If the 1930s Are Repeating Themselves, What Did We Learn From the Last Century?

We Still Haven’t Learned the Greatest Lesson of the 20th Century Yet (The Improbable and Beautiful Recipe for Human Prosperity)

On this 75th anniversary of D Day, what strikes me is a certain kind of sadness, a new discomfort amidst the grief of a long-ago tragedy. If we’d learned much from the last war…why does it feel a whole lot like the 1930s are repeating themselves? After all, here we are. Repeating just the same sequence of ruin that led up to that war. Fascism on the march in nation after nation, from America to Britain to Poland. Nationalism and extremism surging. Hate and violence growing, growing, growing by the day. Trade wars spiralling out of control. Nations that used to be friends becoming enemies, hurling insults at one another. Maybe the bad guys have changed names and faces — but the script they’re playing out certainly hasn’t.

Doesn’t the world feel like it’s spinning out of control these days — just like, I’d bet, it felt in the 1930s? Just a decade ago, I’d bet you would have said it was unthinkable that racist, supremacist, authoritarian demagogues would have led the US — and have the UK to the brink of self-inflicted catastrophe. That they’d be sitting in the White House building networks of concentration camps, lying to the nation every day, and flouting the law. And yet here we are. This decade is very much like a repeat of the 1930s. And that single fact proves how little we learned from the last war, it’s spark, it’s aftermath — all its great lessons seem to have flown over our heads.

So let me try to illuminate them, and you can judge for yourself whether I succeed or fail.

There were three great events of the 20th century. But one of these three, which may be the most important of all, has been almost totally unnoticed, especially by us Anglos. There was the reduction of global poverty, there was the rise of international democracy — and there was the European Miracle.

Now, it’s hard for many of us to swallow our pride and admit there ever was a European Miracle. Us Anglos regard ourselves as the masters of the world. Asians and Africans regard Europe with the suspicion of the bitter hangover of colonialism. But none of these emotions change the fact of the European Miracle. They only make us too blind to see it, and that is how ages turn dark, my friends.

What do I mean by “the European Miracle”? Us Anglos have been taught — brainwashed, perhaps — to think of Europe as some kind of strange, backwards land. But the truth is that Europe has built the world’s most successful societies…ever. Far, far more successful than anyone else. Sure, Europe has its problems — no society is now or ever will be a utopia. (And in this essay, I’ll use “Europe” to mean Western Europe — not peripheral Soviet states.)

Yet what Europe has done successfully is something so vital, so profound, so beautiful, that few of us ever really stop to take it in. Its citizens enjoy the highest standards of living, ever. Period. In all of human history. Full stop. Not by a little bit. But by a very, very long way. They are happier, richer, wealthier, better educated and informed, more diverse and tolerant, kinder and gentler. They are less stressed out and calmer and saner. Europeans live five years longer than Americans, and the gap is growing every year. They aren’t poor, and getting poorer. They top global scales of happiness, meaning, and purpose, year after year — while Americans top global scales of anger, rage, depression, and anxiety, not to mention violence, abuse, and despair. The average European enjoys a life that’s impossibly good on nearly every dimension that one can think of. Impossible to three parties: to Americans, to Brits, and to history. Why do I say that?

If I’d told you in 1945, at the end of the last world war, that the world’s most successful society, the place in which human beings were the richest, healthiest, sanest, and happiest was…Europe…you would’ve rightly laughed at me. Europe? That smoking ruin? Because, of course, Europe was a wasteland like no other. It was utterly devastated. It was wrecked like perhaps no society in history has ever been wrecked. It’s great cities were mostly shattered ruins.

Europe had nothing left after the last war. And I mean nothing. I don’t just mean “no money”, which should be obvious. I mean it had no democracies. It had no constitutions. It had no laws. It had nothing, really, that we regard as modern resources to speak of whatsoever. Think of that for a second. Really imagine it. Imagine Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam in ruins. Imagine all those places not just bankrupt — but barely even countries anymore. Whole generations, whole places, whole towns, just gone. Poof. There was little idea how to even keep these countries working as societies anymore. How do you rebuild from a place of genocide, holocaust, of death and utter and total destruction?

We fail to remember this, to really appreciate it. All of us, I think. Even Europeans. Americans and Anglos, certainly. (Even Africans, who recently criticized me on Twitter. Isn’t Europe’s wealth stolen from the poor of the world? It might have been once — but it isn’t now. What did Europe have left to steal with after the last war? Tanks and guns? Hardly. It had precisely nothing. It’s armies stood devastated. It’s young men, mostly dead. Hence, it began to rapidly divest what little was left of its colonies, from the 50s through the 70s.)

We completely, absolutely, and totally underestimate the magnitude of the European miracle, because we forget that Europe, not so long ago, was a land blighted and destroyed. So just think of the scale of it for a second. A devastated continent, with no resources left to speak of. None. Not even countries, really, not laws, not constitutions, not rights. Nothing. Just the void left behind by death and violence on on unimaginable, industrial scale.

And then, just one human lifetime later, it had become the most successful society in human history. Ever. The place where people lived the best lives human beings had ever lived, measured in hard, objective terms. What the?

Do you see how staggering that is? Let me say it again. Just one human lifetime. To go from a place with nothing, to being the most genuinely prosperous societies in history, ever.Nothing like that has happened in human history before — and perhaps nothing like it will happen again.Europe discovered something that people had been searching for since the dawn of time, my friends: the recipe for human prosperity. Only the world has been all too slow to pick up on it — and even Europe itself is forgetting its own miracle these days.

Here is what is even more staggering. And it didn’t accomplish any of that the old way, either. The old way: I want to be prosperous, I want my people to be prosperous. What do we do? We make the most violent and ruthless ones among us “noble”, and the most violent and ruthless among them “king.” He declares war the ones with the things we want — whether they those things are gold and jewels, or land, or bodies to enslave. Maybe we win — and they declare it right back on us, soon enough. And so the cycle of violence that has defined human history has gone on, and on, and on. Everywhere — except, at last, crucially, Europe.

So Europe did something so remarkable that we still don’t understand it at all, you and I, as a world. Even Europeans themselves, I think, take it a little bit for granted now, these decades later. It discovered something very much like the alchemists’ secret. It figured out how to turn the lead of poverty, ruin, and devastation into the gold of happiness, stability, and prosperity. Suddenly. Snap your fingers! Blink. One human lifetime. Lead into gold. Gold. Not blood. Not bones. Not despair and tears and cries of pain. Europe discovered what has eluded human beings all these long centuries long: the recipe for human prosperity. And it was at once simpler, more beautiful, and more improbable than anyone could have imagined.

Here’s what it wasn’t: winning riches through the subjugation and abuse of others. Europe had done that, too. Where did it end? In war, of course. That was the American way. America, remember, was an apartheid state — Americans hate it when I use this term, but what else do you call a country in which “intermarriage” was illegal — into the 1970s. By then, European societies had provided all their citizens with universal basics. And that is the beginning of the secret to this alchemical recipe for turning lead into gold.

Europe had nothing after the war, remember. It was bankrupt, poor, devastated, its young dead. It had so much nothing, in fact, that it didn’t even have the most basic thing a country can have: a constitution. So European societies set about rewriting their constitutions. They had to. They didn’t have much of a choice. Only this time, they rewrote them in a new way in human history — a quantum leap occurred, that nobody much noticed.

The great war had happened because the Weimar Republic imploded into the horrors of the Nazi Regime. And that had taken place because the average German had grown newly impoverished. The logic was as simple as it was obvious: economic stagnation and decline lead to fascism and authoritarianism. People flee from the desperation and anxiety of imploding lives, into the arms of a strongman — who blames their problems, cleverly, on the vulnerable, the powerless, and the weak. Once they’re exterminated, he says, you will be Great Again! Bang — the 1930s. Or is just that happening today? It’s hard to tell, sometimes, isn’t it?

So this great generation of European leaders after the war reasoned that if the logic went — stagnation, poverty, decline, fascism — then the way to prevent it was to ensure that everyone had the basics as human rights. They created, therefore, the most sophisticated and advanced rights human beings had yet: rights to healthcare, income, childcare, even abstractions like dignity. And those were the basis of Europe’s new constitutions.

(Now, note for a moment how significant this is. Us Anglos are centuries behind — our constitutions, or organizing principles, are centuries older, and therefore, so are the rights in them. Who would have imagined a right to “healthcare” in 1776? The vaccine didn’t even exist.)

Those rights laid the basis for expansive systems of public goods. France’s pension system, Germany’s healthcare system, Scandinavia’s childcare system, and so forth. Because there was now a new set of human rights that societies had to guarantee — that was the key to preventing fascism ever recurring, remember — it was necessary therefore to build institution to administer and govern them,

What was really happening here? What was the secret Europe had discovered, in hard, simple, plain spoken English? Europe had discovered that if it reinvested about fifty percent of its economy in…its very own people, in their betterment, in genuinely good lives for them, in their education, their health, their sanity…then that investment, over time, was to yield staggering returns. Returns far greater than anything else in human history.

As Europe invested and invested in these things, healthcare, education, childcare, transportation, and so on — up to fifty percent of its economy, every single year — a miracle slowly began to take place. And then it grew exponentially, skyrocketing upwards. Much like compound interest, European life got better and better, every single year. How could it not, when all these things were available in abundance, to every single person? And yet because there was more invested in them every year, their quality and quantity only ever increased.

That is the miracle, my friends. It is why today an American pays $50,000 just to have a child — more than the average American’s income — while the average European simply walks down the street to the public hospital, and has a child…who then enjoys world class care, school, college, university, and then, after that, transportation, labour protections, retirement. Life couldn’t be more different now in Europe than in much of the rest of the world — and the reason is the European Miracle: reinvesting in people, every single year, over and over again, in their health, sanity, education, mobility. When Europe was doing that, how could life not get better and better?

And as European life improved and improved, the strange new theory was proven correct. People turned away from fascism, away from authoritarianism. Prosperity did indeed bring about a great and lasting peace. But I want you to really know it — to feel it deep in your bones.

What did America and Britain do differently? They didn’t reinvest in people as much. America failed so completely, in fact, that the opposite of what Europe did ended up happening: people ended up preyed on. The average American is now broke — and dies in debt. Do you see what I mean by “Americans didn’t invest in themselves as a society”? So who ended up taking the lion’s share of what growth, what gains there were in the economy? A new band of super rich, who soon enough become the ultra rich — because by now more than 100% of the economy’s gains were going to them. Instead of being reinvested in hospitals, schools, universities, high speed trains…the money just piled up in the coffers of the super rich, and by about 2000 or so, they’d bought so many yachts, mansions, and penthouses, there was literally nothing left to do with it, so they began to hide it offshore.

Let me put that much more succinctly. Europe reinvested half its gains and more in people — in public goods and institutions that benefited them in basic, direct, tangible ways, improving their healthcare, education, transportation, jobs, and so forth. America invested nothing in its people. Less than nothing, in fact. It let its people be preyed on by megacapitalists, abused by endless wars, ruined by greed and selfishness. How were Americans going to end up anything but broke, dumb, sad, poor, and sick..when nobody was investing in hospitals, schools, jobs, and so on?

And so the theory was proven right — again. This time, in the opposite direction. Just like the theory predicted that prosperity would bring about peace, it also predicted that growing impoverishment would bring about fascism and authoritarianism, too. Bang! At precisely the moment America’s middle class became a minority, that the average American began to live and die in debt — American fascism rose, as if perfectly on cue. It’s so well predicted by that old European theory that it’s almost eerie, isn’t it?

And yet too few of us still understand any of this, my friends. Even Europeans. And their leaders. Even Europe has turned against the lesson of its own miracle in recent years — neoliberals running the European project underinvesting severely in all those great institutions which brought about peace, through prosperity. The result was predictable, too: growing poverty in Europe, which meant a rising tide of authoritarianism and supremacism once again. And yet Europeans have kept it in check, so far, precisely because their constitutions and institutions protect them against fascism truly taking over — just as they were designed to. They are lucky. Anglo societies have no such protection — and that is why they are turning fascist by the day.

None of us — European, American, British, African — fully appreciate today the epic scope, the meaning, the lessons, of the European Miracle. So let me spell it out. Peace comes from prosperity. Prosperity comes from reinvesting in people, in their basic quality of life, their healthcare, education, transportation, retirement, and so on. That means building institutions to do just that. And those institutions must be written into constitutions, so they are protected, nurtured, safe, designed to endure…forever.

There have been few events in history as significant, as unlikely and momentous, as beautiful, as the European Miracle. And yet this decade feels too much like the 1930s for comfort, doesn’t it? And what that should tell you, my friend, that we haven’t understood the lessons of the last war yet, the European Miracle and its significance — but we’d better begin, now.

It wasn’t just Europe that began to be liberated on D-Day, my friends. If we really understand history, it was all of humankind. From the poisons of hate, poverty, ignorance, despair, and violence. With the strange, improbable, beautiful secret of human prosperity, which had eluded us all those long, war-torn millennia.