Speech on the Book Launch of David Howell’s The Coming Anarchy and How to Avoid It
Robert Sidelsky 2 July 2025
David Howell’s thesis: The new anarchy is digital, not ideological. The microchip and information revolution have changed human relations everywhere, uprooted family ties, life patterns, local communities, world affairs. Microcircuit technology has compelled the need for a new type of democracy, a new pattern of world power, otherwise a slide to domestic and world anarchy is inevitable. Already our world is filling up with disoriented masses full of anger and thirsting for revenge.
The first thing to say is that we have been here before: our view of history is cyclical. David does not cite him but he echoes Yeats’s famous poem The Second Coming (1919):
“Turning and turning on the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold,
Mere anarchy is loosed on the world…”And continues:
“The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
Responding to the mass killing of the first world war, Yeats was saying: Look where the Enlightenment has got you! His pessimism was total.
The Second Coming Yeats foresaw was not of Christ but of the seven-headed beast of the Apocalypse: “What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem”.
Yeats’s poem came two years after Spengler’s 1917 Decline of the West, the same story told in hundreds of pages of relentless prose.
Spengler’s Satan was the world city of western civilisation:
“To the world city belongs not a folk but a mass. Its uncomprehending hostility to all the traditions representative of the Culture (nobility, church, privileges, dynasties, conventions in art and limits of knowledge in science), the keen and cold intelligence that confounds the wisdom of the peasant, the new-fashioned naturalism in relation to all matters of sex… the reappearance of panem et circenses – all these things betoken the opening up of a quite new phase in human existence.”
Two symptoms of the decline of culture were atonality in music and abstraction in painting. Arnold Schoenberg was a symptom of the cultural “winter” of Faustian civilisation… a music that has become “foreign to itself”, like Expressionism and Cubism in art, each genre representing a move from organic form to formal dissolution.
The city is the home of the “scribblers”, the journalists who present reality to the deracinated masses. Spengler stressed the collapse of the family: “Children do not happen, not because children become impossible, but principally because intelligence at the peak of intensity can no longer find any reason for their existence.” City civilisations will be dominated by the sterile male and the unfruitful woman. In Spengler’s view, order in this kind of society can be given only by what he calls Caesarism. Power without form is the only thing which can hold together formless mass. Spengler had no time for politics, which exists precisely to reconcile in action that which cannot be reconciled in thought and to mask unendurable truth with fictions.
The question then is: what refloated the Enlightenment project in the 20th century? Communism for some; the victory of the democracies against fascism certainly; but more durably the triumphal advance of technology. Here was a new God who could solve all the problems left by the death of the old ones.
Keynes’s short essay Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930) exemplifies the new confidence: what Keynes said in a nutshell was that technical progress was bringing Paradise within reach. In three generations – roughly in a hundred years from when he was writing – it would give the prospective population of the “civilised” world a standard of living between four and eight times higher than in the 1920s, obtainable at a small fraction of its current work load. Freed of the burden of toil the masses would be enabled for the first time in human history to live “wisely, and agreeably and well”.
Keynes reckoned that three hours economic work a day would be enough to “satisfy the old Adam in us”. That is, machines would make possible a return to Eden, where “neither Adam delved nor Eve span”.
Keynes was not quite sure. As the second world war approached he was driven to reflect that under the “thin and precarious crust of civilisation” there lurked “volcanic and even wicked impulses”.
Optimism returned in the second half of the last century, above all with the belief that technological progress would dispel previous forebodings.
The internet was acclaimed as the highest manifestation of the democratic ideal because it allowed direct, non-mediated, non-hierarchical communication between the producers and consumers of information. Only gradually did the realisation dawn that, as Maurice Saatchi put it about internet’s users: “You are the product they are selling”, that the internet was the instrument not of democracy but of discordance, like atonality in music.
The return of pessimism therefore comes as no surprise. We talk about the four horsemen of the modern Apocalypse: nuclear proliferation, global warming, pandemics, and digital dependency.
The last especially is dissolving democracy into incoherent fragments, to which Spengler’s Caesarism – power without form – might seem the only answer. Is Trump the new Caesar?
Quite sensibly David Howell suggests ways of escaping the doom loop: there must be fundamental reform of liberal capitalism domestically; internationally the creation of a global network of cooperative nations modelled on the Commonwealth (clearly David does not have much faith in the United Nations).
But I have two caveats.
First, David’s dark view of the future is very western. Is, for example, China part of his doom loop? There’s no sense in China, I think, that the centre cannot hold. China exudes a huge optimism. This brings me back to Spengler’s cyclical theory: his book was about the decline of the West, not of the world. David’s is a very western threnody.
My second, and huge concern, is that the current state of geopolitics excludes the use of technology for the common good.
The problem has always been to get agreement on what technology is good and what is bad. But once geopolitics is introduced into the argument, we get the additional complication that no government will act to control or limit the potential harms of technology if that means ceding a technological advantage to a potential enemy. So digital technology is set to be doubly out of control.
Take Isaac Asimov’s first ethical rule for robots: “A robot may not injure a human being, or through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.” For the age of geopolitics this may be rewritten: “A robot may not injure any human being on our side, but should be programmed to inflict the maximum injury on the enemy.”
The logic is clear: if we – the good guys – slow down our own technological advance they – the bad guys – will develop weapons able to destroy us.
The truth is that technology is the child of war. More often than not the creativity of the scientist has been stimulated by the promise of more perfect destruction. More often than not government has subsidised scientific research not for better life but for better death.
The dominant view today is that we have returned to the Cold War situation, or even worse. Fiona Hill, a member of the UK Government’s Strategic Defence Review, believes the third world war has already started.
In such a world AI research and development is part of the arms race; AI policy becomes a matter of making sure that our AI development stays ahead of that of our potential enemies.
As Britain and Europe rearm, a key source of funding for AI development will be the defence and intelligence services. What kind of AI we want and for what purposes will be determined by security requirements. And this will be true of all countries playing the zero-sum game.
What conclusion might one draw? The most obvious one is the urgent need to challenge the geopolitical perspective itself. Not all theories of international relations take a zero-sum view.
We need to distinguish between genuine threats to our security and fake ones conjured up mainly to channel resources into the development of ever more harmful forms of AI.
In concrete terms, how much of a threat to our own national security is posed by China and Russia? If they do pose a threat, what measures short of an arms race can be taken to reduce them?
I don’t see clearly the light at the end of this tunnel.
So I would attach a strong condition to David’s optimism: We can have either an arms race or benign digital development, but not both at the same time.