that it was it was burdensome um so i don't think it'll be a case of um uh governments forcing people to go back to the previous uh system if they do they'll fail and there's quite a lot of evidence at least in britain in other countries that people just won't comply they won't go back uh and i i think it may be in this respect that the popular response um may be more benign more benevolent if you like than um many people fear as the capitalism itself well people have been predicting the end of capitalism at least since marx and earlier and it is a very um versatile uh system it it it can adapt quite quickly but in this respect if it doesn't adapt enough i think governments will actually started defeating an example i gave in my talk is that a number of governments are actually uh encouraging uh um firms to repatriate their capital and their uh businesses from where they were before which were the cheapest countries uh cheapest in terms of labor and production costs on grounds of may on the on grounds of either national security or just making the economy their own economies more durable and resilient because one of the problems of the global free market capitalism that existed before is that the vast delicate network of just-in-time delivery systems from all over the world was extremely fragile it could break down almost at any point and so i don't think even if even if firms would like to go back to that system because it's the cheapest for them they won't be allowed to the pressures of um politics and democracy if you like or even in countries that aren't democratic popular pressures will um force them uh to to adapt to this situation a that's a very good question the greatest risk of this fragmented world is geopolitical division intensifying and even leading to war and one of the features of this recent period has been that long frozen conflicts have blown up again such as in the gono-karabakh for example uh between india and china uh for example and there's a long-term smoldering conflict between um the people's republic of china and taiwan so there are quite a part of the uh tension between um the united states and china so there are lots and lots of geopolitical divisions that could be um uh made more uh intense and dangerous uh if this fragmentation assumes a highly competitive form uh that's a big danger who has the winning hand i think it's too uh fluid uh a situation to really pick a winner there are some losers uh people who are already poor in many countries are getting poorer they're losers um small to medium businesses in many countries are losers uh often uh from the measures that are taken to curb the pandemic because as we know in europe and also i think in latin america and north america although in my view most of them are very necessary have been very necessary they come with terrible deep profound economic costs and even of course with health costs because people who are already don't have good health care or who have pre-existing conditions apart from covid can't get the health care that they need but it's not clear uh which groups uh will emerge as the winners will china emerge as a winner against the united states um well it had a very drastic response to the to the to the pandemic and may have curbed it although we don't really know because the information that comes out of china is not always wholly reliable um i'm it's just not clear at all because the impact of this pandemic on economic life is much more profound than i think people recognized to begin with everyone was talking about getting back to growth which assumed that industries that existed before would come back but it seems to me obvious now that um the airlines industry is not going to come back in the way that it was there before lots of industries that depended on hyper mobility are not going to come back in the way that they were before uh there will be a period of destruction uh in the um in the economy uh which is uh probably both unavoidable but also i think very dangerous because it can leave society whole sections of society devastated and unhappy and that's one of the reasons why in my talk i said that as this pandemic goes on governments will fall even whole political systems will fall in various parts of the world um if we think of it as extending over several years which i think it probably will i'm not an epidemiologist but many of them say that this is a likely outcome if we think of it as as um involving uh uh stop start lockdowns uh um if we a local regional national international um uh then we can see that the uh impact on employment on living standards will be uh uh very acute for large sections of society even some quite big firms if they're in these industries that depend on hypermobility are not going to survive for example the oil industry is is deeply impacted uh by all this new energy solutions will have to be found the oil industry isn't going to come back so it's a very profound change and that's why in an article i wrote in the british new statesman magazine i said this was a turning point in history not just a small blip that would last about 18 months and then we'd go back to what before it's a huge uh uh uh event or succession of events bigger and deeper in its implications than the spanish flew 100 years ago because a hundred years ago although there was a form of globalization then the world wasn't as integrated as it became later hypermobility was didn't exist on anything like that scale even though there was migration and international trade uh there wasn't mass airport transportation so this is bigger a lot bigger and will have longer and deeper effects and dangers but um so it's not that i'm not worried about it it's simply that um uh i think if you if one wants to think about how to cope with something as big as this one has to understand to begin with that there's there isn't going to be a global authority dealing with it and the reason for that i mean a lot of people on the progressive left say this is a global problem there must be global solutions i think this is magical thinking right from the start of the pandemic back in march i said uh this will deepen and sharpen geopolitical divisions and i even predicted uh this hasn't quite happened yet but i'm sure it will that vaccines and treatments would become weaponized in the struggle between countries and this has happened a bit with the united states which has preempted some of the brought up 90 or more of the of certain types of treatments and i think when a vaccine comes or a number of vaccines they will help to deal with cope with the pandemic but there are two sort of issues one is they will be used by governments to promote their policies and objectives and secondly there might be quite large levels of resistance in the population to taking the vaccines because trust is broken down between people and governments they won't trust them they'll fear that the vaccines have are faulty that they've come too early and haven't been tested enough and there's also in america and elsewhere all over the world actually but in america very noticeably there are large movements made up of conspiracy theorists some of whom don't believe the pandemic is real others think it's spread by telephone masts all kinds of crazy theories are and have millions and millions and millions of um followers so the vaccine by itself uh won't do anything uh uh sorry the vaccine by itself uh will aid matters insofar as it's used intelligently and adopted but the problem will be with adoption it'll probably be with popular acceptance and that's in a way a political problem because it emerges from what i've just mentioned namely the breakdown of trust between people and electors which i think has happened anywhere everywhere i think it's happened not only in america not only in uh in uh but also in latin america in brazil and in many other countries no one trusts the government anymore no one believes them when they present a fact if it is a fact they say well this is the fact it's just another lie um uh and that i think is a tremendous tremendous difficulty which we've simply got to make which different countries different groups different parts of society have simply got to make their ways with their way through as best they can [Music] is is is [Music] is yes that's a very good question too and i'm afraid the answer is they are exposed and they will lose out i mean if you ask going back to the earlier question because it's connected with this this question too which countries so far have done the best in uh responding to the uh pandemic it hasn't been america north america united states or western europe or um or britain they're all done relatively poorly actually uh all latin america the best have been asian east asian uh south korea taiwan and japan and that's partly because they are highly technologically developed it's partly because their workforces i mean there is an informal economy in all of these countries but there aren't the levels of extreme poverty that exist in many latin american countries and the size of the informal economy is not huge i mean i would estimate you would all know better than i do but in countries like brazil or mexico might be what 20 or 30 percent something like that large uh in these east asian countries be much smaller um and i'm afraid the countries that will do the worst will be ones with very large pre-existing inequalities and low levels of social solidarity across the whole society and governments which tend to uh uh embody the interests of the smaller better off groups those are the countries that will have the hardest adaptation countries where there's less inequality uh uh where um uh society is is not already fragmented will do better so that's a very um unfortunate fact uh about um uh this uh pandemic which is that the defects or in the inequalities the divisions the fragmentations of existing societies are aggravated exacerbated deepened and sharpened just as they are in international relations in international in geopolitics uh the conflicts and divisions that exist get deeper and sharper and so they do within societies uh but i don't think this will be restricted to latin america i one i would definitely not attempt to predict the outcome of the american presidential election because there is still but one thing i do predict is that whoever wins whether or not trump accepts that he loses if he does loses america will be at least as divided or more divided after the united states i'm talking about not latin america now will be more divided after the election even though it's been until now and the reason for that is that the impact of the uh coronavirus of the pandemic in america on uh not just poor people not just people who are the poorest but large sections of the workforce and even large sections of the middle classes has been very destructive already and will continue to be destructive even if joe biden gets into the white house and launches some new program so i i think the point that's been raised is very important and significant not only for latin america where it is very important but even for north america even for the united states to societies that are already let's put it like this a society like the united states can only can only work at all i don't mean work well but just function if the economy is working at full speed if the economy is working at full speed it's flat out it's going as fast as it possibly can it may be shaking and rattling but it's going very fast then it sort of works although under the surface there's a huge opioid crisis people are dying in enormous numbers from opioids there are huge levels of distress and post-apocalyptic industrial centers like detroit or other parts they're all there but somehow it it keeps going if it slows down a bit if it uh slows down significantly for a prolonged period if if growth stops or the economy shrinks all of which you've had have happened then these conflicts emerge uh uh immediately and they stay uh in existence uh uh uh more or less whatever happens at the higher levels of of political life so i think you're quite right i think the question is quite right this is a very uh very a very difficult a very difficult issue so the so what can you what can we learn from this one can learn that conflict is not going to diminish within societies within many it's going to increase [Music] could you say a little bit more about the change in the notion of distance that you have that you took from what i said what does what you have in mind more precisely [Music] associated [Music] a thank you very much i mean i i understand better now what you're asking it is a very interesting question i think that the change that has occurred and will continue to occur is actually um as much in the sense of time as it is in that of distance um if you think how that applied in the 19th century if someone was planning a journey whether they were rich or poor across europe or from europe to america or even more to australia or asia that would take a long time it was only towards the end of the 19th century that underwater cables were created telegraph cables that transmitted information back and forwards from for example uh north america to western europe so one of the things which i think has been most disorienting for many people is that the sense of time seems to have accelerated uh since the pandemic in other words that has the other side which is a shrinkage of distance so a kind of paradoxical effect of the uh uh we're all able to watch live as president trump stages his walk into the white house when he does his reality show we can actually see him doing it when it's actually happening and so um uh and even many interactions personal and other interactions uh are now much quicker or like the one we're now having if we'd had this exchange um uh before the pandemic it might not have been virtual we wouldn't have been able to exchange ideas straight away as we do now we might have done it by email or telephone or some but we have now an instantaneous or almost instantaneous interaction with one another uh uh and that of a kind that's becoming much more common since the pandemic and i think um i think the the acceleration of events which has been explored to some extent by philosophers in italy and france and latin america and elsewhere the shrinkage of the sense of time is connected with the shrinkage of the sense of space so paradoxically in the virtual realm we might get a more uh um integrated world than we will in the physical realm of production and physical mobility uh uh there might and also there will be and already are many more uh uh many new virtual communities that didn't exist before there are two problems with this which um uh uh i've mentioned in uh things i've written which i mentioned partly in my in my talk my talk for the hay festival one is the one which um uh uh uh i touched on briefly which is that human beings can't live a holy virtual life we didn't evolve to be virtual creatures there are some far out sects techno utopian or techno-futurist sects in california and other parts of the world which want to upload themselves into virtual space so they can escape the conflicts of um the actual world i i've been i've known about these sects since the 1980s when i met some people who were already thinking along these lines and uh the problem with that is that all the the virtual world is the protection of the physical world without an infrastructure a material infrastructure which can be destroyed by wars earthquakes climate change revolutions economic collapses it doesn't work so uh but it's nonetheless a very strong tendency in thought particularly in america but also elsewhere for example one of the leaders of it of this view ray kurzweil is director of engineering at google so he has a vast budget vast resources to pursue these ideas which i think are completely absurd but so humans are adapted to a physical world they can't live in a purely virtual world and an aspect of that too though is that the virtual world is actually quite energy intensive uh a lot of energy is needed to keep these uh virtual linkages intact and and working so it doesn't offer a complete solution uh um in any way at all it has its own problems uh uh both human problems and ecological or environmental problems and the idea of escaping completely into a virtual universe is pure fantasy but it's one of the adaptations the move to virtual spaces one of the adaptations that humans have that that we can see in the world that's humans aren't are are making to this changed uh reality what happens i mean i hope this doesn't happen because um perhaps in the long run it won't be a vaccine which gets us out of these difficulties it may be more effective treatments if we had treatments which made even severe uh coronavirus infection uh highly treatable in most people we'd be less worried about catching it it could become more like the flu it might still be more infectious it might still be somewhat more damaging but we can get back to something like um [Music] more human contact with one another without worrying about it but if this goes on for a long time i think it um if that could take years or decades even then we're going to have to somehow find ways of meeting in the flesh safely and they might involve uh regular checks uh um they might involve all kinds of arrangement we haven't even thought of now because we can't live most of our lives still less all of our lives virtually the human animal is simply not evolved and not adapted for that purpose and it won't change for that purpose and if you try to do if attempts are made to do that they would backfire people would go crazy i think they're already i think there's already quite a lot of craziness in the world i think the um growth of conspiracy theories which is very important and dangerous is partly a response to the acceleration of time which as i've just pointed out in response to your question is another aspect of the shrinkage of space the change in the sense of space a well i've hardly ever been pessimistic enough i think pessimism is a very useful survival technique and it's a very useful way of detecting for example back in 2002 i was one a a year before the iraq war i started attacking the project of a war in iraq uh uh in march or april 2002 as you know the invasion took place in march uh 2003 and i said uh at the time that looking at the history of iraq looking at other countries which had suffered forced invasions intended to change the regime it would be a catastrophe i even said the state would break up it would look like chichen yeah and people said oh terribly pessimistic or hopelessly apocalyptic nothing like that would even happen it's nothing is possible it was worse than that it was actually even worse than that um um so i think if you're thinking of pessimism um as a personal characteristic it makes you less surprised by events in the world though sometimes they're not they're even worse than what you expected but also i think it's it's a precautionary approach to uh politics which suggests that huge vast schemes of human emancipation of the kinds that the neoconservatives it's not only found on the left the neoconservatives on the american right had which is that the iraq war was going to bring about democracy all over the middle east some of them even had the idea of regime change in china and other countries as well and the world was going to become uh a vast democracy model on america now there were several problems about this which is that america was nothing like the democracy that they thought they were projecting you would have needed regime change in america to start with um it was fantasy from beginning to end and it was predictable so some things are predictable and what i would say about my way of approaching um world uh events is that i try to focus on unknown gnomes you remember mr rumsfeld in america talked about uh unknown knowns and uh known unknowns well i specialize in unknown knowns that's to say things that actually if you think about it and consult the facts you know in advance that they're not going to work you you can absolu so for example in the in the in russia too uh back as early as the um 1991 i was saying if the west persists in attempting to impose on post-communist russia uh a a kind of extreme and idealized version of capitalism it'll be rejected there'll be a political political um backlash um it'll be such huge social costs pensioners dying in their hundreds of thousands which is in fact what happened in russia uh that that some other regime will emerge and it will be a kind of hybrid regime but it will be naturalistic and it'll ultimately be anti-western that's exactly what happened um uh of course all politicians are optimists all politicians sell hope but the role of the thinker the intellectual the commentator the observer is i think to uh um puncture the a bit and to warn people of the worst outcomes whether it has any practical effect it certainly didn't in the case of my warnings on iraq because a year later i even by the way wrote a piece before the invasion of iraq uh a satirical piece suggesting that there would be large-scale torture everyone thought that was terrible uh everyone thought that was misanthropic and pessimistic and nihilistic that's exactly what happened to abu ghraib uh there was widespread why did i think that well there was widespread torture in algeria during the war of independence there this was a different situation it wasn't a war of independence but it was a bitter conflict uh um and uh there'd been torture in afghanistan uh both by uh the allied forces and uh the taliban it's bound to happen there so at least you approach um uh if you adopt this what's sometimes called pessimistic i think it's just realism if you adopt this approach um then if it could be embodied to some extent in government which is very difficult to do then you might invol you might avoid some of the worst needless disasters there was no need for the war in iraq there was no need for the war late for the regime change in libya which has also been a complete disaster uh they were not evils that we had to put up with they were uh um uh imposed on the world by foolish policies uh so that's how i consider my um by focusing on known unknowns things we all know about to some extent but we just don't want to think about it then we can um i think at least uh understand the world better okay [Music] thank you very much you

Channel: Hay Festival ESP

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Length: 37min 12sec (2232 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 11 2020