We were told we were living in modern times.

I grew up being told that I lived in modern times. It was never quite stated as an argument. It was simply there, embedded in the language. There were ancient times, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution — and then there was us.

Modern.

The implication was obvious. We had arrived somewhere. Kings and emperors had once fought over territory. Strongmen had ruled through fear and patronage. Borders moved when armies crossed them. Powerful states bullied weaker ones. Alliances were made between rulers, wars started over prestige, and millions of ordinary people lived with the consequences of decisions made by a handful of men.

But that was history. We had institutions.

We had constitutions, courts, elections, professional civil services, international law, the United Nations, NATO, the European Union, treaties, conventions and diplomatic protocols. We had an entire architecture designed to place something between the impulses of powerful individuals and the lives of everyone else. And for much of my lifetime, it seemed to work.

Not perfectly, obviously. There were wars, dictatorships, coups, invasions and atrocities. Vietnam happened. So did Cambodia, Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Iraq and Afghanistan. The Soviet Union crushed uprisings within its sphere. America overthrew governments it didn’t like. The modern world was never as modern as its publicity suggested.

But there was nevertheless a broad sense, particularly in Europe after 1945, that history had acquired a direction. Conquest was becoming illegitimate. Borders were increasingly settled. Trade would make war less rational. International institutions would constrain states. Democracy would spread. Prosperity would moderate extremism. Education would make populations harder to manipulate.

And perhaps most importantly, political leaders themselves were becoming less important. Presidents and prime ministers came and went. The institutions remained.

That may have been the great achievement of modernity: power became boring.

Or at least it appeared to.

The Return of the Ruler

Look at the world now and something feels strangely familiar. We find ourselves discussing the personalities of individual rulers again. What does Putin really want? What will Trump do? How far will Xi go over Taiwan? What is Netanyahu prepared to risk? What might Kim Jong Un do if he feels threatened?

Who respects whom? Who has insulted whom? Who needs to save face? Which leader believes a neighbouring territory properly belongs to his people? Which ruler can be persuaded, flattered, intimidated or contained?

These do not sound like particularly modern questions. They sound like questions from an imperial court. A Roman senator would recognize them immediately. So would an ambassador to the court of Louis XIV.

The technology has changed beyond recognition. The ruler now has satellites, nuclear weapons, drones, global financial markets, instantaneous communications and artificial intelligence. But the underlying calculation can still become remarkably simple:

I want this. You have it. Can you stop me from taking it?

There is something unsettling about discovering such an ancient piece of machinery still running underneath the polished interface of the modern world.

The Scaffolding

Perhaps the mistake was believing that our institutions had replaced power rather than constrained it.

International law exists because states agree, most of the time, to behave as though it matters. Borders remain fixed because enough powerful actors agree that changing them by force carries unacceptable consequences. Treaties work because governments believe breaking them will cost more than observing them.

These things are real. But they are real in much the same way that money is real. They are agreements made consequential by collective participation.

Constructuralism describes such systems as scaffolding: human constructions that can be extraordinarily useful, even precious, but which become dangerous when we mistake them for permanent features of reality. The point is not to disbelieve them, but to hold the belief lightly enough to remember that what has been constructed must also be maintained.

The postwar international order was an astonishing human construction. It helped turn a continent that had spent centuries periodically slaughtering itself into one where war between France and Germany became almost unimaginable. That is not nothing. It may be one of civilization’s greatest achievements.

But perhaps we drew the wrong conclusion from its success.

We thought human beings had changed.

Perhaps only the architecture around them had.

The Exceptional Decades

There is another way of looking at the world in which I grew up.

Perhaps there were simply several decades during which institutions were unusually strong, prosperity unusually broad, American power unusually dominant, Europe unusually peaceful, and the memory of catastrophic war unusually fresh.

That last part may matter more than we appreciated.

The people who constructed the postwar order did not learn about the Second World War in school. They had lived through it, and many had participated in it. They had been bombed and they had bombed cities. They had seen people murdered, displaced and starved, and belonged to societies that had murdered, displaced and allowed people to starve. Some had resisted. Some had collaborated. Most had simply tried to survive inside the enormous moral grey zone that appears when ordinary life breaks down.

When they talked about preventing another European war, “war” was not an abstraction.

It had a smell.

That generation gradually disappeared. The institutions remained. And perhaps we began to confuse the continued existence of the institutions with the continued existence of the conditions that had created them.

How the Scaffolding Weakened

The postwar order did not suddenly fail. The conditions that sustained it gradually weakened, while the institutions they had created remained standing.

For a while, that was enough.

Memory faded. The economic bargain became less convincing. Globalization created enormous wealth but distributed its rewards unevenly. Manufacturing communities declined, housing became increasingly expensive, wealth accumulated at the top, and growing numbers of people became less certain that their children would live better than they had.

Then the West won. The collapse of the Soviet Union seemed to settle the great ideological argument of the twentieth century. Liberal democracy, market capitalism and globalization appeared to have prevailed. American power was unmatched, Europe was integrating and trade was expanding. The scaffolding looked so permanent that maintaining it began to seem less urgent.

Then came blows to legitimacy. Iraq demonstrated how flexible a rules-based order could become when its most powerful member wanted to act. The financial crisis of 2008 showed that market discipline worked rather differently when the financial system itself was threatened. The circumstances were different and complicated, but the cumulative impression was corrosive:

The rules were not quite as universal as advertised.

At the same time, the shared informational landscape began breaking apart. The internet ended the monopoly of the old gatekeepers, while social media discovered that anger, grievance and certainty were remarkably effective ways of capturing attention. People no longer merely disagreed about what should be done. Increasingly, they disagreed about the reality in which the decision was being made.

Meanwhile, American dominance became less absolute. China emerged as a genuine competitor. Russia demonstrated how much influence could still be exercised through geography, energy, nuclear weapons and a willingness to use force. As power became less certain, an old calculation returned.

The question shifted from What are the rules? towards What can I get away with?

Nothing collapsed. Elections continued. Courts sat. NATO met. The European Union issued regulations. The United Nations assembled. Markets opened every morning and millions of people went to work.

The scaffolding was still standing, so naturally we assumed it was still strong.

That may be the strangest part of the present moment: how normal it all looks. The institutions remain, the meetings continue and the language survives, even as some of the assumptions that once gave them meaning are quietly being renegotiated.

For a while, the structure can carry the load.

Then the weight returns.

Modernity Without Modern Humans

This does not mean civilization is collapsing.

Rome is a useful corrective here. Empires rarely disappear on Tuesday afternoon. People continue going to work. Children go to school. Restaurants remain open. Property is bought and sold. Bureaucrats complete forms. Someone plants a vineyard.

The mistake is imagining historical change as an event rather than a process.

Perhaps that is also why the present feels so peculiar. We possess the surface appearance of an extraordinarily advanced civilization. A smartphone contains capabilities that would have appeared supernatural to someone alive a century ago. We can see the surface of Mars. We can edit genes. We can speak instantly to almost anyone on Earth. We have built machines capable of conversing with us.

And yet the political conversation can suddenly sound thousands of years old. Who controls the territory? Whose army is stronger? Which ruler can be trusted? Which alliance will hold? What happens if the king refuses to leave?

The contradiction is almost comic.

We have artificial intelligence.

The bloke at the end of the table still wants the neighbouring province.

The Intermission

None of this means the institutions were pointless. It means they mattered enormously.

If anything, recognizing their constructed nature makes their achievement more impressive, not less. Human beings managed, for a time and imperfectly, to build structures capable of restraining some of their oldest impulses.

Perhaps the dangerous foma was not international law, democracy or the rules-based order. Perhaps it was modernity itself — the comforting idea that because we had constructed these things, we had permanently crossed some civilizational threshold.

We may have mistaken something precious and historically unusual for something permanent.

There was no threshold. There was only scaffolding.

And scaffolding requires maintenance.

I grew up believing that ancient history was behind us. That humanity had moved through it and emerged into something called modern times.

I’m no longer so sure.

Perhaps there were simply several remarkable decades in which the conditions happened to favour restraint, cooperation and institutional power.

Perhaps we weren’t living after ancient history at all.

Perhaps we were living during an unusually well-administered intermission.