The purring twenties

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The purring twenties

In 1920, a Johnson & Johnson employee came up with a simple solution to dress minor cuts – the adhesive bandage. His employers trademarked the invention and started mass-producing the world-famous Band-Aid. Besides the geniality of the idea, its success was in part driven by a novel wave of consumerism and technological optimism that culminated in the culturaleconomic revolution that swept through the Roarin’ 20s.

It was a decade of “rugged individualism” that democratised cars and launched transatlantic flights; introduced women’s suffrage in the US and Coco Chanel’s little black dress in France; filled airwaves with frothy jazz and city squares with Art Nouveau. It was a time of rekindled confidence in human capability, rebuilding from the horrors of the Great War and the decimation of the Spanish Flu.

A century later, the world finds its roar silenced by a crushing pandemic. Expectations for the future remain generally high, but the events in the first two decades leading to the 2020s have injected a sense of caution, particularly in the youngest generations. The century started with the 9/11 attacks which exposed a dangerous clash of values and established political terrorism on a global scale. The events altered the world’s collective consciousness and radicalised beliefs at both ends of the spectrum. The ensuing ‘war on terrorism’ marked the Bush Presidency and pitted allies against each other.

The raging global economy was not to be deterred by the Washington agenda, but it ground to a halt when trouble hit Wall Street. The 2008 credit crunch spread like wildfire causing the biggest financial meltdown since the Great Depression. The word ‘crisis’ flashed from every news broadcast for months on end as millions of people lost jobs, houses, and savings.

Between one tragedy and the other, the world kept spinning fast. The Euro currency entered circulation while China formally became a member of the World Trade Organisation; former Soviet countries joined the EU and an American-led alliance invaded Iraq. The science train continued to steam full-speed ahead with amazing discoveries including the completion of the Human Genome Project.

The early 2000s witnessed the emergence of new technology that would open a new era of civilisation: Facebook was built in 2004, the iPhone unveiled in 2007. Information flowed away from the mainstream media and specialised institutions as new sources of knowledge, advertising and public discussion surfaced in the form of Wikipedia, Google Adwords, or Twitter.

On the other hand, the power of centralised government agencies to capture information created a new kind of angst among citizens.

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High-profile whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden and Sergei Magnitsky are still either revered as heroes or reviled as traitors. The third millennium has already seen a surge in popular uprisings, from the Orange Revolution in Ukraine to the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong. In late 2010, protests in Tunisia exploded into the Arab Spring that swept through North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, toppling powerful, longstanding regimes like a bowling ball crashing into skittles.

While autocratic leaders such as Muammar Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein and Hosni Mubarak were removed, a new crop of strongmen such as Rodrigo Duterte, Tayyip Erdogan and Daniel Ortega have cemented their positions. In Europe and North America, a populist hurricane blew through the landscape traditionally occupied by left-and-right parties.

But it is not only the political climate that has changed drastically. World temperatures have been on an accelerated rise in the last two decades leading to the most severe coral reef bleaching ever observed and the lowest arctic sea ice extent. The hottest ten years ever recorded globally have all occurred since 2000, reaching a record 0.94°C above century average in 2016 with 2020 on course to match it.

Some of the most devastating natural disasters like the Boxing Day Tsunami in the Indian Ocean or the uncontrollable wildfires in Australia and the mudslides submerging Brazil galvanised a

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broader movement for environmental sustainability, cusping in the worldwide school strikes set off by Swedish teen Greta Thunberg. Another teenage girl, Malala Yousafzai became the youngest Nobel Prize laureate after taking on the Pakistani Taliban to defend education for women and suffering a point-blank shot for it. Social justice for women swelled in the #MeToo movement that pushed back against years of sexual harassment and abuse.

Meanwhile, racial equality reached a watershed moment with the historic election of US President Barack Obama in 2008, but the Black Lives Matter movement born just five years later exposed the depth of the social scar, especially when it sparked global riots in 2020.

The most enduring representation of the protests was perhaps the pulling down of a statue for a slave-trader of the British colonial era in the UK. As Bristolians were earnestly separating the bronze figure from its plinth, the British government was busy separating the UK from the European Union. The two sides could still not find a way to untangle their ties, four and a half years after the Brexit referendum.

These eventful two decades were capped by outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. The deadly virus pulled out the plug on everything that is considered ordinary and threw everyone into a state of helpless disorientation. But it did not stop the world as governments, scientists, business leaders, advocacy groups all worked together to develop vaccines as fast and as effective as the spread that they are designed to eliminate.

The first fifth of the 21st century formed a more globalised mind, a natural awareness of the world beyond our immediate horizons. A smoother individualism now characterises people as nodes in an elaborate web that crosses communities, economies, ecosystems, and ideas.

One hundred years ago, the folly of destruction gave way to the années folles. May we transform the openness of the last twenty years into a decade of opportunity for all.