So aimless activists protest and riot and embrace causes that they hope will bring needed shape to their moral lives.

From The Fury in France—and Across the West by Abe Greenwald.  The subheading is We’ve stuffed ourselves with the good things we’ve created, yet still yearn for meaning. The recent riots are a sign of our despair.

Massive protests have been rising in the West for years. In the United Kingdom, Spain, Canada, the United States, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Germany, Israel—you name it—activist armies have been taking to the streets in greater numbers and frequency. And the nominal causes are all over the place: anti-coal protests, cost-of-living protests, farmer protests, trucker protests, anti-immigration protests, anti-capitalist protests, and, of course, Covid-lockdown and police-brutality protests. 

It’s tempting to point to the seismic events of 2020—the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd—as the catalyst for this increased instability. But the rise goes back further. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), “Mass protests increased annually by an average of 11.5 percent from 2009 to 2019 across all regions of the world.” The upheavals of 2020 only exacerbated a growing trend. In the U.S., recall that Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and the Women’s March all managed to seize our attention before we ever heard the word Covid.

As the CSIS report notes, we are in an “age of global mass protests.” But what sets this wave of tumult apart from, say, the rash of protests in autocratic countries at the end of the Cold War, is that Western democracies have been swept up in the action. 

So what’s going on? Why are Western populations now so primed to explode? If you’re exercised over a given political or social cause, you’ll see that cause as the explanation. But are all these causes coincidentally coming to a head at the same time? Are Western countries staring at once into the multiple abysses of racism, state-sanctioned brutality, and economic adversity?

I’d argue just the opposite. The West has made such extraordinary—indeed, historically unique—progress in reducing suffering on a large scale that we’re now left grasping for new ideals and new aspirations to fulfill. This is not to say that everything is perfect. But the current penchant for protests and riots is profoundly out of proportion with the relatively small-scale challenges we still face. 

Our accomplishments on human rights, freedoms, and the alleviation of hardship are so gargantuan that statistical comparisons with previous ages are made absurd. In the twentieth century, industrial-scale racism emanating from Western Europe killed millions of Jews and brought the world to war. In the U.S., Jim Crow segregation was the law of the land in the South while de facto segregation reigned elsewhere. In the twenty-first century, we seize on statistically rare police shootings as evidence of an ongoing genocide. You want to know what French barbarity looks like? The guillotine was still in use in the late 1970s. In the previous century, countries in Western Europe saw genuine famines. Today, Western Europe (and America) is fighting an obesity crisis, with the United Kingdom leading the pack. 

The widespread poverty known to previous ages now seems science-fictional compared to life in today’s West. Between 1960 and 2023, the French GDP per capita went from $1,334 to $43,659, with other Western European nations showing similar growth trends in income and consumption. In the U.S. over the same time period, per capita GDP rose from $3,007 to $70,249. It’s not noted nearly enough that the life of an average citizen of a modern Western country makes the existence of an old-world aristocrat look pauperized by comparison. And the reduction in global poverty driven by Western trade, industry, aid, and debt forgiveness over the past decades has been even more astounding. Between 1990 to 2017 alone, the global poverty rate fell from 36 percent to 9 percent.

We’ve stuffed ourselves to the gills with the good things that we’ve created. But we are still human beings—the one species on the planet that yearns for meaning. And we don’t know where to turn next. In a different age, many would turn to their faith. But in the West, religion has been on a steep decline that crosses the rising rate of mass protests in an X pattern. So aimless activists protest and riot and embrace causes that they hope will bring needed shape to their moral lives.

Because of our systemic productivity, more people have more choices and can take more risks.  Prosperity allows them to indulge in the narcissism of small differences.  We have harvested all the low hanging fruit and people everywhere are marvelously better off than their parents or grandparents.  

Whether it is bringing meaning to their own lives, or achieving status gains by moral signaling during protests, out prosperity allows people to indulge in behaviors which are counter-productive.