In January of this year, I had the opportunity to speak at the Thinkfest in Lahore, which takes place at the wonderful Alhamra. With a diverse list of guests from Pakistan, the region, and the wider world, the event was also notable for the way it combined and linked different social and economic areas, from literature and the arts to technology and geopolitics. As usual - this was my first visit - the Thinkfest stands out by the way its young audience embraces every discussion with unbridled enthusiasm, the kind of enthusiasm shared by those who believe the fate of the world depends on ideas, and ideas are shaped by free discussion. What was different this year was my sense that these young men and women were absolutely right. Their intensity fits the times, times of radical change in world politics and technology.
Toynbee remarks in one of his essays that for an Englishman in 1897 history seemed to have come to an end. Everything he knew was there to stay, at home as well as in foreign and imperial affairs. To someone considering the question from the historical vantage point of 1947, as Toynbee was, the belief seemed sheer lunacy, and yet this is a kind of lunacy every historical moment is prone to make.
The rise and fall of civilisations with their ideas of world order can be turned into a rational rather than a chaotic process. That process would seem to rest on two main pillars: globalisation and technology
We too now live at a moment of transition from one order to another, as the wars in Ukraine and Gaza would seem to evidence, albeit in different ways. Every set of fundamental beliefs about how the world should be organised tends in time to be replaced by a different set. There are also times when world order remains precarious, the result of negotiation and search for common ground between different powers.
I want to make a suggestion: if we have become so sophisticated as to understand the historical dynamic by which a new order replaces the previous one, might it not be possible to establish a world order on a higher plane, an order of a second order so to speak? Instead of looking for eternal principles, how about we look for principles guiding how new principles and new orders come to be? This would imply an agreement between the great powers about the terms of their competition, determining for instance how technological progress must be allowed to happen without interference or how different powers can attempt to build their own visions of global order. The rise and fall of civilisations with their ideas of world order can be turned into a rational rather than a chaotic process. That process would seem to rest on two main pillars: globalisation and technology.
The first intimates that order can never be local or regional but must encompass the world as a whole. The second rests on the truth that order must be built or organised and that process now follows from the human ability to use knowledge or technology to serve human purposes. Any idea of order, or as I argue any theory of order creation, must give free flow to these two forces.