After the pandemic, the other big event of that infamous year, 2020, were the protests that followed the murder of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, by a police officer. Starting in Minneapolis, where he was killed, the protests and related civil unrest spread across the United States and eventually to dozens of other countries.
The murder of Floyd, the protests, the counter-protests, the political fallout, and the eventual conviction of his killer all touch on two of the biggest themes in this book: progress is real, and progress has a destabilizing effect on our societies.
The murder of an innocent man may not seem like a good example of progress of any kind. But, as with the example of the pandemic, you have to look for the good news within the bad. And there is good news. The fact that outrage over Floyd’s death definitively crossed racial – and briefly, political – lines. The fact that prosecutors did not engage in the usual stalling tactics in charging the police officers involved, or indeed that they were charged at all. The fact that the protests drew vocal support from governments and organizations around the world and inspired similar movements all over. These facts do show progress in discrimination and racial inequality, even if that progress is simply greater awareness of the problem.
But Floyd’s murder also shows the disruptive effects of progress, meaning change. If Black Americans want a change in their status, if they want their lives to matter as much as anyone else’s, that means all Americans have to change, one way or another. We have to change our laws, or our police, or our minds, or likely all of the above. How easy is that to accomplish?
That is the unfortunate complication of living in a society: It’s not just about you and what matters to you. It is about all of us. In order for you to get what you want, we all have to cooperate. The more we want – more rights, more peace, more prosperity, more everything – the more we must cooperate.
And that is where the problem lies. Or, as another victim of police brutality, Rodney King, once famously asked, “Can’t we all get along?” The answer is not “no.” We do get along, all the time. But the reason we don’t get along better is simple: Getting along, or cooperating, is really, really hard.
We have doubled our lifespans, outlawed slavery, invented semiconductors, and walked on the moon. But we have not yet constructed a single human society where people peacefully coexist with each other. It is that hard. We will cure cancer first. We will live to 200 first. We will colonize the solar system first.
It is not as if we are overlooking one weird trick, either. There are very good reasons we do not cooperate more. While cooperation in theory is usually considered a good thing, in practice it depends on your point of view. One person’s idea of cooperation might, to someone else, feel like domination, or exploitation, or submission, or manipulation. It is hard to think of any interaction or exchange between human beings that is perfectly equal. Frequently the imbalance is gigantic. Cooperation can be very unfair.
And it is hard. As individuals, getting along, or cooperating, may be the most complicated thing any of us do in our lives. It requires more of our time, our patience, our intelligence, and our willpower than anything else. After all, it was the demands of cooperation that drove our evolution out of the animal kingdom, and into this weird in-between space we now exist in, no longer wild animals yet still behaving like them far too often.
Cooperation is humility and recognizing your own insignificance. Cooperation is making the effort to understand – and even harder, to value – someone else’s point of view, and in so doing letting go of your own. Cooperation is doing the right thing even when others do not, and yet benefit from your sacrifice.
Cooperation poses an existential dilemma for all of us as individuals, as groups, and as a species. Are we individuals, or are we part of something larger than ourselves? And if we’re both, which comes first? And just how widely does that “something larger” apply? We struggle with these questions every day, whether we realize it or not.
But for all its pains, cooperation is totally worth it. Cooperation is what powers everything great about the After Age, and indeed every age. If we want to be more successful – healthier, richer, more peaceful, secure, and free to live, do, and say what we want, and not just some of us but all of us – we must cooperate more and better than we ever have before.
Given how hard and burdensome cooperating is, it should not be surprising that there is stiff resistance to doing more of it. Nationalistic, xenophobic, sectarian, and ethnocentric movements around the world are just some examples of resistance to greater cooperation. The denial of collective responsibility for various problems, climate change being the biggest example, is another. You may be surprised to learn, however, that so is opposition to globalization and free trade, increased governmental power and reach, and cultural assimilation. Those are all examples of how we cooperate for our mutual benefit, some of them more controversial than others.
I have a great deal of sympathy for anyone resisting pressure to cooperate more. It is entirely rational to resist any process where you, or your people, give up something with little or no immediate benefit. Everyone, sooner or later, finds the demands of greater cooperation unpleasant, unfair, or unacceptable, myself included.
And yet, we don’t really have a choice. The After Age has unleashed forces that are prodding us together, forcing us to cooperate more and in ways that push the limits of the cooperation we have already achieved (which, to be fair to the human race, is pretty impressive for a bunch of ex-monkeys). I will talk more about these forces in the chapters that follow, but the bottom line is that while we can resist and delay them for a while, sooner or later we have to figure out a way to adapt.
In other words, we can be dragged into the future kicking and screaming, or we can stride towards it with grace and finesse. Given what I know about the human race, I think it’s safe to predict it will be mostly kicking and screaming, and not much grace and finesse. But even a little more grace is very, very valuable. It is the difference between millions of lives lost or saved. And it could make the difference between infinite success and permanent failure.
In the chapters that follow, I will provide you with some perspective on why these pressures are occurring, and actionable ideas for how you can cope with and benefit from them while also contributing positively to the world around you. I start with the self, and then expand outwards to other people and groups, then other countries, and then abstract ideas like government, money, and more. But always the ideas are meant for you as an individual; I’m not suggesting how our nations or governments or world should change, just how you can change the way you think about them.
You may find some of the ideas that follow controversial. I often assume the worst about human behavior. I assume we are often selfish, biased, greedy, violent, shortsighted, and tribal, and that this is unlikely to change.
That does not mean we cannot be great, however. While I am a pessimist about many things, I am an optimist about the big stuff. I think we have a great future ahead of us, but we’ve got to be honest about our flaws first. For that reason, many of my suggestions are very pragmatic. They are not about us being our best selves, but just good enough.
Another reason you may find what follows controversial is that, as I have just explained, cooperation often is. In the first chapter that follows, I write about how individuals can be more cooperative in a way that is likely to cause strong disagreement in some people. In the next, I jump from the frying pan into the fire by discussing cooperation between groups and, specifically, the topics of social diversity and prejudice. Always tricky territory. I am not setting out to offend anyone, and I have taken care not to, but I might anyway. Apologies in advance.
Finally, I need to make an important point which is critical to the rest of this book. As I mentioned in the previous chapter, I have many biases, and those biases influence the ideas I present here.
Pointing out a person’s bias, especially based on their ethnic background, gender, class, and other demographic features, has become a common criticism in debate over many of the topics covered in this book.
This type of criticism can be traced back to the intellectual movement known as postmodernism. As a general definition, postmodernism considers “universal” ideas like truth, reason, and progress as made-up justifications for political or economic power. Taken to an extreme, postmodernism strips all objective meaning and fact from every idea. Everything becomes relative, nothing is real. Postmodernism, taken too far, is responsible for a lot of nonsense.
However, the underlying insight of postmodernism – that what we think is truth may be a product of our own point of view, or an accident of history – is not nonsense. It is, in fact, urgently important and (ironically) profoundly true. It is key to solving the knotty problem of cooperation, and thus it is one of the themes of this book.
We have entered an exciting period of human history. The 500-year dominance of Western nations and Western peoples is coming to an end. The 10,000-year dominance of men over women is, too. Those are just a couple of the most obvious examples of power structures and social patterns that are likely to fall, or transform, in the coming decades and centuries. Meanwhile, communications technology has allowed everyone to have a voice that can reach anyone else. New opinions and new points of view are growing louder. Things are kind of up in the air right now. Relativity and uncertainty are a truth for our time.
In other words, we live in a postmodern world. I am a postmodernist. And if you aren’t one yet, I hope you will become at least a little postmodern yourself after reading this book.
Being aware of your own bias, or to put it less critically, your own point of view, is probably the best advice I can give you for helping us all to be great. A version of this advice runs through every chapter that follows. It is advice I take to heart. For me writing this book, it was a constant presence, like a voice over my shoulder saying “Are you sure?” and “How do you know?” and “Who are you to say?” I take that voice very seriously.
However, as you can see, that voice has not stopped me from making some very sweeping statements about the entire human race. That is because I believe we still need those universal ideas, ideas that could apply to all of us, now more than ever, precisely because so much is now wide open. It is one of the paradoxes of the After Age. Our postmodern world makes it much harder to find ideas we can all share, while at the same time making that search all the more important. Whether they are the old ideas, reinterpreted, or new ones, we need them. That search requires more patience, more humility, and more work than it ever has. It is an intergenerational, intergroup, and international effort. This book is my contribution to it.