As the 21st century reaches adulthood, here are the lessons we’ve learned

As the 21st century leaves its troubled teenage years behind and enters full adulthood as an equally troubled 20-year-old, it’s not hard to see how the millennium bug panic set the stage for many of the big themes of the last two decades: conspiracy theories, fear and confusion, and the power of machines over our lives and imaginations. This time 20 years ago we were about to enter an age of techno-paranoia – we just didn’t know it.

The great irony was that we went into the century totally unprepared. We’d been lulled into a false sense of complacency thanks to the short period of relative peace and stability we’d just lived through. Seen over the great gulf of history, the final years of the 20th century were something of an idyll, at least in the West and in Britain in particular. Communism had fallen, there was peace in Northern Ireland, Tony Blair had brought a sense of unity and calm to the country, employment and prosperity were rising, it was the era of Cool Britannia. Life was fun … for a while.

Then, on September 11, 2001, planes did fall from the sky and crash into buildings – and everything changed. The attacks by al-Qaeda splintered the world, and we’re still trying to pick up the pieces. Terrorism and the club-handed response by America plunged the world into a cycle of violence which still spins and will spin for decades to come.

Throughout history there have been events like this which shaped whole centuries and the global order. The defeat of Napoleon in 1815 set the stage for the domination of the British empire throughout the 19th century. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 laid the ground for a century of conflict which only ended with the Cold War. In 1605, the Gunpowder Plot accelerated civil and religious conflict in the British Isles and helped create the nation we know today.

Our young century was conceived in fear and born in violence. No wonder our era is the age of anxiety. The torching of many liberal democratic values began after 9/11. The Bush administration advocated a doctrine of pre-emptive war: suspicion of a plot against you is sufficient to permit you to hit your opponent before they hit you. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was immediately in the crosshairs.

The Western world split down the middle over the invasion of Iraq. Taking out the Taliban after 9/11 was one thing – waging war on a nation quite another, especially when invasion was based upon claims that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. Those claims, of course, were lies – and those lies were deeply corrosive, eating away at trust between the British and American governments and their people. Today’s broken politics is a casualty of those lies back in 2003.

But worse was to come. There was Guantanamo Bay and extraordinary rendition. As the war ground on, the world was horrified by revelations coming out of Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. American troops were torturing and sexually humiliating detainees. All moral ground was cut from beneath the allies.

Iraq exploded into sectarian conflict. The West had turned Iraq into a bloody cauldron of religious violence. The chaos and atrocities were the midwife of the Islamic State. Nor could the West win the war – the US and UK might be able to topple Saddam, but they couldn’t win the ground war, and an endless parade of flag-draped coffins started arriving home. In the end, the Iraq invasion’s biggest winners were Iran, and especially Russia – newly emboldened. The annexation of Crimea would have been extremely unlikely without Iraq.

Islamist terror had already fomented racial hatred in the West towards immigrants and Muslims – but then the Arab Spring and the Syrian civil war began, triggering a humanitarian crisis. In Syria, civilians fled violence en masse, aiming to find safety in the West. The refugee crisis played into simmering Islamophobia in Europe and beyond. European political parties with deep xenophobic roots saw an opportunity.

At home, political lines started to divide not between left and right, but along pro or anti-immigration lines. We were beginning to see the divisions form which separate us today. Race became a toxic political issue. Public life turned ugly. Welcome to the “hostile environment”.

Behind the fear, violence and hate, one other big factor was shaping the course of the young century – the economy. The 2008 financial crash threw millions in the West into poverty and despair. Bankers were bailed out, while ordinary people got the agonising medicine of austerity. It was patently unfair; the dice were loaded. Elites were being protected, the people were being shafted. Bankers had made billions on voodoo economics and we were picking up the bill.

While war, financial collapse and austerity shook the entire world, the same issues played out here at home in Scotland, at a time when the nation was discovering its voice through its burgeoning devolved parliament. Without question, revulsion at the Iraq war and anger at austerity helped the SNP in its rise to power and secured its domination over Scottish politics. Inevitably, these schisms between Scotland and Westminster played into the first independence referendum. As the century matures, a second vote on Scotland’s constitutional future remains the nation’s main talking point.

So by the time we were into the second decade of the 21st century, voters in the West were increasingly alienated from political leaders, there was growing animosity among a proportion of Western populations towards immigrants and Muslims wrongly blamed for Islamist terror in Europe and beyond, and people were suffering financially. Then we learned that our children would be the first generation to experience worse economic outcomes than their parents. A dystopia of zero-hours contracts and the gig economy arrived.

Little did we know it but liberal democracy was now seriously under threat.

Then along came social media. By 2011, Twitter users were sending 140 million tweets daily. Today, Facebook has nearly 2.5 billion monthly users. The platforms, which we were told would bring the world together and empower democracy, allowed people to scream their rage into the ether. At first social media seemed a harmless distraction – soon, though, users realised that it was weaponising rage, and hatred was becoming the lingua franca of political debate.

The West was losing control of the narrative which had driven it since the end of the Second World War. Trust had broken down, belief in politics had broken down. Soon the fabric of community would break down as people retreated behind screens.

We shopped online and our high streets fell apart. We consumed news on social media allowing disinformation to spread. People even began dating online. We streamed our music and movies online, we read books on tiny screens. Our homes began to empty of physical “stuff” – record collections became a thing of the past.

Our entire culture was hollowing out. The rise of streaming services like Netflix, together with the proliferation of TV channels, meant families no longer consumed the same programmes together. We could sit in separate rooms, or even the same room, all watching different screens. We no longer shared common experiences. We were starting to lose touch with one another on a fundamental level.

Culture was also changing and feeding into the coarsening of society. Reality TV was the great culture invention of the 21st century. Big Brother began in summer 2000, and quickly public cruelty became a sport. People wanted to be famous for the sake of being famous – not because they had a talent or something to say. The public could interact with and control what was happening on shows like Big Brother. If the public liked someone they became a star, if they hated them then that person could be destroyed. The life and death of Jade Goody perfectly illustrated the cruel vagaries of celebrity and the fickleness of the public.

Public taste went through huge upheavals in the last 20 years. The century began with Eminem hailed as the greatest musical talent of his generation – a rapper linguistically ruthless and unafraid to push freedom of speech to the limit. Today, Eminem has little place in a world where speaking your mind can be dangerous. The TV show Friends was beloved as the century dawned – now it’s seen by some as the embodiment of everything the millennial generation stands against. This authoritarian mood led to the no-platforming of those deemed to hold “unacceptable” views on issues like abortion or sexuality. Purity purges and circular firing squads became the norm. This ongoing culture war and the debate over freedom of speech now plays out at its most vehement over trans rights.

Beneath the surface, society was fracturing into myriad identities – of us and them on a grand scale. Black-white, gay-straight, trans-cis, male-female – people were being asked to take sides, even though many just wanted individuals to get along and be happy.

Simultaneously, nationalism arose around the Western world as an answer to the corrosion of liberal democracy. People were trying desperately to find some narrative that would give their lives sense and meaning.

Then came Trump and Brexit. Populism had been taking root across many parts of the world as the century wore on, but America and Britain gave populism its high water mark. Trump weaponised everything that had shaped the course of the 21st century so far: social media, race, gender, immigration, hard nationalism. He fed his base what they wanted and won. It was a message heard around the world. There was no nuance or balance, no reaching out – it was anger and insult as policy. It’s without irony that many call the President the greatest internet troll the world has ever seen.

Brexit followed the same playbook, with lies and distortion the new currency. Both Trump and Brexit proved our worst fears about the rise of social media. We discovered that not only had platforms like Twitter turned us against each other, but Facebook had helped manipulate voters by channelling disinformation our way, and allowing propagandists to target us with deceit. In a truly dystopian turn, we learned that social media platforms had caused such havoc through the harvesting of our data and allowing it be used against us. We were being farmed.

Even worse, social media had been exploited by hostile states like Russia to interfere in Western democracy. Social media now meant cyber-warfare and black psy-ops. Politics, like culture and society, was been hollowed from the inside out. The result was political chaos. The world had speeded up to such an extent that before one outrageous presidential tweet could be analysed another was already winging its way across the internet. There was no time to think anymore.

The algorithm was taking over our lives. For years now, Amazon has known what we want to buy better than we know ourselves, and now Facebook seemed to be able to steer our political thoughts with more precision than our conscious minds. Technology has already shattered and rebuilt the world, under the flag of progress and disruption. But the disruption hasn’t even started. We’re only beginning to imagine what the coming of artificial intelligence and biotechnology might mean for humanity.

Trump and Brexit seemed not only to play to our darker instincts rather than our better selves, but they also seemed pitted against modernity. A wave of curdled nostalgia swept the West, as some harked back to a 1950s golden age that had never been. Nowhere was anger felt more righteously than among women, as Trump rode into office on a tidal wave of old-school misogyny. The Harvey Weinstein scandal and Trump’s “grab ‘em by the pussy” comments galvanised women around the world, and soon the MeToo movement was battling to upend the old order.

Nuclear war remains an existential threat to humankind, but towering above all the other nightmares of the 21st century stands climate change. It’s the issue humanity must address, fast, but the crisis comes when the world is thoroughly divided and seemingly incapable of taking intelligent collective action – international bodies from Nato to the UN seem weaker than ever. Hope lies with the young, however. The generation born after 2000 is now determined to save the planet in order to save themselves. As they reach adulthood, they’ll take custody of the world. But time is against their fight for change.

It’s little wonder, then, that many of the world’s best minds have begun floating fears of a coming total “general systems collapse”. We’ve seen a general systems collapse before on the face of planet Earth – back around 1200 BC when the major civilisations of the Mediterranean and Near East were snuffed out in a matter of just a few generations. Political systems got too big to manage, wars became too intense, land was over-farmed, weather got wild, and technology – in the shape of new types of weapons – ran out of control. The fall of the Roman Empire and the collapse of the Central American Mayan civilisation are also examples of a general systems failure.

One of the greatest thinkers alive is the Israeli scholar Yuval Noah Harari. His books Sapiens, Homo Deus, and 21 Lessons For The 21st Century chart how humans came to conquer the world, where we are likely to go in the future as we harness technology like AI, and lastly the disturbed and broken lives we live in 2019.

Reading Harari leaves you with one powerful thought in mind: we’re amazing creatures. We’ve built this world using imagination alone. But we’re also incredibly backward creatures too. It seems that while we evolved at super-speed when it came to technology – going from fire to atom bomb in 250,000 years – we’re pitifully unevolved when it comes to our emotional intelligence. We’re like infants playing with grenades.

Like the 21st century itself, humanity has barely got out of its teenage years. The challenge that we face today is making sure we take the decisions that allow this century to age into a safe maturity, along with our children and grandchildren.