It’s About Time: James Cairns Reviews Andrew Potter’s On Decline, and Stephen Dale’s Shift Change: Scenes from a Post-industrial Revolution

Is society getting better or worse? I ask this question to my social theory class at the start of each semester. Are we living through an age of progress or decline?

Students make persuasive arguments from contending perspectives. One group points to improvements in medical technology, labour-saving devices, religious and cultural tolerance, food production, life-expectancy, and concludes that society is getting better. Another group says: No way. The cataclysmic threat of climate change, growing economic inequalities, mind-numbing effects of digital technologies and social media: all are signs that things are getting worse.

Andrew Potter. On Decline. Biblioasis. $14.95 128 pp., ISBN: 9781771963947

Andrew Potter, a McGill professor and former journalist, sides with the doomsayers in his contribution to Biblioasis’ Field Notes series, On Decline. Potter’s small book makes a big, bold claim: the progress of modernity is over. Civilization has begun to decay. “Humanity is in serious trouble, and while it isn’t the apocalypse, it might well be the beginning of the end.” 

Potter argues that civilizational decline doesn’t take the form of one cataclysmic event. Not a bomb, not a war – not even a pandemic, or flood caused by climate change. Our decline “is a slow-moving thing, a relentless secular decline” in which key features of politics, the economy, and culture are “going wrong at the same time.” Economic growth is stagnant. Political culture is being torn apart by alt-right provocateurs and woke-left thought-police. Bureaucratic liberal democracies stifle innovation and prevent the sort of quick-moving technocratic solutions required to deal with complex global problems, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Social media are short-circuiting our rational capacities, undoing the gains of the Enlightenment era. Potter sums up his dire message in a list of clichés: “the free ride, and the party, are over. The bill is coming due and dreamtime is coming to an end.”

There’s an intuitive rightness to Potter’s description. At times, we’ve all felt the way he does. Living through the catastrophe, the farce of Trump. Daily reminders that the Earth is on fire. The scourge of your Twitter feed. The pain of pandemic lockdowns (not to mention of anti-vax idiocy). 

But there are serious problems with Potter’s analysis. In accounting for causes of the decline, he never moves beyond people’s feelings, their beliefs, their “hardwired” cognitive processes. For example, he anchors a chapter on the limits of progress with the notion that “it doesn’t take sophisticated political theory or historical anthropology to see that Hobbes hit closer to the mark than Rousseau,” when, in 1651, Hobbes described human nature as essentially bad. People are selfish, greedy, deceitful, and irrational, says Potter: “Anyone who’s ever lived with roommates knows this intuitively.” 

In fact, it does take rigorous theorizing and empirical evidence to make credible sweeping claims about human nature, not least because there is an anti-Hobbesian tradition of social theory no less active, sophisticated, or influential than the one to which Potter subscribes. The idea that “politics in the twenty-first century has been dominated by two features: nostalgia-based populism and identity politics,” both symptoms of our cognitive weaknesses, is laughably inaccurate. Not neoliberal trade, tax, and social policy? Not Western imperialist adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq? Potter ignores the high stakes material struggles of global political economy to fuss over the so-called “weaponization of free speech” by the right, and the so-called “cancel culture” of the left.

Contrary to Potter’s characterization of contemporary society as being stuck in “the Great Stagnation,” some people are doing very nicely, thank you very much. Ask Jeff Bezos, the Amazon CEO, next time he comes back from space. Or any owner and investor among the global “1%”. Yes, wages for the average worker have stagnated, as Potter notes. But corporate profits continue to soar. Google’s parent company, Alphabet, has sucked up record profits in each quarter of 2021. In 2020, Walmart and Amazon saw profits grow 57% over the previous year. I’m not saying that skyrocketing profits are signs of progress or a healthy society. I’m saying that the story of our time is growing inequality – progress for some, devastation for others – social struggle, not universal decline. Whatever painful trends, call it decline, face billions of people globally, they’re not natural civilizational growing pains but the consequences of powerful and wealthy classes getting what they want. 

Potter’s assertion is dubious that “we’ve become so comfortable as a society that, for the vast majority of people in the West, mere survival has completely faded away as a concern.” Tell that to the teacher, the grocery store clerk, the nurse, the trucker, who skips work for a week. As Potter rattles off neoliberal talking points — “as the economy grows, we get richer and more productive and experience a rise in our standard of living” — I reflect on who’s in and who’s out of the “we” Potter evokes on every page. We’ve never had it better, he says. Though we also lack initiative. “We never really became enlightened.” We’re obsessed with status struggles. “We’re rushing back into barbarism.” Well, some are (hi again, Jeff Bezos), and some aren’t (welcome, Black Lives Matter, Greta Thunberg, striking Korean workers, #LandBack, and others). 

Potter’s world is devoid of contradiction. In On Decline, we’re all in this together: and we’re all going down the tubes. Far more interesting, not to mention sociologically rigorous, is to ask: Which trends are in decline, and which are thriving? Who is losing and who is benefitting from the status quo and emerging policies?

Stephen Dale. Shift Change: Scenes from a Post-industrial Revolution. Between the Lines. $25.95 252 pp.,ISBN: 9781771135535

These more nuanced questions frame Stephen Dale’s excellent book Shift Change: Scenes from a Post-Industrial Revolution. Dale’s sites are narrower than Potter’s. He focuses not on shifts across Western civilization but in Hamilton, Ontario. However, like Potter, Dale asks what the future holds: decline, prosperity, more of the same? The key difference from Potter’s approach is that Dale assumes that processes of decay and renewal, collapse and growth, happen simultaneously, are always contested, never neutral, and are shaped by struggles among contending social forces. 

The city of Hamilton is in the midst of major change, no doubt about that. The question is “What kind of future is being constructed here, who’s in charge of the process, and who will benefit (or lose) once this nascent post-industrial renaissance is fully formed”? Regardless of what Hamilton becomes — whether it slides into chronic hardship typical of other Rust Belt towns, transforms into Toronto-lite, or develops into a healthier, more stable, more successful (by many measures) city — some will gain and some will lose. Either corporate money gains and working-class and poor people lose; or people will gain, which will be interpreted by big money (and Andrew Potter) as a bureaucratic, unimaginative, “woke” decline. Dale’s attentiveness to the divided, complex character of Hamilton’s future makes his book serious and important in ways most one-view-fits-all studies of urban “renewal” aren’t.

Dale isn’t out to retell Hamilton’s familiar story of twentieth-century boom and bust. He’s interested in developments in Hamilton post-2000, after the fall of the heavy manufacturing economy, after the first wave of “artists, musicians, and other bohemian settlers cast their gaze on Hamilton,” the recent past in which Hamilton became a prime target of “overleveraged Torontonians and assorted real estate barracudas.”

The story should be simple: rapid gentrification and all the social harms involved (displacement of poor people, the homogenization of local cultures, etc.). That’s the main story of urban transformation in Brooklyn, San Francisco, Toronto’s West Queen West, and just about everywhere else. However, Dale thinks Hamilton could be different. Partly this is because the city as a whole has lived through decades of economic and social devastation. Even business and political elites, suggests Dale, are more sensitive to the needs of marginalized groups in Hamilton than elsewhere. (For the record, I’m unconvinced. The ongoing violent crackdown on houseless people’s encampments in Hamilton, an assault supported by the majority of City Council, BIAs and other high-profile NIMBY groups, is one recent bit of evidence that Dale places too much hope in the hearts of Hamilton’s ruling classes.) More importantly, observes Dale, in Hamilton there is considerable grassroots pushback against the pro-business model of gentrification. “There are people in Hamilton who are audacious enough to think that their one-time Steeltown could chart a different course and defy a market-driven narrative so commonplace and so powerful that it sometimes seems almost inevitable.”

The book tells the story of these individuals and groups working in counter-flow to the market-driven model of urban renewal. Dale interviews activists, union organizers, and academics (Kevin MacKay, Dierdre Pike, and Wayne Lewchuk are among the book’s interviewees familiar to anyone following local politics). They offer reflections on the past (for example, the legacy of anarchist anti-gentrification campaigns, and the 2018 attack on Pride Day), and visions of the future (especially around hopes for social housing and an LRT that ensures community benefits). The analysis would’ve benefitted from engaging with Indigenous communities and anti-racist organizers working with groups such as the Hamilton Centre for Civic Inclusion, and HWDSB Kids Need Help (now Hamilton Students for Justice). I hope Dale’s follow-up book places these voices front and centre.

Dale acknowledges the “sense of frustration among most of the people I spoke with over how frequently promising, well-designed plans get short-circuited in this city.” That’s a nice way of saying that the forces of global capitalism, Doug Ford’s cuts, bureaucratic rigidity, and local conservatism are powerful adversaries, indeed. The alternative model of “equitable growth” and “the city using its planning power to ensure private developments help to meet public needs” won’t be achieved except through an ongoing struggle. The reason that Dale’s book is so refreshing and helpful is that it recognizes exactly this point. It doesn’t assume that elites will do the right thing just because it’s the right thing. Yet the book holds out the possibility of a more socially-just Hamilton developing in the future. 

It all depends on which side organizes more successfully and pulls the vast majority of the city along with its plan. Of course the market-driven side is better funded, better connected, and has stronger allies at the centre of power. But as Dale shows, the nature of the shift Hamilton is going through is neither inevitable or complete. “There’s enough inventive thinking and constructive dialogue happening in Hamilton to suggest that the outcome, here in the shadows of those hulking foundries that monumentalize a lost era, might somehow be different.”

The debate among students in my social theory class reveals the limits of all-encompassing “better/worse” answers to questions of historical change. Potter’s book ignores those limits in an attempt to be intellectually provocative. Dale’s book provokes genuine thought because it embraces the nuance, the contradictions of social life.

James Cairns is associate professor of Social and Environmental Justice at Wilfrid Laurier University, and a Senior Editor at Hamilton Review of Books. He is the co-author (with Alan Sears) of The Democratic Imagination: Envisioning Popular Power in the Twenty-First Century (University of Toronto Press, 2012). His most recent book is The Myth of the Age of Entitlement: Millennials, Austerity, and Hope (University of Toronto Press, 2017).