The New Penguin History of the World (220 page)

Even its grossest manifestations – its material greed and rapacity – show this. Societies once rooted in changeless acceptance of things as they are have taken up the belief that limitless improvement in material well-being is a proper goal for them. The very idea that willed change is possible is itself deeply subversive, as is the notion that it may be a road to happiness. Large numbers of people now know that things have changed in their own lifetimes, and sense that there can and probably will be still further change for the better. A spreading and unquestioning, not very reflective, acceptance that human problems are in principle manageable or at least remediable is a major psychological transformation; it was hardly foreseeable, let alone established, even among Europeans only a couple of centuries ago. Although for most of their lives millions of human beings still rarely contemplate the future except with deep unhappiness and misgiving – and that is when they can summon up the energy to consider it at all, for they are often still going hungry – in the normal course of events more millions than ever before do
not
go hungry, nor do they seem in any obvious danger of doing so. More people than ever before now take it for granted that they will never know real need. A smaller, but still huge, number find it easy to believe that their lives will improve, and many more feel they ought to.

This change in outlook is of course most obvious in rich societies which now consume much more of the earth’s resources than the rich could do even a few decades ago. In the western world, for all its comparatively deprived minorities and underclasses, most people are now in this sense rich. Only about 200 years ago a typical Englishman would have been unlikely in the whole of his life to have been able to travel more than a few miles from the place where he was born except on his own two feet. Only 150 years ago he would not have had assured supplies of clean water. A hundred years ago, he still faced a good chance of being crippled or even killed by a casual accident, or by disease for which no remedy was known or existed, and for which no nursing care would be available to him, while many like him and his family ate meagre meals so lacking in balance and nourishment (to say nothing of being dull and unappetizing) that their like is now eaten only by the poorest in this country; and they could expect in their fifties and sixties (if they survived so long) the onset of a painful and penurious old age. Much the same could be said of other Europeans, and of North Americans, Australasians, Japanese and many others. Now millions of even the poorest worldwide can glimpse possibilities of changes in their lot for the better.

More important still are those who have come to believe that such change can be sought, promoted and actually brought about. Their politicians tell them so; it is now evident that peoples and governments implicitly believe
it to be a matter of fact that many specific problems in their lives and the lives of their societies can be solved. Many go further and feel that, therefore, they will be. This cannot, of course, logically be taken for granted. We may well be at the end of cheap fossil fuel and plentiful water supplies. We may well also feel sceptical about rearranging the world to increase the sum of human happiness when we remember some of the twentieth century’s attempts at social engineering, or the superstition and sectarianism, intransigent moralisms and tribal loyalties that still cost so much in misery and blood. Nevertheless, more people than ever now behave
as if
most of their problems are in principle soluble or remediable. This is a revolution in human attitudes. No doubt its deepest origins lie far, far back in those prehistoric millennia of slowly growing capacity to manipulate nature, when pre-human beings learned to manage fire or to put an edge on a convenient piece of flint. The abstract idea that such manipulation might be possible took shape only much more recently, and at first as the insight of only a few in certain crucial eras and cultural zones. But the idea is now commonplace; it has triumphed worldwide. We now take it for granted that people everywhere should and will begin to ask themselves why things remain as they are when they evidently might be made better. It is one of the greatest of changes in all history.

MANAGING NATURE

The most visible grounds for this change have been provided by mankind’s increasing ability in the last few centuries to manage the material world. Science provided the tools for that. It now appears to offer more than ever. We stand at the edge of an era with the promise and threat of an ability to manipulate nature more fundamentally than ever (for instance, through genetic engineering). Perhaps there lies ahead a world in which people will be able to commission, as it were, private futures to order. It is now conceivable that they could plan the genetic shaping of unborn offspring, and buy themselves experience ‘off the shelf’ as information technology becomes available to create virtual realities more perfect than actuality. It may be that people will be able to live more of their conscious lives, if they wish to do so, in worlds they have constructed, rather than in those provided by ordinary sense-experience.

Such speculations can be intimidating. They suggest, after all, great potential for disorder and destabilization. Rather than wondering about what may or may not happen, it is best to reflect firmly on the historical, on what has already changed human life in the past. Changes in material
well-being have, for instance, transformed politics not only by changing expectations but also by changing the circumstances in which politicians have to take decisions, the ways in which institutions operate, the distribution of power in society. In only a few societies nowadays can or does religion operate as it once did. Science not only hugely enlarged the toolkit of knowledge humanity can use to grapple with nature, but has also transformed at the level of daily life the things millions take for granted. In this century it has accounted for much of a huge increase in human numbers, for fundamental changes in the relationships of nations, for the rise and decline of whole sectors of the world economy, the tying of the world together by nearly instantaneous communication, and many more of its most startling changes. And whatever the last century or so may or may not have done for political democracy, it has, thanks to science, brought a great extension of practical freedoms. Overwhelmingly western in origin (in spite of early sallies by Asian civilizations), the expressions of scientific knowledge in better technology swiftly became global in their effect.

Only among the intellectual leadership of the richer societies has there been some qualification of the confidence evident and hardly challenged until 1960 or so, in human ability to manage the world through science and technology (rather than, say, through magic or religion), and so to satisfy human wants. Such qualification may prove to have much further to go. We now know more about the fragility of our natural environment and its susceptibility to change for the worse. There is a new awareness that not all the apparent benefits derived from the manipulation of nature are without their costs, that some may even have frightening implications, and, more fundamentally, that we do not yet possess the social and political skills and structures to ensure that humanity will put knowledge to good use. Discussion of public policy has only recently begun to give due weight to many of the concerns thus aroused, of which those most attended to can be summed up as ‘environmental’ – pollution, soil erosion, dwindling water supplies, the extinction of species, forest depletion are among those most noticed.

Such awareness is evident in the attention given in recent years to the problem of ‘global warming’, the rise in average temperatures on the world’s surface, believed to be produced by changes in the atmosphere and stratosphere that affect the rate at which heat is dispersed and lost from it. The facts themselves were until recently in dispute, but in 1990 a UN conference at Geneva conceded that global warming was in fact a growing danger, and that it was largely a matter of the accumulation of man-made gases in the atmosphere. This, it was agreed, had in a century already produced a measurable increase in average temperature; climate
was in fact changing faster than at any time since the last Ice Age. At present, the authoritative consensus is that human agency has been a major contributor to this.

Argument continues about the likely rate of further increase and its possible consequences (in, for instance, rising sea levels) while work began on the preparation of a framework convention on man-made climatic change, which was ready by 1992. Its main aim was the stabilization of levels of emission so that in 2000 they should still be at 1990 levels. At Kyoto in 1997 this was turned into a regulatory agreement covering the emission of all major ‘greenhouse’ gases (as they were called); it imposed levels of reduction for emissions and timetables that placed the main burdens on developed countries. The signing of the convention had been preceded by a warning from President Clinton earlier in the year that no such reductions would be acceptable to the United States, and President George W. Bush confirmed this in 2001. Meanwhile, signs of the bad effects of global warming multiply and the first attempts are already being made to seek legal remedies for damage caused by climate change.

A decade or so is hardly long enough to expect or find politically acceptable solutions to a problem of such magnitude. There seems to be no reason to assume that things will not get worse before they can get better, but, more important, also none that agreed solutions cannot be found. Humanity’s confidence in science has, after all, been based on real success, not on illusion. Even if that confidence is now to be qualified, it is because science has made it possible to do so by giving us more knowledge to take into account. It is reasonable to say that while humanity may have been producing much irreversible change since it successfully displaced the larger mammals from their prehistoric habitats and if, consequently, some grave issues are now posed, the human toolkit has not been shown to be exhausted. Humanity faced the challenge of the Ice Ages with far poorer resources, both intellectual and technological, than it faces climatic change today. If interference with nature has led to the appearance of new, drug-resistant bacteria by mutation through natural selection in the changed environments we have created, research to master them will continue. What is more, should further evidence and consideration oblige humanity to abandon the hypothesis that global warming is mainly a man-made phenomenon – if, say, it were to become plausible to say that natural forces beyond human control or manipulation, such as those producing the great Ice Ages of prehistory, were the determining forces at work – then science would apply itself to dealing with the consequences of that.

Even irreversible change does not in itself warrant any immediate abandonment of confidence in the power of the human race to pull itself out
of difficulties in the long run. Although we may already have lost some choices for ever, the arena within which human choice can be exercised – history itself – is not going to disappear unless the human race is extinguished. That humanity’s extinction should occur by natural disaster, independently of human action, is possible, but speculation about that is hardly useful (even actuarially) except over a limited range of cases (that the world should be hit by a monster asteroid, for example). The human being remains a reflective and tool-making animal and we are still a long way from exhausting the possibilities of that fact. As one scholar has strikingly put it, from the point of view of other organisms, humankind from the start resembles an epidemic disease in its successful competitive power. Whatever it has done to other species, though, the evidence of numbers and lifespan still seems to show that human manipulative power has so far brought more good than harm to most human beings who have ever lived. This remains the case, even if science and technology have created some new problems faster than they have yet produced solutions.

The power of humankind has almost imperceptibly encouraged the benign spread of assumptions and myths drawn from the historical experience of European liberalism into other cultures and of an optimistic approach to politics, even in the teeth of much recent and even contemporary evidence. That there may be huge prices in social adaptation to pay, for example, for effective response to global warming cannot be doubted, and it is fair to ask whether they can be paid without large-scale suffering and coercion. Nonetheless, confidence in our political culture remains high, to judge by the widespread adoption of much of it. Republics exist around the world these days, and almost everyone speaks the language of democracy and the rights of man. There are widespread efforts to bring to bear a rationalizing and utilitarian approach in government and administration and to replicate models of institutions that have been found successful in countries in the European tradition. When black men have clamoured vociferously against the white-dominated societies they lived in, they wished to realize for themselves the ideals of human rights and dignity evolved by Europeans. Few cultures, if any, have been able altogether to resist this vigorous tradition: China kow-towed to Marx and science long before it did so to the market. Some have resisted more successfully than others, but almost everywhere the individuality of other great political cultures has been in some measure sapped. When modernizers have sought to pick and choose within the dominant western political model, they have not found it easy to do so. It is possible, at a certain cost, to get a selective modernity, but it usually comes in a package, some of whose other contents may be unwelcome.

For the sceptical, some of the best evidence of the ambiguous outcome for social well-being of the growth of uniformity in political culture has been provided by the continuing vigour of nationalism, whose success has been consummated virtually worldwide in the last hundred years. Our most comprehensive international (a word whose commonplace acceptance is significant) organization is called the United Nations and its predecessor was a League of Nations. The old colonial empires have dissolved into scores of new nations. Many existing national states have to justify their own existence to minorities that themselves claim to be nations, and therefore to have the right to break away and rule themselves. Where those minorities wish to break up the states that contain them – as do many Basques, Kurds, Quebecois, for example – they speak in the name of unachieved nationhood. The nation seems to have been supremely successful in satisfying thirsts other ideological intoxicants cannot reach; it has been the great creator of modern community, sweeping aside class and religion, giving a sense of meaning and belonging to those who feel adrift in a modernizing world in which older ties have decayed.