Let us imagine for a moment a future in which no great undertaking has been made to join the nations together, and in which the Global Rail Network — that plan which binds six continents and 195 countries to one another — has never been built.
But before anything else we must set aside a common misunderstanding: the notion that “if we do nothing, things will at least stay as they are”.
It is not so. The world of today stands upon the edge of several escalating crises — crises which, as time passes, do not hold steady but grow worse at speed. The population of the world rises continually, and with it the need for food and water and energy and space. Resources are limited, and the ways of bringing them to people more limited still. Many of the difficulties mankind has met with in the twenty-first century are not yet clearly seen, and no one has done any serious work to solve them; but these difficulties, like a crack in a dam, grow larger in silence. A world which finds no new way of connecting and of distributing fairly will bend, little by little, under the weight of these very pressures.
The first front is the economy and transport. And here I want to be fair and exact, because I do not wish anyone to take a false impression from this book.
The railway is not meant to replace the ship and the aeroplane. We shall still have need of the sea and the air; the ship for great and cheap cargoes, and the aeroplane for speed and urgency. Even the rail network itself will in some places make use of those same strategic passages, and is not wholly independent of them.
So what I am saying is not that we should count these chokepoints as enemies, or tear down all the bridges in order to build a road of our own. On the contrary: the security of these very limited passages has its own remedies, and those are to be had only through sincere cooperation and mutual respect among countries. And the Global Rail Network is the encourager and the supporter of those same peaceful remedies, because it takes precisely these two principles — cooperation and mutual respect — as its foundation.
What this network changes is that it does not leave the whole need of mankind hanging upon a few slender threads alone. It brings the railway close to where people live, makes access to mines and to remote and difficult regions easier, and reaches into the heart of the abandoned landmass — to the very places the ship cannot reach and where the aeroplane is not economical. Without such a network, the landlocked countries and the deprived regions will continue to be left behind by the world market and by a better life; whereas with proper management they could be connected to the global community.
The second front is the human cost. Without a road to carry technology and treatment and education and opportunity into the heart of the landmass and close to where people live, millions of human beings remain deprived. A child born in a remote village stays enclosed within that same small compass to the end of his life; a sick person who needs specialist treatment does not reach it; and a talent which might have transformed a world falls silent in obscurity. A world without connection is a world in which the place of a person’s birth decides his destiny — and this, to my mind, is the most fundamental injustice possible.
And here we come to the darkest part of this picture; a part which I want to state with composure, but without disguise.
When the gap between those who have and those who have not passes a certain limit, societies break into fragments. And today there are troubling signs of just such a fragmentation. Instead of all our strength being spent upon the mending of the earth and upon the fair sharing of progress, a group of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world are quietly busy building themselves a way of escape and a monopoly of technology.
Researchers such as Douglas Rushkoff — who has himself worked closely with this elite — show in his book Survival of the Richest that many of them know perfectly well that their manner of living and of doing business is intensifying the crises of the environment and of inequality; but that instead of changing course they are in pursuit of building a “resilience basket” for themselves: they construct luxurious underground shelters, they think about cities beneath the sea, and they even pursue plans for flight into space and for settlement upon other planets.
And the more bitter point is that these projects often hide their true face beneath fine titles such as “saving the environment” or “guaranteeing the survival of humanity”, while observers warn that their real fruit is nothing but the adding of fresh layers to inequality — a kind of “technological feudalism” in which not only better schooling and better treatment become the monopoly of a few, but life upon another planet will be the privilege of a handful as well.
But here there is a truth which I want to bring, with the utmost respect yet with candour, to the ears of those same elites and billionaires and politicians — those who know exactly what I am speaking of.
There is no escaping the consequences of one’s own deeds.
Upon an earth grown bitter and unjust and filled with anger, no one will be safe — neither behind the steel doors of a shelter, nor in the orbit of the earth. The swallowed frustration of billions of human beings sooner or later overflows, and the storm that rises knows no boundary between poor and rich. The way of escape is no more than an illusion; for the true home of mankind is this earth and no other.
So the wise and honourable road is not to flee from the earth, but to make it good — to invest in connection and in the raising up of all human beings, together, and everywhere in this shared home.
And this is a truth which the Book of Heaven set plainly before mankind centuries ago. There, where it addresses all the jinn and mankind together and says:
﴿يَا مَعْشَرَ الْجِنِّ وَالْإِنسِ إِنِ اسْتَطَعْتُمْ أَن تَنفُذُوا مِنْ أَقْطَارِ السَّمَاوَاتِ وَالْأَرْضِ فَانفُذُوا ۚ لَا تَنفُذُونَ إِلَّا بِسُلْطَانٍ﴾
O ye assembly of Jinns and men! If it be ye can pass beyond the zones of the heavens and the earth, pass ye! not without authority shall ye be able to pass!
al-Rahman, verse 33
And once again, so that no room for doubt should remain, it repeats the same truth thus:
﴿وَمَا أَنتُم بِمُعْجِزِينَ فِي الْأَرْضِ وَلَا فِي السَّمَاءِ ۖ وَمَا لَكُم مِّن دُونِ اللَّهِ مِن وَلِيٍّ وَلَا نَصِيرٍ﴾
Not on earth nor in heaven will ye be able (fleeing) to frustrate (His Plan), nor have ye, besides God, any protector or helper.
al-‘Ankabut, verse 22
The message of these two verses is clear: however capable man may become, and however loftily he may imagine that by fleeing to the heavens and to other planets he can escape the consequence of his own deeds, in the end he cannot pass beyond the realm of the divine power and justice. Neither the earth nor the heaven is a refuge for flight.
The only way of deliverance is not flight, but a return to the straight road: the building of a more just earth for everyone — not the building of an escape route for a few. And this is the very invitation around which this whole book turns.
I know that this picture is a dark one. But let me say it plainly: this is not a prophecy, it is a warning. None of those dark roads is our inevitable destiny. Man is the very creature who created civilisation by building roads; and that same man can once again, by building a new road, secure a better future for himself. A world without a global rail network is only one of the possible futures — and we still have the chance to choose another.
And this brings us to the central question: what is that new road? What is the idea that could turn this dark picture into a bright one?
In the next part we come at last to the thing itself — to the Global Rail Network, and to the horizon it opens before humanity.
Sources: Douglas Rushkoff, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires (2022); documentary reports on the shelters of billionaires and on investment in space; analyses by observers concerning the “resilience basket” and “technological feudalism”; the Holy Qur’an, Surah al-Rahman (33) and Surah al-‘Ankabut (22), in the translation of Abdullah Yusuf Ali; the earlier United Nations data on inequality and landlocked countries.