The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [132]
Yet was the mood of 1830 optimistic? No, it was just like today: fashionable gloom was everywhere. Campaigners who went under the pseudonym of ‘Captain Swing’ took precisely the same approach to threshing machines in 1830 as their 1990s equivalents would take to genetically modified crops: they vandalised them. Some of the vociferous and numerous opponents of the Liverpool to Manchester Railway, which opened that year, forecast that passing trains would cause horses to abort their foals. Others mocked its pretensions to speed: ‘What can be more palpably absurd and ridiculous than the prospect held out of locomotives travelling twice as fast as stagecoaches!’ cried the Quarterly Review. ‘We trust that Parliament will, in all rail ways it may sanction, limit the speed to eight or nine miles an hour.’ (Dr Arnold was more enlightened about the first steam train: ‘I rejoice to see it, and think that feudality is gone forever.’)
In that year, 1830, the British Poet Laureate Robert Southey had just published a book (Thomas More; or, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society) in which he imagined his alter ego escorting the ghost of Thomas More, the Tudor author of Utopia, round the English Lake District. Through the ghost of More, Southey rails against the condition of the people of England, and especially those who have left their rose-fringed cottages for the soulless tenements and factories of the industrial cities. He complains that their condition is worse than in the days of Henry VIII or even than in the days of Caesar and the Druids:
Look, for example, at the great mass of your populace in town and country – a tremendous proportion of the whole community! Are their bodily wants better, or more easily supplied? Are they subject to fewer calamities? Are they happier in childhood, youth, and manhood, and more comfortably or carefully provided for in old age, than when the land was unenclosed, and half covered with woods? ... Their condition is greatly worsened ... [They] have lost rather than gained by the alterations which have taken place during the last thousand years.
Not content with denigrating the present, Southey castigates the future. He – in the form of his fictional ghost of More – forecasts imminent misery, famine, plague and a decline of religion. The timing of this jeremiad was, in retrospect, hilarious. Not only technology, but living standards themselves, had begun their extraordinary break-out, their two centuries of unprecedented explosion. For the first time people’s life expectancy was rapidly rising, child mortality rapidly falling, purchasing power burgeoning and options expanding. The rise of living standards over the next few decades would be especially marked among the unskilled working poor. British working-class real earnings were about to double in thirty years, an unprecedented occurrence. All across the world countries were looking enviously at Britain and saying ‘I want some of that.’ But for the reactionary, Tory, nostalgic Robert Southey, the future could only get worse. He would have been at home in the modern environmental movement, lamenting world trade, tutting at consumerism, despairing of technology, longing to return to the golden age of Merrie England when people ate their local, organic veg, danced round their maypoles, sheared their own sheep and did not clog up the airports on the way to their ghastly package holidays. As the modern philosopher John Gray puts it, echoing Southey, open-ended economic growth is ‘the most vulgar