As a theoretical
physicist based in Cambridge, I have lived my life in an extraordinarily
privileged bubble. Cambridge is an unusual town, centred around one of the
world’s great universities. Within that town, the scientific community that I
became part of in my 20s is even more rarefied.
And within that
scientific community, the small group of international theoretical physicists
with whom I have spent my working life might sometimes be tempted to
regard themselves as the pinnacle. In addition to this, with the celebrity that
has come with my books, and the isolation imposed by my
illness, I feel as though my ivory tower is getting taller.
So the recent
apparent rejection of the elites in both America and Britain is surely aimed at
me, as much as anyone. Whatever we might think about the decision by the
British electorate to reject membership of
the European Union and by the American public to embrace Donald Trump as their next president, there is no
doubt in the minds of commentators that this was a cry of anger by people who
felt they had been abandoned by their leaders.
It was,
everyone seems to agree, the moment when the forgotten spoke, finding their
voices to reject the advice and guidance of experts and the elite everywhere.
I am
no exception to this rule. I warned before the Brexit vote that it would damage scientific
research in Britain, that a vote to leave would be a step backward,
and the electorate – or at least a sufficiently significant proportion of it –
took no more notice of me than any of the other political leaders, trade
unionists, artists, scientists, businessmen and celebrities who all gave the
same unheeded advice to the rest of the country.
What
matters now, far more than the choices made by these two electorates, is how the elites react.
Should we, in turn, reject these votes as outpourings of crude populism that
fail to take account of the facts, and attempt to circumvent or circumscribe
the choices that they represent? I would argue that this would be a terrible
mistake.
The
concerns underlying these votes about the economic consequences of
globalization and accelerating
technological change are absolutely understandable. The automation
of factories has already decimated jobs in traditional manufacturing, and the rise of artificial
intelligence is likely to extend this job destruction deep into
the middle classes, with only the most caring, creative or supervisory
roles remaining.
This
in turn will accelerate the already widening economic inequality around the
world. The internet and the platforms that it makes possible allow very small groups of
individuals to make enormous profits while employing very few
people. This is inevitable, it is progress, but it is also socially destructive.
We
need to put this alongside the financial crash, which brought home to people
that a very few individuals working in the financial sector can accrue huge
rewards and that the rest of us underwrite that success and pick up the bill
when their greed leads us astray. So taken together we are living in a world of
widening, not diminishing, financial inequality, in which many people can see
not just their standard of living, but their ability to earn a living at all,
disappearing. It is no wonder then that they are searching for a new deal,
which Trump and Brexit might have appeared to represent.
It is
also the case that another unintended consequence of the global spread of the
internet and social media is that the stark nature of these inequalities is far
more apparent than it has been in the past. For me, the ability to use
technology to communicate has been a liberating and positive experience.
Without it, I would not have been able to continue working these many years
past.
But it
also means that the lives of the richest people in the most prosperous parts of
the world are agonizingly visible to anyone, however poor, who has access to a
phone. And since there are now more people with a telephone than access to
clean water in sub-Saharan Africa, this will shortly mean nearly everyone on
our increasingly crowded planet will not be able to escape the inequality.
The
consequences of this are plain to see: the rural poor flock to cities, to
shanty towns, driven by hope. And then often, finding that the Instagram
nirvana is not available there, they seek it overseas, joining the ever greater
numbers of economic migrants in search of a better life. These migrants in turn
place new demands on the infrastructures and economies of the countries in
which they arrive, undermining tolerance and further fuelling political
populism.
For
me, the really concerning aspect of this is that now, more than at any time in
our history, our species needs to work together. We face awesome environmental
challenges: climate change, food production, overpopulation, the decimation of
other species, epidemic disease, acidification of the oceans.
Together,
they are a reminder that we are at the most dangerous moment in the development
of humanity. We now have the technology to destroy the planet on which we live,
but have not yet developed the
ability to escape it. Perhaps in a few hundred years, we will have
established human colonies amid the stars, but right now we only have one
planet, and we need to work together to protect it.
To do
that, we need to break down, not build up, barriers within and between nations.
If we are to stand a chance of doing that, the world’s leaders need to
acknowledge that they have failed and are failing the many. With resources
increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few, we are going to have to learn
to share far more than at present.
With
not only jobs but entire industries disappearing, we must help people to
retrain for a new world and support them financially while they do so. If
communities and economies cannot cope with current levels of migration, we must
do more to encourage global development, as that is the only way that the
migratory millions will be persuaded to seek their future at home.
We can
do this, I am an enormous optimist for my species; but it will require the
elites, from London to Harvard, from Cambridge to Hollywood, to learn the
lessons of the past year. To learn above all a measure of humility.
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