Whenever I walk down the street, I can’t help thinking of René Barjavel, a science fiction writer, who when asked (in 1947) to imagine what the future might look like conceived of a vision (then made into a short film ‘La Télévision, l’oeil de demain’) where human life was dominated and disrupted by handheld ‘television’ devices, to the extent that people walked through streets bumping into each other as they watched their screens.
The guiding thesis of Barjavel’s work related to the undermining of civilisation by technology, something that is now becoming more apparent as a widespread trend.
We are at a point in the very long run of history where many established patterns of human behavior are being subverted…in what I call the ‘Great Retreat’. That is to say that in general people – in the West and Asia are retreating from established norms of behaviour, and specifically are retreating from traditional social interaction. These deviations from trend are occurring in the way we socialise, the effects of what we consume on our bodies and perceptibly the ways in which we organise our lives.
Here are a few snippets to illustrate – there is growing documentation of the effects of a loneliness epidemic and researchers are linking this to higher rates of Parkinson’s and cardiovascular disease, a large cohort of adults and young adults in countries like Japan living in effective celibacy and this is also a factor in China whose population is now in a structural decline whilst in the West the birth rate in England & Wales is the lowest on record, a tripling of worldwide obesity since 1975 according to the World Health Organisation to these extent that the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention puts US obesity prevalence at 42% – something that has contributed to a vertiginous drop in life expectancy.
In brief, in many countries human body shapes and cardiovascular health are changing for the worse, they are interacting less with each other, consuming more information from ‘manufactured’ or non-human sources (the average American checks their mobile device 159 times a day) and are breaking with the cycles of life that have defined the human race over the past three thousand years.
There is a sense that these trends represent a new departure compared to the established social patterns of the past two hundred years, but they also coincide with much lower poverty globally, generally greater longevity (except the US) and broadly greater wealth.
However, there is also the unavoidable impression that the above trends are correlated, and in the view of someone like Barjavel perhaps, are provoked by over industrialisation (of foodstuffs and lifestyles), over-financialisation (of real estate) and over digitisation.
The effects of the ‘Great Retreat’ are already being felt in politics – higher levels of abstention and radical ‘left/right’ voting in many countries and large differences in voting intentions between younger and older generations, and in work patterns (my hunch is that for younger workers the trend towards working from home is altogether less productive).
This sets up a significant task for policy makers, especially those who grow up during the ‘Great Retreat’ and who may not question its long term effects (such as falling birth rates).
In the context of a more laissez-faire approach, a dystopian society threaded together by social media, with high levels of wealth and health inequality could arise, but there might also be a tech led path that could continue to solve the side-effects of obesity and low fertility rates.
In a typical European model, a policy approach might well involve the introduction of ‘civics’ courses in schools on the importance of diet, use of social media, primacy of democracy as well as greater sanctions on disinformation. On the human side, pension and tax systems may well see revolutions that incentivise higher fertility and city planning will, in an ideal world, start to incorporate the need for greater sociability.
Either way, the conception of the ‘Great Retreat’ as a policy idea is not yet upon us but it might be an idea for one of the dwindling world institutions like the WHO or UN to take up.
