The Relay Race of Civilization
March 2026
I didn't live in the early 1900s. That's obvious, but it matters for what I'm about to say, because there's a kind of knowing that only comes from being inside a moment — from the texture of daily optimism, the particular flavor of a culture's confidence in itself. I can read about it. I can look at the photographs, the architecture, the World's Fair pavilions. But I can't feel what an educated American felt in 1908, waking up in a country clearly on the rise, watching the newspapers carry dispatches from a Europe busily, almost eagerly, destroying itself.
What I can do is notice that I might be living the mirror image of that moment — from a different seat.
The rough symmetry is this: early 20th century America was ascending. Industrializing rapidly, institutionally young and relatively coherent, still far enough from the center of gravity to be insulated from Europe's gravitational collapse. Meanwhile, the great powers of the old world were locked into alliance systems, imperial competitions, and nationalist grievances that would eventually produce two catastrophic wars. Capital fled Europe. Talent emigrated. American institutions — messy, democratic, occasionally corrupt — still looked stable by comparison. The contrast was clarifying.
Now consider China. Economically ascending across the span of my adult lifetime. An enormous population moving into the middle class with speed that has no real historical precedent. Infrastructure investment that makes American airports look like provincial bus stations. And watching, from a careful distance, as the country that defined the 20th century democratic model seems intent on demonstrating that model's fragility.
I'm not making a political argument here. I'm making an observational one. The structure of the situation rhymes.
There's a theory of history implicit in this pattern — something like a relay race. Civilization runs the baton forward, and the handoff happens when one civilization is exhausted or self-distracted enough that another can receive it. The optimistic reading is that the race continues. Progress accumulates. The next runner benefits from everything the previous one built, even if the previous one stumbles at the exchange.
I find this framing hopeful, but only conditionally. The condition is that the stumbling civilization doesn't take the whole track down with it. Europe's self-destruction in the early 1900s was catastrophic by any measure — tens of millions dead, entire generations hollowed out. And yet. The baton got passed. The postwar order, largely American-designed, produced a period of broadly distributed human development that history will probably look back on with something like awe. The relay worked, even if the handoff was brutal.
What I genuinely don't know is whether today's version of stumbling can be contained the same way. America in 1900 was protected by an ocean. China is not protected from America by anything like that. The two economies are so deeply entangled that American dysfunction becomes Chinese risk in ways that have no early-20th-century parallel. The stumbling runner and the next runner are running in close formation, arms tangled.
But here's what I keep coming back to, and what I can't fully answer: what does an educated, cosmopolitan Chinese person in their late thirties actually feel right now?
I'm genuinely curious about this in the way I'm curious about the 1908 American — not as a geopolitical abstraction, but as a human subjective experience. Is there a palpable sense of historical arrival? A quiet confidence, watching Western dysfunction, that says our model is working and theirs is not? Or is it more anxious than that — the memory of Japan's astonishing 1980s rise followed by its lost decades sitting somewhere in the cultural background, a cautionary tale about how quickly ascending can plateau?
Is there pride mixed with nervousness? A sense of possibility shadowed by the awareness that the problems ahead — demographic, environmental, political — are enormous?
I ask because I think the emotional texture of an ascending civilization is itself historically significant. American confidence in the early 1900s wasn't just an attitude; it was a self-fulfilling force. It attracted immigrants who believed in the bet. It produced institutions that embodied the optimism. The feeling preceded and enabled the fact. If China's ascent has that same quality of felt momentum, that matters. If it's more complicated — more cautious, more aware of fragility — that matters differently.
There's one more thread I want to pull. The relay race metaphor implies the baton is the same object throughout. But maybe what gets passed forward is not identical to what came before — maybe it mutates at each handoff. American civilization absorbed and transformed what Europe built. Whatever China builds from here will absorb and transform what America built. The Enlightenment values, the scientific method, the institutional frameworks — these don't disappear when the leading power stumbles. They get reinterpreted, sometimes improved, sometimes narrowed, but carried forward.
That's actually the most hopeful version of the story: not that China replaces America the way America replaced Britain, but that something larger than any single civilization is being built, run by run, stumble by stumble.
I didn't live in 1908. I can't know what that optimism felt like from the inside. But I do live in 2026, in a country that is — let's be honest — doing some fairly vigorous self-destruction. And I find myself looking east with genuine curiosity, trying to imagine the feeling of being on the upslope, watching history tilt in your direction.
I hope they're running well. The race matters.
Lonnie Mandigo writes about photography, philosophy, and the texture of living thoughtfully. He lives in Corvallis, Oregon.
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