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Historical Perspective

Understanding the modern world in its current order requires a historical perspective.

While the roots for many of the current-day geopolitical and identity-driven conflicts go way back in time—centuries, if not thousands of years—the most recent major event that established the world as we know it today was the end of World War II in 1945.

Faced with the lessons of unprecedented destruction, countless lives lost, injustice, and all the other horrors of the war fresh in mind, multinational institutions were set up to promote peace, trade and diplomacy.

Through a combination of international cooperation, trade and, not to be ignored, the hegemony of Western military might, the last 80 years have seen the rise of the standards of living for billions of people.

According to the World Bank, there have been over 5 billion people connected to the Internet since 2021 [1]. Also, 1.4 billion people traveled internationally for tourism in 2024, according to the United Nations [2].

It follows that the infrastructure needed to meet all basic necessities, such as piped water, sanitation and electricity, has reached billions across the world, freeing them to work and worry about concerns at a higher level than bodily subsistence.

Historically, pandemics have brought terrible death to half—or double-digit percentages—of the population of a continent. COVID-19, while tragic, prompted a coordinated global response which contained deaths to thousands per million in the worst affected countries [3], demonstrating multiple feats of medical research, manufacturing capability and logistics. (Mostly, the low points, I'd argue, can be attributed to the unfortunate politicization.)

While technology and the sciences have reached levels that would be considered unfathomable just a lifetime ago, with unprecedented scale and availability, political discourse and civic engagement have seen very little increase in sophistication from old-fashioned self-interested zero-sum identity-centric populism.

My only hope would be that learning these same lessons—that global stability, multinational cooperation, compromise and peace lead to wealth and higher standards of living for more people—does not require similar events to take place in the current generation.

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