The Rational Optimist (33 page)

The extraordinary thing about Macaulay’s predictions is not that they were too barmy in their optimism but that they were far too cautious. Last week I took a stagecoach (well, a train) from London to York in two hours, not twenty-four, and ate a take-away salad of mango and crayfish (£3.60) that I bought at the station before I boarded. The week before I sailed without wind (at 37,000 feet) from London to New York in seven hours watching Daniel Day Lewis cover himself in oil. Today I rode my trusty Toyota without horses ten miles in fifteen minutes, listening to Schubert. A ‘peasant’ in Dorsetshire would indeed think himself miserably paid at twenty shillings (£70 in today’s money) a week. Sanitation and medicine have not added several years to life expectancy, as Macaulay rashly predicted, they have doubled it. And as for comforts and luxuries, even the indolent and spendthrift working man has a television and a refrigerator, let alone the diligent and thrifty one.

Turning-point-itis

‘We cannot absolutely prove,’ said Macaulay in 1830, ‘that those are in error who tell us that society has reached a turning point, that we have seen our best days. But so said all who came before us, and with just as much apparent reason.’ So, too, would say all that came after him. Defining moments, tipping points, thresholds and points of no return have been encountered, it seems, by pessimists in every generation since. A fresh crop of pessimists springs up each decade, unabashed in its certainty that it stands balanced upon the fulcrum of history. Throughout the half-century between 1875 and 1925, while European living standards shot up to unimaginable levels, while electricity and cars, typewriters and movies, friendly societies and universities, indoor toilets and vaccines pressed their ameliorating influence out into the lives of so many, intellectuals were obsessed with imminent decline, degeneration and disaster. Again and again, just as Macaulay had said, they wailed that society had reached a turning point; we had seen our best days.

The runaway bestseller of the 1890s was a book called
Degeneration
, by the German Max Nordau, which painted a picture of a society morally collapsing because of crime, immigration and urbanisation: ‘we stand in the midst of an epidemic, a sort of Black Death of degeneration and hysteria.’ An American bestseller of 1901 was Charles Wagner’s
The Simple Life
, which argued that people had had enough of materialism and were about to migrate back to the farm. In 1914, Britain’s Robert Tressell’s posthumous
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
called his country ‘a nation of ignorant, unintelligent, half-starved, broken-spirited degenerates’. The craze for eugenics that swept the world, embraced by left and right with equal fervour, after 1900 and caused the passage of illiberal and cruel laws in democracies like America as well as autocracies like Germany, took as its premise the deterioration of the blood lines caused by the overbreeding of the poor and the less intelligent. A huge intellectual consensus gathered around the idea that a distant catastrophe must be averted by harsh measures today (sound familiar?). ‘The multiplication of the feeble-minded’ said Winston Churchill in a memo to the prime minister in 1910, ‘is a very terrible danger to the race.’ Theodore Roosevelt was even more explicit: ‘I wish very much that the wrong people could be prevented entirely from breeding; and when the evil nature of these people is sufficiently flagrant, this should be done. Criminals should be sterilized and feeble-minded persons forbidden to leave offspring behind them.’ In the end, eugenics did far more harm to members of the human race than the evil it was intended to combat would ever have done. Or, as Isaiah Berlin put it, ‘disregard for the preferences and interests of individuals alive today in order to pursue some distant social goal that their rulers have claimed is their duty to promote has been a common cause of misery for people throughout the ages.’

It was the thing intellectuals said they needed more of – government – that did for the golden Edwardian afternoon, by declaring world war over a trivial issue. After it, what with inflation, unemployment, depression and fascism, there were plenty of excuses for pessimism between the two world wars. In 1918, in
The Education of Henry Adams
, Henry Adams, famously contrasting the spiritual energy of the Virgin Mary with the material energy of a huge dynamo seen at an exhibition, foresaw the ‘ultimate, colossal, cosmic collapse’ of civilisation. The drone of woe from pessimistic intellectuals was now a constant background hum: from T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, W.B. Yeats and Aldous Huxley. They were mostly looking the wrong way – at money and technology, not idealism and nationalism. ‘Optimism is cowardice’ scolded Oswald Spengler in 1923 in his bestselling polemic
The Decline of the West
, telling a generation of attentive readers of his mystical prose that the Western, Faustian world was about to follow Babylon and Rome into progressive decline as authoritarian ‘Caesarism’ at last came to rule, and blood triumphed over money. Caesarism did indeed rise from the ruins of capitalism in Italy, Germany, Russia and Spain, and proceeded to murder millions. By 1940, only a dozen nations remained democratic. Yet, dreadful as it was, the double war of 1914–45 did little to interrupt the improvement of lifespan and health of those who managed to survive. Despite the wars, in the half-century to 1950, the longevity, wealth and health of Europeans improved faster than ever before.

Worse and worse

After the Second World War, led by Konrad Adenauer’s West Germans, Europeans enthusiastically followed America down the path of free enterprise. There dawned a golden age after 1950 of peace (for most), prosperity (for many), leisure (for the young) and progress (in the form of accelerating technological change). Did the pessimists disappear? Was everybody cheerful? The heck they were. George Orwell kicked it off in 1942 with an essay complaining about the spiritual emptiness of the machine age and a book in 1948 warning of a totalitarian future. The torrent of gloomy prognostication that characterised the second half of the twentieth century was, like everything else from that time, unprecedented in its magnitude. Doom after doom was promised: nuclear war, pollution, overpopulation, famine, disease, violence, grey goo, vengeful technology – culminating in the eruption of civil chaos that would undoubtedly follow the inability of computers to cope with the year 2000. Remember that?

Consider the opening words of Agenda 21, the 600-page dirge signed by world leaders at a United Nations conference in Rio de Janeiro in 1992: ‘Humanity stands at a defining moment in history. We are confronted with a perpetuation of disparities within and between nations, a worsening of poverty, hunger, ill health and illiteracy, and the continued deterioration of the ecosystems on which we depend for our well-being.’ The following decade saw the sharpest decrease in poverty, hunger, ill health and illiteracy in human history. In the 1990s numbers in poverty fell in absolute as well as relative terms. Yet even the 1990s were marked by (in the words of Charles Leadbetter) ‘an outpouring of self-doubt and even self-loathing from the intelligentsia of developed liberal societies’. An unspoken alliance, Leadbetter argued, developed between reactionaries and radicals, between nostalgic aristocrats, religious conservatives, eco-fundamentalists and angry anarchists, to persuade people that they should be anxious and alarmed. Their common theme was that individualism, technology and globalisation were leading us headlong into hell. Horrified by the rate of change, and the undermining of the status of noble intellectuals relative to brash tradesmen, ‘the stasis-craving social critics who have shaped the western zeitgeist for decades’ (in Virginia Postrel’s words) lashed out at the new and yearned for stability. ‘It is the failure of modern man to observe the constraints necessary for maintaining the integrity and stability of the various social and ecological systems of which he is a part that is giving rise to their disintegration and destabilization’ groaned the wealthy environmentalist Edward Goldsmith. The price of prosperity, in the words of the Prince of Wales, has been ‘a progressive loss of harmony with the flow and rhythm of the natural world’.

Today, the drumbeat has become a cacophony. The generation that has experienced more peace, freedom, leisure time, education, medicine, travel, movies, mobile phones and massages than any generation in history is lapping up gloom at every opportunity. In an airport bookshop recently, I paused at the Current Affairs section and looked down the shelves. There were books by Noam Chomsky, Barbara Ehrenreich, Al Franken, Al Gore, John Gray, Naomi Klein, George Monbiot and Michael Moore, which all argued to a greater or lesser degree that (a) the world is a terrible place; (b) it’s getting worse; (c) it’s mostly the fault of commerce; and (d) a turning point has been reached. I did not see a single optimistic book.

Even the good news is presented as bad news. Reactionaries and radicals agree that ‘excessive choice’ is an acute and present danger – that it is corrupting, corroding and confusing to encounter ten thousand products in the supermarket, each reminding you of your limited budget and of the impossibility of ever satisfying your demands. Consumers are ‘overwhelmed with relatively trivial choices’ says a professor of psychology. This notion dates from Herbert Marcuse, who turned Marx’s notion of the ‘immiseration of the proletariat’ by steadily declining living standards on its head and argued that capitalism forced excessive consumption on the working class instead. It resonates well in the academic seminar, causing heads to nod in agreement, but it is sheer garbage in the real world. When I go into the local superstore, I never see people driven to misery by the impossibility of choice. I see people choosing.

The problem is partly nostalgia. Even back in the golden age itself, in the eighth century
BC
, the poet Hesiod was nostalgic for a lost golden age when people ‘dwelt in ease and peace upon their lands with many good things’. There has probably never been a generation since the Palaeolithic that did not deplore the fecklessness of the next and worship a golden memory of the past. The endless modern laments about how texting and emails are shortening the attention span go back to Plato, who deplored writing as a destroyer of memorising. The ‘youth of today’ are shallow, selfish, spoiled, feral good-for-nothings full of rampant narcissism and trained to have ephemeral attention spans, says one commentator. They spend too long in cyberspace, says another, where their grey matter is being ‘scalded and defoliated by a kind of cognitive Agent Orange, depriving them of moral agency, imagination and awareness of consequences’. Balderdash. Of course, there are twerps and geeks in every generation, but today’s young are volunteering for charities, starting companies, looking after their relatives, going to work – just like any other generation, maybe more so. Mostly when they are staring at screens it is to indulge in rampant social engagement. The
Sims 2
game, which sold more than a million copies in ten days when launched in 2004, is a game in which the players – often girls – get virtual people to live complex, realistic, highly social lives and then chat about it with their friends. Not much scalding and defoliating there. The psychoanalyst Adam Phillips believes that ‘for increasing numbers of Britons and Americans, the “enterprise culture” means a life of overwork, anxiety and isolation. Competition reigns supreme, with even small children forced to compete against each other and falling ill as a result.’ I have news for him: small children were more overworked, and fell a lot more ill, in the industrial, feudal, agrarian, Neolithic or hunter-gatherer past than in the free-market present.

Or how about the ‘end of nature’? Bill McKibben’s bestselling dirge of 1989 insisted that a turning point was at hand: ‘I believe that without recognizing it we have already stepped over the threshold of such a change; that we are at the end of nature.’

Or the ‘coming anarchy’? Robert Kaplan told the world in 1994, in a much discussed article in the
Atlantic Monthly
that became a bestselling book, how a turning point had been reached and ‘scarcity, crime, overpopulation, tribalism, and disease are rapidly destroying the social fabric of our planet’. His evidence for this thesis was in essence that he had discovered urban west Africa to be a lawless, impoverished, unhealthy and rather dangerous place.

Or ‘our stolen future’? In 1996 a book with this title claimed that sperm counts were falling, breast cancer was increasing, brains were becoming malformed and fish were changing sex, all because of synthetic chemicals that act as ‘endocrine disruptors’, which alter the hormonal balance of bodies. As usual, the scare proved greatly exaggerated: sperm counts are not falling, and no significant effect on human health from endocrine disruption has been detected.

In 1995 the otherwise excellent scientist and writer Jared Diamond fell under the spell of fashionable pessimism when he promised: ‘By the time my young sons reach retirement age, half the world’s species will be extinct, the air radioactive and the seas polluted with oil.’ Let me reassure his sons that species extinction, though terrible, is so far under-shooting that promise by a wide margin. Even if you take E.O. Wilson’s wildly pessimistic guess that 27,000 species are dying out every year, that equates to just 2.7 per cent a century (there are thought to be at least ten million species), a long way short of 50 per cent in sixty years. As for Diamond’s other worries, the trends are getting better, not worse: the radioactive dose his sons receive today from weapons tests and nuclear accidents is 90 per cent down on what their father received in the early 1960s and is anyway less than 1 per cent of natural background radiation. The amount of oil spilled in the sea has been falling steadily since before the young Diamonds were born: it now is down by 90 per cent since 1980.

One ingenious argument for apocalypse relies on statistics. As related by Martin Rees in his book
Our Final Century
, Richard Gott’s argument goes like this: given that I am roughly the sixty billionth person to live upon this planet, it is plausible to believe that I come roughly half way through my species’ run on Broadway, rather than near the beginning of a million-year run. If you pull a number from an urn and it reads sixty, you would conclude that there are more likely to be 100 numbers in the urn than 1,000. Therefore, we are doomed. However, I do not intend to turn pessimist on the strength of a mathematical analogy. After all, the six billionth and six millionth person on the planet could have made exactly the same argument.