Future of Globalization: Why the Renaissance Mindset Matters So Much

Rapid change has rendered invalid many of our expectations, so that today reality often contradicts them. Their uselessness is evidenced by the big shocks that few foresaw: Brexit, the global financial crisis, the rise of ISIS or the collapse of oil and other commodity prices.

This discomforting state of affairs is reflected in the utter failure of political pundits worldwide to predict the viability of the reality TV demagogue Donald Trump as a U.S. presidential candidate (although the editor of The Globalist is a rare exception. See his lucid piece from almost a year ago, laying out 10 specific reasons for Trump’s rise).

The “experts” — blindsided

Few foresaw the rise of the far-left Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the British Labour Party, or of “The Punisher,” Rodrigo Duterte, as president of the Philippines.

As a result, uncertainty reigns supreme – so much so that the boardrooms of many Fortune 500 companies have decided to punt.

Instead of investing, which they are supposed to do in order to grow their businesses, they are collectively holding onto a record wad of cash. They simply lack the confidence to make bold investments.

Whether as citizens, policy makers or business leaders, going about our life in a tumultuous time without a reliable way to make sense of surprises is downright dangerous.

Why? First, because rapid change usually demands rapid responses, and — as the cash accounts of big companies show — when we lose all confidence in our judgments, we hesitate when instead we need to act.

Second, because — as present-day surges of anti-immigrant sentiment in Britain, anti-trade agendas in the United States and ultra-nationalism in India suggest — it’s when ugly surprises leave us grasping for the big picture that we are most likely to adopt the wrong picture for the wrong reasons.

How to deal with uncertainty

We urgently need a fresh frame of reference. That frame needs to help us cultivate the confidence to advance critical agendas and enable us to step back from surprises when they happen.

We need to be able to place those surprises in a trusted context and gain more leverage over their meaning (and our response).

Can we prevent surprises? No. But we should aspire to do a better job of shaping their consequences than we have done in the past few years.

Understanding Machiavelli’s relevance for the world today

To that end, almost 500 years ago Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) wrote:

Whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past; for human events…have been, and ever will be, animated by the same passions. The result is that the same problems always exist in every era.

At the time, Machiavelli was schooling the leaders of Italy, who were struggling to navigate a similar time of unrelenting surprise. First, Copernicus upended their God-given notions of heaven and earth.

Then, voyages of discovery by Columbus, da Gama and Magellan tore up millennia-old maps of the “known” world (which, as it turned out, hadn’t depicted even half of the whole).

Immense riches were generated from trade for some, the happy few, while also intensifying the spreading of conflict, economic collapse and pandemics – the prices that the countless others had to endure.

Gutenberg’s printing press flipped knowledge production and exchange from tight scarcity to radical abundance.

It also put most scribes out of business and enabled a single disillusioned friar (Martin Luther) to ignite a century of religious wars. New communication technologies allowed individuals to challenge mighty authorities.

Gunpowder shocked the once-invulnerable: Ottoman cannons toppled Europe’s eastern bulwark, Constantinople, and shoved Venice’s mighty merchant fleet out of the eastern Mediterranean.

It’s not about predictions, but the parallels

The present moment is our age of discovery, our Renaissance — akin to Machiavelli’s own in both the crescendo of change taking place across the full range of human endeavor, and in the interdependence, instability and fear that accompany it.

Contemporary historians may point out that it is impossible to predict future events by looking backwards. After all, details matter, and usually differ by enough to frustrate time travel.

But that’s missing Machiavelli’s point. Learning from history isn’t about divining precise predictions; it’s about regaining perspective. Technologies change, but human nature is more stable.

When the events of the present stop making sense for us, we can clarify the personal choices and social conflicts to be expected by looking back at how humanity coped in similarly historic circumstances.

Take the worldwide hollowing out of the political centre in many a country and the
associated rise of populist movements (on the right, for example, Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland, the UK’s UKIP party, Denmark’s People’s party, Sweden’s Democrats, or the People’s Party of Switzerland; on the left, Spain’s Podemos, Greece’s Syriza or the UK’s Jeremy Corbyn; and sometimes straddling both sides of the aisle, Trump).

Rich Florence got totally blindsided

Machiavelli and his fellow citizens knew this crisis well. His own city of Florence suffered a shocking popular power-taking when Girolamo Savonarola (1452-1498), a mid-level friar from Ferrara, exploded from obscurity in the 1490s to enthrall Florentines who felt left behind economically or culturally with sermons that lay blame upon the misguided policies and moral corruption of their leaders.

He and his zealous supporters, though a minority by far, swept away the Medici establishment and seized control of the city’s councils. From there, Savonarola launched an ugly campaign of public purification.

He radicalized laws against sin, prostitution and homosexuality, and highlighted them by an act of intimidation that history still remembers as the Bonfire of the Vanities.

Similar, parallel uprisings played out across Western Europe: the Comuneros Revolt in Spain, the Grand Riot in Lyon, the Revolt of the Straccioni in Tuscany, the Pilgrimage of Grace in England and the German Peasants War.

The German Peasant’s War was the biggest public insurrection Europe would ever see up until the French Revolution.

Fairness matters – greatly

In hindsight, all fed on the same discontent. The distribution of gains and losses brought about by economic, social and technological upheaval was bitterly uneven.

Some, like Peter Ramus (1515-1572), who started life as the son of a charcoal maker and ended it as Regius Professor of Rhetoric in Paris, flourished. “We have seen more progress in this century than our ancestors did over the past fourteen,” he wrote.

Others suffocated in “a golden age for the Shearers [that] left the Shorn with just enough on their backs to keep alive, and not always that.”

Both sides were correct. Then as now, the strain of that contradiction, coupled with the availability of new technologies, mobilized indignation and gave it a powerful voice. That broke the bargain that held many communities together.

Rear-view mirror as future cast tool

Political analysts today are rushing to lay the same analysis upon our contemporary experience. A Renaissance lens could have brought this risk into focus much sooner.

Now, it sharpens the lessons. Most urgent among them is that the very real and dramatic gains humanity as a whole has made over the past 25 years of opening and connecting up — as a species, we have never been healthier, wealthier, nor better-educated than we are today — will be lost if we don’t help those who, so far, have been excluded.

The hollowed-out middle needs to find its collective voice, roll up its sleeves and reshape society’s distribution of unwarranted gains and blameless losses. Or wait for the times to shape it for them.

Renaissance Florence was famously liberal-minded until a loud demagogue filled in the majority’s silence with rage and bombast.

Adapted from Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance by Ian Goldin and Chris Kutarna (Bloomsbury, May 19, 2016)